We almost weren’t, but now, we are.

I did that ‘pressing the button’ thing over the weekend, expecting all kinds of nasty when I did so, and I transferred my websites to a new host. That part of the process went suspiciously smoothly and took a couple of hours. Then came something to do with domain name servers, and having to find this ‘DNS’ and replace it with that DNS, which can take up to 48 hours, but seems to have happened overnight. Yay! Success, I thought, until I switched on this morning and couldn’t find the admin area to the blog, and then, couldn’t even find the website.

I had to use the hosts’ chatbot, a string of inputted numbers and symbols called ‘Codee.’ Right, so I am conversing with a headache tablet, as we are forced to do more and more these days because humans have become a fad of the past. I told it my issue. I have to say, it not only found the problem within a minute, but with my permission, it then went and solved the problem, and here I am!

And here’s a photo so you can say, what’s that?

It’s last night’s sky, and it looked a lot better on a small screen in the dark. There was another one of those maintenance power cuts yesterday, but not in our area. I assume that at the end of the working day, someone forgot to switch on the lights, because the streetlights were all out along our lane, and it was glorious! Orion was looming above us in the south, striding warrior-like over the Vigla, and Cassiopea was up there advertising McDonald’s to Australia (we used to call it the Big W), I could see Ursa Minor, and there, my knowledge of the stars runs out. Anyway, the night sky is spectacular in winter when someone forgets to turn on the lights. If you’re here and want to see for yourself, then either drive out into the forest or somewhere else remote, and have a look. You can get a good idea by walking up to or down from the Constantinos View kantina that overlooks the village. If you do that and stop in one of the folds of the road where the trees block the light from Pedi, and you’re in shadow, you can stand and gawp until you get run down by Manolis on his 50cc. Here’s one of the moon which also turned up in my folder. The photo, not the moon. This wasn’t last night, but another time. And I’ll be back with you another time too, like tomorrow, all being well.

Share on Facebook

There’s an end-of-the-week gallery of some of Neil’s older photos of the island. This time, I tried to find ones that are of the hinterland, or of places most day trippers don’t see. They were taken a couple of years ago now, mostly in the winter or autumn, by the looks. There’s a feeling of ‘end of term’ about them. I don’t know if you’ve ever found yourself in a boarding school the afternoon after all the kids have gone for the holidays, or in a holiday complex during a changeover weekend? Perhaps an empty cruise ship after the cruise, or any other place that’s one day filled with activity and noise, and the next, empty, peaceful and slightly spooky, like Hastings out of season. Such places take on a different personality once everyone goes home, and Symi certainly does too.

Before the gallery, though, a word of warning.

This is the weekend I am finally going to try to ‘migrate’ my websites to a new host. Symi Dream has sat on the same server since 2004, and although I’ve been able to host as many sites as I want there, and have paid the same price for 22 years, I am now dealing with my third company, and they seem to have put security restrictions in place, which mean I can’t easily use my old email addresses. Something to do with being on a much-shared server and having to pay more to move to a dedicated one… I don’t know, but I looked around for some other places, found some sites, got bamboozled about STPs and PVLs (which I thought had something to do with the clap and visible panties, but what do I know?), and looked at much cheaper prices, and have been swayed by the hosting company that says they will do all the work for me, and only charge me half of what I was being charged, and for 10 times the GB, and I can translate my domain name too, as that’s with another company, and they, too, are costly, and all I have to do is commit to a free month where I bed everything in, and then stay signed up for at least a year. Cheaper if you commit for longer. The usual stuff. But this Company kept coming up in searches and discussions as being a reliable one, so, tomorrow morning, I shall begin.

Phew – that’s how much I am looking forward to the weekend. I know what’ll happen. I will fill out the simple bits like my name, set up my account, and be all ready to start on Saturday morning. Perfect. Then, trepidatiously, I will hit the button that I have to hit to start the ball rolling, and off we go… Into a series of instructions. It’ll be things like:

Navigate to Settings, enter your BSL Code (found in System/ Readers/Digest/Code/SBL), and open the All-in-one-Optimum-Migration Service found under More on the second Appearance menu, and toggle off ‘When C4 is sellected’ (you may have to log out and log in again at this point), first ensuring you have entered the SOC code sent by message to phone number +33 ending in 01019 into the marked box, and shout “Where the **** do I find ‘Settings?’”

So, if you call back here on Monday and things look different, wrong, or are not there, you will know I am having trouble translating my migration from one power-guzzling black box in Arizona to another. Alternatively, it may all go smoothly, or you may find exactly the same as you are looking at right now, and nothing will have changed.

Tempus omnia revelat. ‘Time Reveals All.’ (The motto was found scratched inside a pocketwatch researchers thought once belonged to Jack the Ripper. Hm.) We shall see…

Share on Facebook

I wasn’t sure what to talk about this morning, so I sat down at the typowriter and thought for a while… Ah, yes! That.

Before setting fingertips to plastic, though, I went online to check a fact as best you can these days, and there, I became distracted. First, by arriving emails, and then by the fact my Thunderbird email program (sorry, ‘App’) doesn’t have autocorrect like Word does, so my entire reply was underlined in red. Never mind, there is always a solution, and I went to find an add-on for that, and found one, which I then couldn’t get to work, so I tried another way, and 15 minutes later, I’m still none the wiser.

So, I went to my photos folder, which is really Neil’s because it’s currently full of only his photos, and selected a few suitable for today’s blog. Then I remembered what I was going to write about, and went to make a cup of tea…

Back at the desk, I slipped gracefully in to ‘Before I start, I must change the email address associated with my websites’ mode, and went to both sites’ admin panels to sort out that little job that’s been waiting for three weeks and will take one minute to fix, and discovered that the WordPress confirmation email was not getting through to my Gmail account, and I needed to install this plugin or fiddle with that extension, so I used another email address to see if that would work (the home one supplied by Greece’s national phone system) and lo and behold, no.

By which time, I’d forgotten what I came in for, and the calming music on Spotify, which had been playing some of Ravel’s less enthusiastic experiments, was now playing ‘Your 100 Best Songs from Shows You’ve Never Heard of’ or something, so I had to deal with that. Took all of two seconds, and then I remembered I’d not lit any incense. (It’s not part of an ancient rite, sadly, but is a thing I’ve been getting into this winter, and one a day sets a pleasant background scent for the office.) So, I had to see to that… Before making another cup of tea.

And returning to the desk to start again on this blog… After I’ve checked book sales a Kindle Unlimited reads for the month so far… Eek! Much more work is needed in the publicity department if we are to eat in June, and I’m so glad I don’t buy petrol or have travel plans. Except, that is, for our health MOTs in a couple of weeks, which reminded me I had to sort something out there, which I did, before returning to my original search (the one for whatever it was I was looking for at the top of this page), and finding I had somehow opened my BookFunnel author dashboard and joined a free promotion for June. Ah, right. That needs noting and passing to the admin department because it’s a good promo to join, and there are only a few places left, so I must get that form done now.

Sorted, and back to this post, by way of the kitchen to collect a full bottle of water, and the bathroom to unplug the pump because I’d left it on and it was kicking in every ten minutes, and finally back to the desk.

Now, what, 50 minutes ago, was I going to write about?

I couldn’t remember, so I wrote this.

Share on Facebook

What can I tell you this morning? Not a great deal. We had another quiet day at home yesterday, and I finished the rough first draft of a new mystery, except for about two page,s which I will get done this morning. Then, I can start on the editing and produce a draft two. If you are in any way at all interested in the process, I wrote an article about how I write these stories, and it’s on my other website. You can read it here: How I Write a Novel.

That was my yesterday morning taken care of. I’m still finding it a drag to get back to work in the afternoons, mainly because it’s still not quite warm enough, and part of me doesn’t want to put the heating on in there for more than a few hours in the morning because of the cost. Not long to go now, though, and I will be able to reshape my days and spread what I cram into a morning into a whole day.

For the past two/three months, my routine has been to get up, cup of tea, take to office, heater, do blog (while still waking up, so it’s as good as you’re going to get for this time of day), check emails (so fewer now I have got rid of outlook and don’t use Mailwasher, had had to get rid of the @symidream emails for the time being), see if there is any admin to do such as book promos, answering posts on social media, advertising as best I can, checking book sales, making a stronger cup of tea, saying good morning to the husband and running through the usual checklist: sleep alright? How many times did you have to get up during the night? What you doing today? We always ask the same blunt trauma questions first thing in the morning and always get the same reply. And then back to the typowriter and on to the next section of whatever mystery I am creating. Battle on until around 11.00, take two hours off for lunch during which we watch a couple of TV shows, and then… Well, not quite back to work yet, but sometimes it’s back to doing something useful, and the next thing you know, it’s sofa time again, and I’m vegging with a film or two until bed at 21.30.

The routine is broken now and then by a quick walk, though that hasn’t happened for a while, or shopping, visiting the Rainbow once or twice a week, or attending a quiz (though that will have to stop for us soon), and pottering around the house or courtyard. Quiet, lazy, plenty of time before the summer season, and before Neil goes back to work – though never as much time as you think there is.

Others are already working hard. The digger trundles past for eight hours a day. The sounds of building work and transportation are everywhere. The supply ships coming in, the ferries, vans delivering, noisy mopeds, parents and children passing to and from the Προνήπιο (Pronipio) and Νήπιο (Nipio) above us on the hill – the kindergarten years one and two. We’re not seeing the village Square so busy yet, though the boys have been out playing football of an early evening, and the cafes are open. It’s just that no-one’s sitting outside as yet, but they will be soon. There were a couple of boats in the harbour the other day, I mean, what looked like private sailing yachts, and we have already seen a few day-trippers from Rhodes, so as far as some places are concerned, the season has already started.

Now, I must go and unplug our water pump. The soldier downstairs is still away on leave, so that means we don’t have the pleasure of his laughter and singing coming from below, but he’s gone and left a tap dripping so the pump continues to kick in every 10 to 15 minutes, and the only way to stop it driving me mad is to unplug it when we’re not using it. I imagine Violetta over the road and Agapitos next door don’t want to hear it running through the night, and neither do I. So, when that’s done, it’s back to the last few pages of a book with no title, though I may call it, ‘A Night of Opposites.’ And on with Wednesday we go…

Share on Facebook

It’s coming to that time of year when those who have jobs set up for the summer season start to think, ‘Only a few more weeks to go. What happened to winter?’ It’s funny how that happens, isn’t it? When you’re little, even a day and a night (such as Christmas Eve) can feel like a week, and yet, times like the old six-week summer holidays of youth in the rural 1970s used to last forever. Until the last couple of weeks, when time whizzed by as you crammed six-weeks’ worth of homework into two tedious afternoons.

The same goes for trips abroad. Like our trip over Christmas. It took a year to plan, save and pay for, and during the first week, time was endless, but during the second, it was, ‘Where did that go?’ And we hardly stopped moving and doing things, so no moment of any day was wasted.

The road around Yialos is like it too. It seems to have been up and under repair for an age, and yet, today, as if it never happened, it is open again. (At least, I read a prediction, so it is hoped it will reopen again today.) The works were hampered by bad weather, but it’s now been so dry that we need to water the plants for the first time in ages.

(I nicked this image from David, who posted it in a Symi group last night. He’s coming for dinner on Saturday, so I will ask permission then.)

It’s time to start putting names on the calendar: Who says they are coming this year, and when we can expect them. The Bother-in-law has already booked his place on the sofa bed for a few nights, and other friends are also due to return to the island. I’ve been reading potential visitors’ questions on social media and have seen many saying they are looking forward to coming. The businesses are starting to put things back together gradually – there’s no rush just yet – and soon, people will be doing up their properties ready for Easter. It’s all starting to roll back towards the summer season, but you have to wonder what kind of season it will be, what with everything going on in the world. I’m not going to go on about all that because there is nothing I can do about any of it except hope. So, I shall carry on regardless, as the film title said, and hope for the best.

Here, instead, is a photo of the new step-free arrangement that’s been built alongside the Kali Strata ready for the summer visitors.

No, silly. It’s a ramp put in by builders who have been doing something to a property near us on and off for the last year or so. We are now quite used to the trundle of the transporter machine that passes and shaves the corner off the house now and then, and neatly stacks its rubble and whatnot along the lane.

Yes, preparations for summer are underway, and as if to back up the statement, we didn’t have to turn any heaters on yesterday, not until eight in the evening.

Share on Facebook