Symi Property Services

Sunday morning. Rain overnight, apparently a storm but I didn’t hear a thing. We enjoyed a wonderfully relaxing and fun Saturday afternoon with the godboys including sausage and mash in a giant Yorkshire pudding. We fed the cats on the way there.

Saturday brought a return of our water problems and an instant fix from Symi Property Services. For a while now, in fact, since before the sterna broke and we had the temporary tank installed, the water pump was taking it upon itself to go off every now and then. This usually means a leak somewhere, but I’d been unable to find one, so assumed it was just slowly filling pipes or cistern somewhere. However, when I noticed water dripping from the bathroom roof on Friday night and traced it, on Saturday morning, to the hot water tank in the storeroom above the kitchen, it became obvious. We were suffering from a rusty nipple, apparently, even though the tank is only about five years old. So… A quick call to SPS, the expert arrived, diagnosed our nipple and told me we also needed a new valve. That replaced, it’s now a case of ordering a new tank. The current one is fixed for now but because of the rust, won’t last, but hopefully a new tank will be in place in the coming days, and I won’t have to sit there listening to the pump and wondering why it’s doing what it’s doing. It’s already quieter because the tank is leaking less. Anyway, that’s the current instalment of our on-going water issues which I am confident will be fixed thanks to the experts.

You can contact Symi Property Services here, and this link leads to their Facebook page.

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Symi Saturday Photos

Morning! Here are a few photos taken by the two of us recently. The eggs are from Sotiris’ chickens; so much nicer to hand pick your own from the bucket in the supermarket. The view is from the house yesterday, a fine, sunny and cold day. The others are from Neil’s collection from last week. It’s Saturday morning, I have some writing planned, we’ve been invited to lunch with the godboys, and after that, have nothing much going on until we go to Rhodes for our annual health checks later in the month. Neil starts work at the bar again in April which is suddenly not so far away, and I need to make a phone call and have our water pump looked at; it’s going off every half hour or so, and I still can’t find a leak. So, that’s my weekend planned, here are your photos.

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Light

Happy March 1^st to you, and kalo mina, as they say in Greece on the first of the month. A few shadow photos for you today. You know, it’s odd. When I nip down to Yialos for something and take my phone/camera, I come back with one or two of the same kind of shots as always. When Neil pops down to pick something up or go to the bank, he comes back with all kinds of arty and interesting images on his camera.

It has been sunny this past couple of days, hence the shadows in the images today, but this morning the temperature in the courtyard was back down to 10 degrees, which is probably how it should be at this time of year. Heaters on, curtains drawn against the breeze which makes things feel colder, though so far today, there’s no wind so we might warm up a little later. Ah well, a couple more photos and then back to work.

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A day for staying in

Wednesday, early, waking up to the wind which is cold, and a sky streaked with cloud, but at least there’s no rain. Also waking up to a handy post on Facebook directing me to the yUK Gov site where the latest info about what might happen to British foreigners in Greece, or coming on holiday to Greece. You can find it here.

Of course, it all depends on what happens next, and that’s as up in the air as it’s ever been. As I see it, and I’m usually wrong, if there’s a deal, everything (for us here) stays the same except we’ll have to change our paper residency cards to something else in time. If there’s no deal, the Greek government will reciprocate whatever the yUK does with Greeks there. If there’s neither, if a no deal isn’t allowed but a deal voted down, then there might be more time to prolong the agony, keep Her in power while she gets what she thinks is best for everyone, allow the other parties to shift around and settle on whatever green benches offer the best view of the car crash, and no-one will know what’s going on for another few months. So, that’s as strong and stable as mud then.

She has recently made her speech about protecting British immigrants now living in Europe (as that’s what we are). She says she is behind us (a hideous thought). But she’s doing it simply because there’s a bill going through committee to bring back the voting rights of UK nationals living abroad. Handily, that could be just in time for her extension so everyone will have time to forgive and forget the way She’s ignored us all this time and come around to her way of thinking. A masked attempt to add a few more potential voters to her failing armies. Or something equally as cynical. But that’s only me. And there my Big B thoughts will end for now. The photos today are from Neil and his walkabout yesterday (changing his tax details to reflect his Irish passport). Some Symi views and details to take our minds off the macabre car crash which is the current state of the yUK.

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Tuesday

Tuesday morning and, after another thunderstorm overnight which I didn’t hear, I woke up to rain which soon cleared. It’s now sunny and clear, the windows are open to help shift the damp smell, the washing is on in the hope it will dry before more rain comes, and there was no need to have a heater on in the bedroom last night. In fact, if the weather settles down and stays as it is today (yesterday), I should be able to drag myself out onto them there hills and start up my three-mile walk-a-day routine before long. I need to. The belt is back on hole number two, one down from where it was before Christmas and not down in a good way. Still, that should be rectified when the weather is more amenable to regular walks rather than the odd one here and there.

Meanwhile… Here are some interesting stats supplied by Grammarly. That’s the plug-in program I use to check my grammar and spelling on top of Word’s own (hideously inaccurate) grammar and spell check. The program highlights possible typos and other anomalies and regularly send me a report on my progress. The following was quite surprising.

Number of words checked since July 2016 when I first started using it: 4,979,397

I was more productive than 98% of Grammarly users (which doesn’t mean much as perhaps no-one else uses it)

I was more accurate than 78% of users

I used more unique words than 99% of users, which is probably due to the dialect used in the Saddling and others and also because I am currently writing with an old-fashioned Victorian style (or my own version of)

My most common mistake is missing commas in compound sentences (I do use a lot of ‘and’).

As we were talking work and writing, I thought I’d share the latest images from ‘the study.’ My writing corner and my reading desk which is still waiting for the captain’s chair which, I am told, goes into production early next week. When it’s ready, it will be delivered to friends in the yUK when they return from New Zealand, and they will be shipping it with some of their own items before the end of March. As for me, I am shipping off to the writing corner to see if I can make the 5 million words mark before the end of the week.

PS, that painting isn’t of me, it’s of my uncle, done in oils the 60s (I think) by a well-known artist I can’t read/remember the name of. I the photo above, the house is a tapestry of where we lived, done by my mother in 1972.

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