Strange goins-on yesterday in the magical world of computers. I plugged in my external hard drive where I keep my notes, opened a file I had been using in the morning to find all updates to it, since December 20th, had vanished. No idea what is going on there. (Will try a re-boot later and see if that helps.)
Meanwhile, while I was doing that and feeling a little under the weather, Neil was bouncing around down in Yialos at his first aerobics class of 2014. It was a cold morning again, that followed a night of heavy rain, so much so that we had drips in the bedroom, and that made me think of an answer to that age-old question: what is Symi like in the winter.
Well, you will find out by reading my blog posts, and Adriana’s when she is back, and you can also find out by reading the Symi books (see the right hand column). But here’s an example of what it can be like, based on Sunday evening. Wet. Agreed it was a big rain storm but it was wet inside the house and outside. Here’s how our house is in the winter:
The kitchen, at the back, gets little ventilation due it it’s design and so turns black and needs washing with bleach, and painting every year, and the rain drips through the ceiling no matter how often you (or Ian) repairs the roof and the cracks. The hall has a mysterious puddle in a certain place due to rain, and the big window can leak. The bathroom, despite having the window open most of the time, also slowly gets black mould, and is always cold. The sitting room can get wet inside depending on which way the wind is blowing, it comes through the window, under the door and sometimes through the roof but it doesn’t usually get damp as it’s the room that gets heated the most.
The moussandra office has just this year stared to get drips in it, through the old pitched roof, and sometimes these drip into the bedroom below where the window has a broken shutter that has been listed for repair for about a year now – it’s one of those ‘avrio’ things, I reckon we’ll end up having to get it fixed ourselves. But that’s also now leaking and gets black mould around it which needs cleaning off. The front room has only leaked vertically once but does get horizontal leaks under the balcony doors and front door, which is so expanded in the rain that it is a job to open it. Oh, and the house is also cold and the inside of my wardrobe damp.
And that’s not because of how we live or anything; we don’t use gas heaters – the worse thing for producing black mould, it’s just how the houses are. Other people’s houses are sometimes worse, sometimes better than ours, it all depends. But people do ask and that’s just one example of how it can be. Yesterday morning I looked out of the window as I was hanging up the floor-towels to dry and said to myself, ‘We didn’t do so badly last night.’ It can always be worse.
