Sunday at home, another one at rest

Sunday 21nd January 2023


Just as a reminder, from now on, the blog will about  the previous day, the day indicted in the blog will indicate the day it about.

Our telephone contract ends in the UK soon, and as we don’t want to sign up for a new one until we know more about what we are doing with house, we are letting it lapse ( well we need to cancel it ) this includes our internet as well. We are using the house to host our VPN solution for here, so we have had to relocate this. The new service is going to be faster, hopefully easier to fix too. I spent a bit of time setting up, VPN on the two devices I use it on, with the kind help of one of my friends on Sifnos. We are also looking into getting one of those dongle devices to use when we are in the UK for the house, as we won’t want to use data roaming over there. 

Photo Interlude - nice photo near the second set of cats I am feeding


I used my notes from the Greek course that I am following to do some revision on words I learnt ages ago.  It is quicker than going over the whole audio course, I know I am not checking my answers against what the instructor provides after the students have a go. I have two versions of the note, one with the answers on, the other with just the English to be translated ( so I can’t cheat) . But this was just a quick way of going over the whole thing to refresh my brain. I also had a good look at my notes on the Greek letters, that I mentioned the other day. I reckon about eleven letters would be recognisable by English speaking people. Some of the others are not to bad, the letter P is actually an R. I have completed one Duolingo session, and just need to listen to the current chapters that I am at in the audiobook course.


I did some guitar practice with the four fingered chords, which are starting to sound much better. I can actually move the smaller fingers, better than I could to start with. I can only hold those extra strings down for half my practice time, after which you can hear the buzzing and I then revert to two finger versions of the chords. I have a furniture polish that I use on the guitar, and I gave the instrument a good clean up afterwards. The guitar book I am buying should be here, by the end of the month. 


One of the good thing about the bunch of friends I have found, is they have all been here many years. They have a lot of experience, and I told one of them about my problem with white towels. So the above solution is added to the wash, which I will try and see how things go. I have a candidate towel getting grubbier by the moment and hadn’t been totally clean since I started using it.

The second machines VPN  took a little bit more work to get it going, with a bit more help from one of my friends on Sifnos, and a few handy memories of things I used to use every day in my IT working life. So I am up and running on both now.

I fed both sets of cats, the two who push each other out of the way, they did so several times, and the so called Souvlaki cats, no adults tonight, only two juveniles.


If the forecasts are to be believed, Thursday is going to bring with it, a serious amount of rain. The days either side of it might be a bit wet too. But over those days, a good inch might appear. The good news, is the island needs the rain, but I am also hoping I am going to be able to see some busy streams, especially at the inlet of the reservoir, but what I don’t know is how long the rain will take before it gets to my vantage points! I might miss the event, or just be too early. But experience will assist, but I am not going out there when it is tipping down, my interest and enthusiasm is not that keen. However we are to have two nice days that’s Monday and Tuesday for me to do my weekly litterpicking and to go somewhere nice in the car and sit in the sun.

The friend who is in Athens that I am feeding her two cats for, is helping me in Greek, I get sent messages in Greek, and now they have started sending me audio clips with words in Greek and English. I have promised to send audio clips of my own, with my efforts. Hopefully this way will help my confidence as it’s not face to face. 

Finally I tried the Wordle puzzle again, I did not get the answer in the prescribed number of goes, half the battle, is to resurrect words that fit into the clues you have found. But I imagine over time, you get more agile, and it becomes easier. I am not so sure it’s going to be part of my daily puzzling activity, but let’s see.



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