Happy New Year!!!!!

Well it's 2009!! Hope you all had a good Christmas and New Year. We have had family over for the break and as our first guests out here it was good fun too.

We had Christmas eve with the Brits in a local bar and New Years eve with the Greeks in a local restaurant. It was a good night we had the usual countdown and then we were all given a bottle of fizz or two per table and we all counted down again and had a synchronised cork poppin!!! A lovely cake then appeared iced in 2009 and it was shared amongst us all.

We left about 1.40 am and came home to see the UK New Year come in on the news on the internet, isn't technology wonderful. We then had another New Year toast and finally got to bed around 3.30am.

We had a rest whilst our guests were here but they left us last Friday and renovation started again on Monday 5th January!!! Oh it is my mums birthday today so happy birthday to you Buffalo if you are reading!!

Well lets hope 2009 is a good year and less eventful than 2008 was for us. Although with the state of the economy, currencies and labour markets it's not got off to the best of starts. Anyway enough doom and gloom.

We've had the shortest day its about 3 minutes a day extra day light now up 'til June. I have to say out here we are 2 hours behind the UK and the daylight saving mess that happens in the UK does not happen here and it is better. It's light just after 8am and dark just after 6pm it's loads better. (It's also a few degrees warmer too - sorry.)

We have a list of chores to do before we ferry to Venice on the 17th March. The back door is knackered and needs replacing - we opened it when we got here and it took us an hour to close and lock it again!! It is like paper at the bottom, well rotten. We have a barrier to install across the drive to stop the Greeks abandoning another car in our garden - we had an old VW golf in it when we arrived. There don't appear to be any scrapyards out here and there is a sea of abandoned cars all over the place. Anyway, we have the posts and the barrier from a local welder - Stokatis - it was fun getting the spec right - (his English was marginally better than my Greek but we got there.) There is a bit of mortaring to do on the outside walls of the apotheki (outbuilding) to stop it from falling down. It really needs re-roofing but that will be a long way down the job list. The first job is to insulate one of the external walls in the middle bedroom. It gets cold on a night and the construction of the building means it retains the cold in winter and the heat in summer so we are attempting to create an insulating barrier which will hopefully give the opposite effect, we will see . . . .

Well it's sign off time now and I will try get back to the old weekly rambles in a few days time.

Good health and prosperity to y'all for 2009!!!!

"D"