"Live long and prosper"

After three days of open windows and doors, and painting, the first part of the great work is finished. We awoke this morning to the task of putting our house back to the way we want it. It's all a bit strange as all the curtains were taken down and sent for cleaning, and with the blinds down and the net curtains sitting in front of them, the house has an echo with which we are not familiar. Every sound is amplified. Spooky.

The second stage - the installation of the wood burner - will take place at some stage in the near future (when the company who are installing it for us have finished their current jobs), and we look forward to that. We shall rearrange our sitting area as if the wood burner is there, so that there should be no great upheavals when that happens.

Two days of high winds and rain have caused the dogs to be a little twitchy (especially our foster puppy, Mister Sprout). We shall have to start putting appealing photographs and videos on Facebook in the hope that someone can offer him a permanent home. The difficulty will be appraising potential owners, as he has already been abandoned once in his short life. No doubt our chum, Ruby Pearl Evans, will be able to offer valuable advice. It would be heartbreaking if he was cast out again.

Blue skies and sunshine today suggest the storms of the last couple of days are over. But water is in desperately short supply, especially along the southern coastal region. Reservoirs are running very low there and rain, and then more rain, and even more rain, is needed. The thought of our government having to import water by tanker from Greece, as apparently happened in 2008, at great cost is awful to contemplate. And yet, everywhere we go, we see people hosing down their drives without a thought for this year. It would be easy to blame the Greek Cypriots for this profligacy, but I suspect that expat residents are equally thoughtless.

This weekend we are "in the bubble" to recover from the excitement of the last few days, and will raise our heads above the parapet on Monday. Until then, as the Vulcans say, "Live long and prosper."