My kingdom for a number

Our area of the village is fairly unpopulated, one of the most recently developed areas of the municipality. There are a handful of houses up here, and the trek to the village proper is at least a mile (perhaps more, I’ve never done an odometer check to be certain). So our street is relatively new, in fact, it may have just been a dirt/stone road when I first moved to Greece and came up to visit our house while it was still in progress. Despite having nomenclature, our road has not been officially numbered, either by the municipality or the post office, so we are without an official address. This is slightly annoying for a variety of reasons, given that the post office (and our P.O. box) is well out of our way (we end up getting our mail about once a month). Although it would be mighty nice to have mail delivered to our house, it would be nicer if, god forbid, we ever had to call police/fire/ambulance, we could actually give them a freakin’ address.

It doesn’t help matters much that our neighbor, in true Greek fashion, has apparently arbitrarily decided upon a street number for his house. How exactly he came up with this number is beyond me, but it has been made even more complicated by the fact that someone closer to the beginning of the road has decided their street number is 8 (higher than our neighbor’s 5), and posted it proudly. This would mean that our street numbers are ass backwards from the rest of the world, since there is no way there are seven properties between the beginning of the road and the illustrious number 8, and with our neighbor’s chosen number, this means that the numbers would have to start at the end of the street instead of the beginning (and since the end of our street is a dead end, obviously that isn’t the beginning of the street, is it?). If we can just pick our own street number, I think we should come up with something like 6242 and really throw people off, which is the kind of thing I am inclined to do but I don’t think my in-laws would go for it.

Here’s hoping that some day we actually do get this sorted out, so when I’m 90 years old and having a stroke, someone can actually give the EMT an address. That gives them about 50 years to figure it out.

If Dante had it right

It was just over a month ago that we were trudging through the hottest, sweatiest days of the summer, and yet here we are, at the end of September, freezing our bums off. While technically speaking the temperature has not been freezing, it has been hovering around 60 degrees F (about 15 C, I think), and has felt downright cold for the last week or so. Add a plethora of cloudy, rainy days and our house feels bone cold, so we finally decided to turn on the heat (the heat was on in early May, now again late September, I think this is a record for me). I’m sure things are colder up here on the mountain, but come on now, it would be nice to have some mild temperatures in between the sweltering air conditioning weather and the bitter heat on non-stop weather (we might have had a week of them, which isn’t anywhere near enough). Today has proven to be yet another gloomy, cold day (I think the coldest yet, the temperature hasn’t risen above 49 up here), and while I tend toward the dark and gothic, even the most melancholy of people need a sunny day now and then, if only to dry the laundry. There is one thing this weather is good for, however – cuddling on the couch watching T.V. with your husband and three cats.

In other words, it is official – I have become an old woman who spends her time complaining about the weather. At least there is one thing this weather is good for – cuddling on the couch watching T.V. with your husband and three cats.

Hometown pride

Things like this can only happen in Nashville. If you have lived there, you know exactly what I mean.

Idiotic, maybe. But I think this story made me more homesick than ever.