I had little enthusiasm when the alarm went off this morning at 04:30. Luis had me up twice in the night due to the amount of activity on the camping. At some point in the early hours, some punters decided to pack up and go home. This was too much excitement for Luis who decided the wind needed a bit of accompaniment, so serenaded everyone. I went to the storeroom to have a conversation with him and discovered I had not put one of the e-collars on him as I did the previous night. Fido had one earlier as he interrupted my meal to bark. Luis, I forgot about. What I should have done was to go back and put the collar on him but, in my befuddled state, I opted for my bed. About 90 minutes later he started off again, probably due to activity outside, but this time I took the collar and put it on him. Peace at last! Tonight I shall preemptively apply collars to both Fido and Luis in the hope that I can sleep through uninterrupted.
There were no mosquitoes this morning as it was still very windy when we went out. The only sign of activity were fresh tyre tracks from Kostas who was hard at work when we arrived. He carried on until after we left so there must have been plenty of salt to collect. We played ball and they larked about together as usual. Scattier due to the wind naturally.
My run was hard work against the wind but easier on the return. I even overtook another runner! Later, I struggled against the wind once more as I cycled to Paleochora. At one point I even stopped as the wind was so strong. The fastest gust today so far has been this evening at 70km/h. The forecast talked about much stronger winds earlier in the day with it moderating in the evening. It looks as though the weather has not read the forecast properly!
My weekly phone call was very short due to Mo not having much voice. I’d made up for it earlier with a conversation to Eleanor.
I’ve spent quite a lot of the day learning about SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Not very exciting so I shall bore you only briefly. These protocols are used in emails in an attempt to stop SPAM or nuisance emails. The aim is to add information to the outgoing email so that the receiving server can verify the source of the message. The idea being that you then reject any unverified message so reduce spam.
There will come a time when email servers will reject any unverified mail by default so I felt I should get ahead of the game and mug it up. So far, I have set up SPF but DKIM and DMARC are a little more complicated.
During the night there was a lot of banging on my metal roof from branches blown by the strong wind. I had already been around and trimmed those branches I thought would cause problems. This afternoon, armed with my trusty heavy-duty pruning shears, I have further reduced the height of the carob trees to the north of the van. There should be no further banging on the metal roof or the poles which hold it up.
We are approaching the busiest time of the year for the camping as it is a Public Holiday on Wednesday. From then on, things will liven up at the weekends as far as Greeks are concerned. As September progresses the clientele will include more foreigners and almost exclusively foreigners once the Greek schools go back around 15 September. It’s a shame it’s so windy as this may impact upon customer numbers. That said, they seem to be coping. So long as there’s no rain.
I’ve just returned from a visit to reception where Maria is disappearing under a tsunami of customers, as well as being in charge of the mini-market too. One of the Google customers has decided to stay for two weeks and had problems contacting Maria via email so wrote to me to see what was going on. Maria is simply overwhelmed and is, therefore, firefighting: dealing with the customers standing in front of her. Someone scheduled to arrive on 29 August is therefore quite far down the list! There is also a problem with the camping email apparently due to the number of people connecting to the serve. Horse Feathers!
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