Monday

My Monday starts in the breezeway.

The tiles are a little cooler here where the doorways funnel an airflow. Sometimes when it is suffocatingly hot (beyond 40) F puts wet towels here and when she lifts their dried husks we both lie on the cool patch of floor they reveal.

F's Monday started at 03:18 when loud music drove by. She decided to get up and visit the bathroom. I heard a tinkle and flush, then she was ages coming back. She remarked that the sea was dark. We can't remember if we have ever seen the sea here with no lights on it.

At 05:16 the neighbour who parks under our back balcony started his car. He takes his dog somewhere else to walk and comes back about half an hour later. There is the sound of manouevring as he parks. Some mornings he washes the car. Today he just put the cover back on it.

0609 and the phone pings - another neighbour, this time to wish us a good week.  F is lazy today and stays lying down until nearly 7am despite my efforts to make her get up.  I didn't stab her today.  I did smoochy cat.  The last stabbing I gave her got me in serious trouble so I'd better let some mist drift over it before I try that again.

Once again this morning there is a round of cat feeding, plant watering, and swimming (with showering and washing salt water off stuff), followed today by packing lunches.  Our Bento bag of lunch looks like something a stork delivered!  

I visit  my bathroom and then have a funny 5 minutes while F reads as many blogs as she can before....

9am: I get dragged out of whatever hiding place I have squeezed myself into and plonked onto the Donkey. F dons her big hat, and recites out loud "cat, keys, lunches, wallet, ...is there anything else we should have?"  I exchange looks with the cousins as we leave the building.

You have read about our trek to work and all the people I greet. It is quiet this week. Lots of my fans are on holiday. Businesses are closed for a couple of weeks. We will be the only ones in the office today. The others call it 'working from home'.

I climb onto the desk and F pokes the computer into life, then heads into the kitchen to make coffee and put our lunches in the fridge. She waters the plants here too.

We guess at the number of emails before she opens them. Mondays always have more. 45 is a good Monday,  100 would be a bad one. At that point I do sleep while F drinks coffee and solves other people's problems - all day. 

At some stage my lunch appears, and F eats her lunch while she answers phones, reads contracts, and drafts emails. That's not healthy. She knows that but it's a choice between work lunch or work late.  I do a couple of turns of the office, ask for a door to be opened so I can check the outdoor temperature, and make a quick visit to my litter tray in an empty office. 

The afternoon is like the morning.

Today's trek home is punctuated by a stop outside a pharmacy.  I contemplate the potted plants and greet the arriving customers while F buys some sports electrolyte stuff; a tube of tablets that fizz when you drop them in water.  She puts one in a glass of water every morning and drinks it while she is reading blogs.  It is probably a con but she likes the fizz.  The pharmacist who does the COVID testing in the little booth outdoors joins my list of fans while I wait.

Around 7 every evening the smell of a cigar wafts over our balcony and fills our living spaces. Just one. One of our near neighbours enjoys one sweetish smelling cigar every summer evening. It's definitely sweeter than the smell of spent marine fuel that wafts in from time to time throughout the day - whether we are at home or in our office down by the port.

F tries to finish her day with something creative or at the very least productive: today some handsewing on the binding of a patchwork quilt.  She concedes that silk might not have been the most robust fabric she could have used, but it was about all that was available.  She is using up stash.