Funny start to the day

I made a big switch on the bed last night...we have been sweating under the duvet for a while now...I kind of like Duvets, but they are rather all or nothing, and there are times when that doesn't work. We are there. The other problem we were having was that the dog was gradually stealing the covers every night. He would lie on the floor, on my side of the bed, on the little bit of cover that reached down that far. By morning, he had a good couple of feet of duvet, and the husband had none. This was compounded if the man came back and lay down on top of the bed before going to work, which is kind of his routine...he gets up extra early and then lies around listening to the radio on the head-phones till it is time to go. The only problem is that with the dog pinning down one side, and then the man lying on top of the covers on the other, I was waking up in sweaty imprisoned nightmares, pinned tightly down by the two of them, and way way too hot....

The duvet is gone, and I hung the dog hair duvet cover on the line....


I was joking with the kids this morning about how some people worry over and take care of things as if they were their first born child. There was a pause, and then youngest piped up, "What about the second born?" Oops.


The eldest went off to the local museum today, they have been doing a sort of dawn of man to modern times romp through history this year, and one of the neat things about being here is that we have a bit of everything in this town. There are ancient neolithic tombs, roman ruins, mediaeval churches and castles and tombs and houses, Feudalism basically continued here until the dawn of the industrial revolution, and then was dealt a death blow by the introduction of a California worm that killed every grape vine in Spain. That sounds like an exaggeration, but isn't. It pushed most of the rest of the farming peasants off the land. The feudal agreements around land between the peasants and the lords were based on the lifespan of the vine. When all the vines died, the leases all came up. Many were not renewed. Later they introduced vines that were resistant to the insects, but they were not as long lived as the originals, and so the leases were shorter, and often the vines were planted, not by peasants anyway....

It is interesting walking in the hills here, so much of it is still terraced, you can see how far and wide the cultivation has been, and how little there is now. In the hills, there is little more than home cultivation patches...big, but certainly not enough to make a living from the sales. There are bigger growers, many of them, but they are further down where the land is flatter.



Walking through these once terraced areas is strange. They feel at times like Northern Ontario.



At others like Georgian Bay, up on the Canadian Shield, and at others, it feels like Arizona. Cactai and heat and poor soil.



There are trees on most of the old terraced areas now, and scrub bushes, as well as rosemary thyme, asparagus, and anise growing wild....it is like the soil is being replenished and reserved. Re-enriched by this long fallow period. Wealth and bounty waiting for it's time. Health rebuilding in the soil.

This morning I was staggering off to the baker to get a couple of loafs of bread when one of the local tradesman's trucks went by...out the window, a cheerful voice shouted, "Good morning"

"Hola" I shouted back, took a couple more steps and spun around..."Hey! That was in English!" We all laughed pretty hard at my giant double take, and he said something else, but the truck was noisy, the street narrow and he was almost gone...next time I see him I'll have to chat with him about where he learned English, and how much he knows. God only knows how many languages this man speaks, I am assuming that he is North African since he is black, I know he speaks Spanish as he has legal work here, his English, what little I heard, was accentless, and it is possible he speaks something else as his native tongue, as well as at least some Catalan, and maybe quite a bit. He's got a good sense of humour too, brightened my morning quite a bit.

The local tradesmen are not like the neanderthals gentlemen I was discussing in my previous post, who are brought in by a larger company. The tradesmen live here, and their kids go to school with mine. If they think things like the construction workers at least they keep their mouths shut, which goes a long way.

Funny way to start the day.