Overheard and agreed

I was making a big fat truita de patates for Youngest and a friend to sell on the street, a kind of lemonade stand, in a Catalan sort of way.

While they were working away peeling potatoes they were chatting and they commented on the fact that no matter how often you practice something, when it comes time to show it to someone else it often comes off not quite so well.

Then I went to flip the truita and the whole darned thing stuck to the pan.

##***##||||

They were going to take this out to sell the entire village and say I'd made it.

Grrrr.

In the end it turned out alright, when they put it on the plate the right way up.

One noticable thing here is that there is not the same tradition of lemonade stands and the near obligation of stopping at them.  They have a tough time getting people to stop and buy, big old brush-offs most of the time.  Also oddly, it is normally teens who are the best customers.

That and grandparents.

Later on we went and saw some castallers....I've posted about them before and there is a whole album of photos on the right there for you to look at, maybe two.

These photos I took today struck me as interesting though.  The guys on the bottom are carrying a fairly enormous strain, they have up to 7 people one on top of the other standing on their shoulders.  The strain doesn't show as much as you would expect.  They also have to work very hard at resisting any lateral forces they are subjected too.  Additional strain.  This guys face however seems to illustrate it nicely.

First layer up, all fairly calm.  Focus and concentration, but all OK

Here you can see the next layer heading up....two people standing on his shoulders at once!

Now he has about five layers of people on him.  Starting to work a little more.

He's got seven folks on his shoulders now, in the zone, veins bulging and blood congesting in his face with the effort.  Still looking pretty calm.

He had to talk for a moment while there were seven layers on him.  Doesn't look that easy.

Now?  No problemo, the 180 pound man is the only one left, and he's climbing down, plenty of time for a chat, no?  I'd be chatting with a 180 pound man climbing down off my shoulders, wouldn't you?

Diablo time

The devils were out playing again this evening.

The shirtless devil set the torches alight by blowing flame on them

They burned an effigy of the church, in front of the church, and torched the politicians with their words.

They made a whole lot of noise too.

Have to say, I loved it.

Progress on the house

I like this stage, things are going very very quickly.  The guys managed to put in the bulk of the roof over Youngest's room...well, this is rather illusory as they have more to fill in, plus a mesh of rebar and then concrete, plus filling in the holes in the walls.  Nonetheless, the change is impressive.

Looking up from Youngest's room:

This will someday be the terrace, with a higher wall and fewer bricks lying around.

Remember that view down the hallway that I painted as well, with the window at the end?  This is what it looked like last night. Not sure it would still looks like this now.  Guys are FAST.

More anon.

Amazing, no?  Makes me pretty happy.

Plus today, with the terrace sorta kinda floored, (don't step on the red bits, only on the skinny white bits) we got up there and had a look around......look-y!  We've got a pretty good view of some of the mountains.....

and we can see the sea!!!!  Or we would be able to see it much better if it weren't so hazy.  The view of the sea isn't as good as at the apartment, but we can get a look, and that is good.

happy days to you all folks,

O

Whisky

Nona our friend's dog was over this morning, which is fine, until she threw up.

That was a little nastier.  Fortunately Eldest got her off the couch before anything vile happened there.

Here's the thing though.  I have been feeling fairly terrible every time I use bleach for the last very long time and now we have run out.  That said, a certain amount of disinfectant is necessary in this life, and when faced with this mess an, ahhh, unusual idea struck me.  A couple of years ago someone gifted the man with a bottle of really cheap and terrible Spanish made whisky.  It has never been opened, till this morning.

Have you ever washed your floor with whisky?

It leaves a nice shine behind when it's done, evaporates away, not sticky and much better for the marine world than bleach.

What guests will think about the left-over smell is another issue.  Good to keep the dogs out of it till it's dry too, no?

Reader's meme...

Courtesy of JG at the Hotchpotcafe:

The rules: Bold the ones you've read completely and italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. According to the BBC, if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.* My comments are in parenthesis.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger (no memory of the plot)
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (hated it)
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (very confusing as an audiobook)
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (delightful!)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
47. Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (icky ick ick ick)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert 
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (why is there so much Austen on this list and no Hemingway?)
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (in Catalan, hated it) 
57. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (TBR)
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon
60. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (hated it)
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (TBR)
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (TBR)
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (editor please)
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden -Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno-Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (LOVED it)
78. Germinal - Emile Zola (in French class, the horror)
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - A.S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (twice, the plot still won't stick in my mind)
85. Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (TBR)
87. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (LOATHED it)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down -Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A reason I'd like to move.

The neighbours had a big party yesterday afternoon.

That's OK.

They didn't tell us.

That's OK too.

They had it up on the terrace.

Still OK.

All our laundry was hanging out on the terrace, including our bras and underwear and holey socks.

That didn't feel quite so OK at all.

how to

Spent almost all day in the garden today, working away and slogging through Paul Thereaux's Dark Star Safari.  Unbearably dull.  When I've been five days at a book and I'm still only half way through.  Bye bye.  Sad, I usually like his work.

On another note, we're planning on building a climbing wall in Youngest's room once we get there, so we were doing a little internet searching this morning about how to build them and where to buy the holds.

Youngest went to type in, 'how to build rock climbing wall' in the google search window.  I stopped her part way through as the most intriguing list of how to items came up.

how to tie a tie
how to kiss
how to lose weight fast
how to get pregnant
how to solve a rubix cube
how to get a girl to like you
how to make a website
how to write a resume
how to download youtube videos
how to make it in america

I am sorry, but this list amazes me.  The order of the items and what they are. Something to be pondered here on a lot of different levels.

Friday's work....sunrise

Hi there!

Had to work this morning, but before heading out I went over to the much quieter house while the sun was coming up.  I like the way the architecture is shaping up in her room, some interesting geometric lines forming up.

She also has a most impressive view of the sunrise these days.

Impressive, no?

Staff meeting today.  One of the other teachers suggested that we, essentially, rewrite the text books, but when asked what she was planning on doing for her next class, and when given the option of doing most anything at all ie. writing her own little bit of curriculum, she decided that was too much work altogether and took the books to prep her class.
 
Guess it's not quite the same if someone else is doing the curriculum than if you have to do it yourself.

No?

house photos, first week, destruction phase!

Bloglines has been down a couple of days and it has made me realise that I need to update my google blog list on the side there.  Feeling lonely over here!

OK, onto the house photos!  I may just put a link up to some albums 'cause this might get boring fast...or not.

This used to be a bathroom, now it, well, I think the guys are still using it, but I wouldn't want to.

This used to be the roof to Youngest's room, now her room is very bright and airy.  Sadly these beautiful beams have got to go, they are completely rotten and there is nothing holding them up but habit.  I was really fairly sad about that till I thought about sleeping under them.  That's when I came to terms with the loss.  I can hear them using the chainsaw on them from the apartment.  Kinda bugging me, but what can we do.

This is looking down into Eldest's room, the loft has been partially removed, it will later be completely replaced.  As you can see the upper part of the wall dividing Eldest's room from the rest of the house has been removed.

Flowers we've put out in the garden....

Youngest's lettuce patch:

More to follow I imagine, I believe they are removing those beautiful beams today!  As I now have a copy of the key, photos should be a little easier, no?

Happy St. Jordi's day, may you get a book and a rose!

Education in the capital.

There seems to be a problem with the education system in Madrid.  I am very sorry to report this, but the evidence has come in.

Here's how I know.  We went off to yet another government office today in the quest for the children's citizenship papers.  This, we thought, was nearly the final hurdle, indeed, for Eldest it was meant to be the last one.

But it seems, Madrid failed to learn one of those 'all I need to know I learned in kindergarten' rules.  That would be sharing.  Seems the papers have to go to Madrid to be looked at and they have to write it down.  Inscribir-la.

This is where the other educational problem seems to have appeared.  It seems that in Madrid they can only write very    veeeerrrrrrrrryyyyy sloooooooowwwwwwwlllllllllllllyyyyyyyyyyy.  It is going to take them a year to write down her name.

Something is going to have to be done with the education system in this country.

Really, it is a crying shame.