Back up and running

Saturday daytime was quiet, we briefly wandered around the market then headed to the Manantial for coffee, then in the afternoon Carmen and Anja went for a walk while Jamie did her homework and Daniel had his nap. Jamie's forging ahead at the moment in reading and writing. We bought her a book at her teacher's recommendation, it's actually one that they'll be using next year, but she spent a lot of time at the weekend reading through it and practicing the words she'd learned. She's now learned various letters, AEIOU of course, and L, G, T, M, S, Z , so she can write 'el gatito', 'el tomate', 'la lata' and lots more, all joined up.

When C&A got back I went off for a jog. It was good to get out in the daylight for a change, although at 17.50 it was already getting dark. (I'd been out for a bike ride on Friday, but only managed to get as far as Rosana and Guido's place. We hadn't seen each other for so long that my 2 minute stop to drop off old car magazines turned into a cosy hour and a half of red wine and coffee...). I got to the beach in the twilight, and decided to keep going along the beach. The tide was right out and the last few walkers were heading for the car park. I turned around at Meron, the next car park along where the nice beach restaurant is, and came home.

On Saturday evening Carmen and I went round to Magdalena and Rodolfo's for supper and football - Barcelona against Real Madrid, the 'clasico'. Anja kindly babysat for us. Supper was very nice, tapa-style. Gambas (king prawns); pate; surimi, egg & jalapeno pepper on baguette slices (wonderful!) and tortilla, accompanied by a very nice wine that we'd brought that Brenda had bought while she was here, Los Molinos Reserva 1999 (Valdepenas).

We enjoyed the football, at least what we managed to follow of it! M&R were for Madrid, while we follow Barca, but as Barca were 2-0 up at half time, our hosts didn't have a great deal of interest in the second half, so of course we were good guests and chatted to them. 3-0 was a fair result, Barca were far and away the better team. Madrid looked as rudderless and unthreatening as England had against Spain on Wednesday, with Beckham performing almost identically in both games.

On Sunday afternoon we took Jamie and Daniel to the birthday party of Alegria, a friend of Dani's from creche. Her parents, Toby and Jackie, are from the UK, over here for a year, Jackie is actually half-Spanish, hence Alegria's first name and why they are here. The kids had a wonderful time, ate a lovely multicultural party meal (chorizo followed by jelly and ice cream, anyone?) and played pass-the-parcel and musical chairs until they were fit to drop.

It was quite a restful weekend after probably my busiest week ever - I translated well over 20,000 words last week. In fact the past three weeks have been extremely hectic. My job numbering system is year-month-job number, and I'm already way over the record number of jobs in a single month since I switched to the system 5 years ago, and there's still 8 days to go in November. I spent a lot of time messing around with my hobby - downloading! I've been a happy KaZaa user up to now, but recently most of my downloads keep freezing up. If I were a conspiracy theorist I'd say the recording industry and movie industry have planted millions of dodgy files on the web to clog up these file sharing systems. Who knows, in any case I only manage to download about 25% of files I click on. So I was pleased this weekend to find a new alternative - Bit Torrent. I've already used it to download the elusive last episode of a series I managed to download on KaZaa - SPACED (if anyone wants copies, let me know).

It's currently busily downloading a Spanish-language copy of the new Pixar movie, the Incredibles.

Right I'm off to watch Bad Santa, another recent download!