Banter

I went out on Wednesday evening to watch Chelsea v Barcelona with a Brit I recently met who lives here with his Spanish girlfriend. He knew a few of the Spanish lads in the bar so we had a bit of banter going back and forth, especially as the game swung one way and another. Good laugh, we'll be doing it again soon.

We went back to Santander yesterday to spend our big gift token - and a lot more besides :( We had our fingers crossed tightly again when we put our lottery tickets into the slot, but lightning didn't strike twice unfortunately.

Jamie had a cooking afternoon at school yesterday, this time with grandparents helping out rather than parents. They cooked 'tortos', which are local fried corn pancakes, very thick, the texture of which actually more resembles hash browns or rosti.

The flat is now let until 13 August, with provisional reservations for 13 Aug - 10 Sep, which I think is very good going considering how long we've been advertising it. I have been asked by an estate agent friend to mention properties they have on their books to people I turn away because the dates are already booked, which seems to me to be a pretty good compliment.

I'm girding my loins for a 22,000-word court judgment which I will have to start work on soon and am not looking forward to. I got offered another 2 big jobs in the past 2 days which I had to turn down because of it - total 70,000 words. I can't remember ever turning down that kind of quantity in such a short period before now. And once those two jobs have been placed with other translators, people will have trouble placing other jobs, so I'll probably be turning down even more in the coming weeks. It's a vicious circle, but it suggests there will be no shortage of work in the next few months.

Finally got software installed to connect up our new Motorola V550 phones to the computer, so we can upload photos (and download MP3 flies to use as ringtones, for example). Up to now we've had to send photos by MMS to our email, which would have been an expensive option in the long term, so I'm glad we've got that sorted. It means we can snap away with the cameras at will. They proved their worth at the swimming pool - it's nice to always have a camera handy.

We will be taking our annual trip to Holland from about 25 August to 10 September this year.