Backlog

Oh dear, lagging behind on the blog again… the usual excuses, too busy with work, not much else happening… I'm sure nobody's interested in hearing about the fascinating translations I've been doing about Dutch inheritance law, online gambling or terms and conditions of delivery (and don't get your hopes up, the online gambling text was even less interesting than the inheritance law one).

The weather in the past two weeks has conspired against us as well - in my case, the day I had to work the longest hours and couldn't get away was the only day of the past week with any sunshine. Sod's law. A couple of weekends ago I got out for a pleasant bike ride with Rodolfo, and this time we were joined by Carlos, the butcher from Lupa supermarket. The weekend before last was La Folia, so we didn't get out for a bike ride then, and last weekend it was 'orrible weather so we had to cancel again. I did get out for a 5 mile jog last week and was planning to have gone again by now but the same combo of weather and work have conspired against it.

One thing I have been managing to do while stuck at my desk is burning DVDs. I'm still getting a frustratingly high failure rate, although lower than at the start. It doesn't seem to matter if I use DVD Decrypter first or just use DVD Shrink from the start. Also I'm not sure how much has to do with the blanks I'm using, Princo 4x - after I'd bought them I spotted several negative comments on the web about how they have an above-average failure rate. Other people say they've burned hundreds of them without a single problem. Luckily they were very cheap! Packages are currently in the post to Kev and Jason, so I'll be interested to hear if they work ok on their machines. So far they haven't worked on friends' machines here or on Brian's machine or computer :\ but work fine on our machine.

The kids are doing nicely. Both of them had a great time on the fairground rides at La Folia (the weekend before last), as you can see from the photos. On Sunday we met up with a Dutch/Spanish family who live near Llanes and they came round in the afternoon and the two little girls played with our two, then after they left we went to watch the last bit of the procession, then popped into Rodolfo and Magdalena's, where the kids played together. Funnily enough they were both a bit tired by the end of that day… Rodolfo and I then went to the pub to watch Real Madrid v Barcelona, which was one of the best matches I've seen so far this season.

Jamie is playing her piano a lot more than she was when she first got it. She mainly plays around with the various sounds and beats, and should really be practicing her exercises more, but we're just pleased she's using it at the moment. She has another private music lesson this afternoon. She's as happy as ever playing with her brother and her friends.

Danny is also his usual cheerful self, and he has some interesting Dennis the Menace moments in between. Horrible half hours, shall we say. Thankfully he's not broken anything too expensive yet, although he managed to destroy our new cordless, ball-less mouse apparently just by clicking on the button. Doesn't know his own strength… His vocabulary keeps growing in 3 languages, and he's stringing together bigger sentences. Most of these are still of the two or three word variety though.

With Anja here, Carmen has been getting out more for walks in the mornings and afternoons, when the weather's permitted. Magdalena has also been along a couple of times, which has been nice. Hopefully that will continue when Anja is not here. A&C have also been off shopping to Santander a few times - if there's one type of shopping I hate it's helping women choose clothes, so they've had each other to help out there, to my great relief.

I am in the middle of baking a steak and Guinness pie, and I need to get back to it now. I'll let you know how it turns out.

PIE UPDATE: It was delicious, miles better than I was expecting. I got the recipe
here, off Jamie Oliver's website. Couldn't get hold of any parsnips so winged it with two small potatoes, an extra carrot and a large squirt of honey ;o)