Santa's big helper (now wouldn't this have made a nice Christmas card?)

That'll do for me

Jamie's hand-made "granny photo" for Anja

Danny had his class Christmas show and party this morning. They all went dressed as Santa, here he is after having just put his suit on.

Getting made up by Ima his teacher. Can you tell he doesn't like anyone putting anything on his face?

The santas sang a little song with actions... Danny started out well but his attention and movement tailed off after a minute or so. At one point he gave a huge open mouth yawn, which had quite a few people in fits of giggles, including the three of us.

They had a Christmas party afterwards with snacks and a present from the Three Wise Mens' helpers...

Jamie's class also had a Christmas party

Jamie's class

Rockslide on 'our' motorway

A hillside collapsed onto the main motorway between us and the French border yesterday, halfway between Bilbao and San Sebastian, covering all four carriageways in rocks and burying four cars and a tanker lorry carrying toxic gas(!). Incredibly only one person was slightly injured.

Looking at the footage on the news yesterday this seemed not just incredible but impossible, can you imagine travelling at 80 mph / 120 kph and suddenly ... ?

The motorway was closed all day while they cleared the rubble and debris, and they have just reopened one carriageway this morning.

Rockslide on 'our' motorway

One wonders if this will make them rethink their policy of cutting away hillsides rather than building tunnels. They'll certainly need to look again at all the other sheer rockfaces like this that line this motorway and many others.

It was Jamie's Christmas concert at her music school yesterday. A bit lower key than previous occasions, this was only attended by the parents and various siblings of the kids. Jamie did her piece on the piano, and we had our first chance to watch her play the violin. We were bracing ourselves for a blackboard-fingernail type scenario, but she did it very well, hitting the right strings each time confidently.

The singing was very impressive, they'd obviously practiced the timing a lot. As a group this is the area they've improved the most in the past year.

The kids slightly more visible here

Here's our Christmas pole in the main square

Jamie's school all drew pictures for Constitution Day, to celebrate 27 years of the constitution. Jamie's picture was chosen to represent her class, so she and her friend Carolina posed (and it was an excuse to try out our new camera, a Fujifilm A350)

Here's a close-up of the picture, it's a book (the constitution) with a cake in front of it with two candles on it (2 and 7), with party decorations and the like around the edge - and people inside the decorations, because the constitution is for the people.

Danny didn't want to be left out - he's always got a cheesy grin to spare!

Danny's class at school, with the teaching assistant on the left. 

As you can see, the mat in the corner has another use - it's where the kids take their afternoon siesta. Danny hasn't napped at home for months, but he goes out like a light on the class mat. This is not a typical thing, it's only his teacher who does it. 

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Best friend Oscar in the middle 

It's been pretty quiet here so I haven't had much cause to write, you know how it is.

Jamie's at her second swimming lesson. The first one last week was a bit of a drama, she fell over and scraped her elbow and knee nastily just before she got on the coach. The whole thing
seems very poorly organised. Carmen has gone in the car today so she can bring her home straight afterwards. There's no waiting area so they're dumped outside to wait for the coach with wet hair and everything, so one shudders to think how many catch colds when it's wet or rainy. There's one coach for two coachloads of children, and Jamie is in the second one, so she would be left in the cold. I'm not sure if Carmen's going to keep it up going there every Friday -
there's no viewing area and parents are only allowed in to the pool to watch once a month, so the mums have to kill time during the lesson. Coffee and natter, I guess.

But it's good for Jamie to get some lessons, she's a natural swimmer but needs some proper teaching. Also they start early in Holland and we don't want her to be lagging behind next year. Frank passed his certificate recently, swimming fully clothed, so you see they are pretty advanced there.

Danny is enjoying school, they have a nap there in the afternoons, he has his own cushion and blanket and they have a mat in the corner they all lie on. He seems to nap there better than he does / did at home! He has always been a loner in the playground unless Jamie's been there, in which case he's played with her or her friends, but since he's started school he's started slowly to come out of his shell a bit. At least he tries talking to other kids, but he doesn't jump in to their games like Jamie did at his age.

He's got a slight cold at the mo, his winter permasnot has started and he was coughing and sneezing a lot first thing this morning. He's lasted well today though, considering.

We took the car in for a service and to have them look at our clutch, which kept slipping during acceleration on the journey to and from Holland. They've spotted an oil leak onto the clutch, but they're wondering if it's a design fault of the car and have phoned 'Madrid', who want to have a look at it, so it's going away for a couple of days. Whatever happens, it's under guarantee.

Not a lot happening on the Holland front, we need Nuria to come and take some more photos of this flat. They're on the market at Nuria's agency, there have been some people interested in the 2nd flat but as there are people renting at the mo we haven't been able to show it to anyone. We are also waiting to hear from our accountant about the exact tax consequences, but he's in the middle of quarter-end and will get back to us once that's finished, i.e. any day now I hope.

The chap who designed the website for the rental flat is going to make a new site for selling the flats, and I will promote them on selling sites at some point soon. The prices here are driven by the proximity to Bilbao and are not very attractive to the average Brit - 100 miles to the west you can buy a renovated 5-bed detached house with garage, land and views, 5 minutes from the beach, for the same price as we are asking for this place. So we need to think of a strategy, ways of targetting the Basque market rather than the Brit market which I personally would be more comfortable selling to, language wise at least.

I had an appointment this week for a specialist to look at my knee, which had been made in June. My knee is a lot better, but I still get the odd little twinge so I thought might as well go to the appointment. I guessed they would do a scan or x-ray or something, but he just felt it and bent my leg in different directions, then said they would phone me with an appointment for a scan. Hmmm, all that wait and a trip to Torrelavega for that? Not sure if I'll bother with the scan.

Actually it was TWO trips to Torrelavega, as I got the dates mixed up and turned up a day early... ahum... The silver lining was we got to do some shopping - there's been a local transport strike, which had just turned national, and a lot of things were disappearing from the
shelves, so we stocked up on fresh fruit, veg and meat. As it was they called off the strike the next day, but we had some peace of mind having stocked up.

Eclipse

Long time no blog! Sorry about that. The longer you wait before updating, the more daunting the task appears. Sort of like cleaning behind the cooker...

Anyway this is just a quickie to mention that there was an annular solar eclipse in Spain today. We didn't quite get the full thing here, but it was still pretty spectacular, with just a little rim left on the left-hand side of the sun. Funny thing was we only found out it was coming yesterday! There has been none of the hype and hysteria which surrounded the 1999 total eclipse. I tried looking for our old eclipse viewing glasses but with such short notice I couldn't find them anywhere. So we made do with 4 dark ski sunglasses on top of one another, and then only when the sun was behind a cloud.

The pale sunlight when the eclipse was at its maximum was rather spooky, made me think of the video of Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden.

Surf lessons

Jamie is going to the creche in the mornings during the summer. They have special activities for her age group, lots of arts and crafts, that kind of thing. This morning they went crabbing at the beach and last week they had a surf lesson.

Here they are in their wetsuits ready for the lesson.



Listening to the instructions,





And getting into the water.



Apparently they were all standing up by the end of the lesson, but there didn't manage to get any photos of this, unfor-tunately.

Click on the photos for larger, high quality versions.