Danny's class at school, with the teaching assistant on the left.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Friday, October 21, 2005
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.
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.
Monday, October 03, 2005
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.
Friday, August 05, 2005
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Soplao
Carmen, Jamie and I went canoeing yesterday down the River Deva with Cora, Pascal and Frank. Beautiful weather, and the river was perfect as well, much higher water levels than in late August and September, so we didn't get stuck on the bottom as much (or maybe that had something to do with my 14 kg less weight...)
This morning we visited the new caves that have just opened here - Soplao. These feature the biggest collection of 'eccentric stalactites' in the world - stalactites that don't simply hang downwards vertically but shoot off in every direction. These are jaw-droppingly spectacular - the photos below give just a taste of what they're like in the flesh. Some of the formations also looked like waving flags or curtains, where drips had run along a sloping ceiling for thousands of years, slowly building up a horizontal line of mineral deposit.
As you can see from the photos, a lot of them look more like icicles or melting snow than mineral formations.
The tour was a bit short, only about 45 minutes, but they mentioned that a more adventurous tour lasting 3 hours and requiring helmets and wellies to be worn would be starting in October.
This morning we visited the new caves that have just opened here - Soplao. These feature the biggest collection of 'eccentric stalactites' in the world - stalactites that don't simply hang downwards vertically but shoot off in every direction. These are jaw-droppingly spectacular - the photos below give just a taste of what they're like in the flesh. Some of the formations also looked like waving flags or curtains, where drips had run along a sloping ceiling for thousands of years, slowly building up a horizontal line of mineral deposit.
As you can see from the photos, a lot of them look more like icicles or melting snow than mineral formations.
The tour was a bit short, only about 45 minutes, but they mentioned that a more adventurous tour lasting 3 hours and requiring helmets and wellies to be worn would be starting in October.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Girlwatching
Carolina and Sofia came round for an afternoon in the paddling pool, and Danny got an eyeful through his binoculars. They start young these days, you know.
Pony and horses.
We took the kids to the local stables to ride the horses, and they got a pony ready for Daniel. We confidently predicted that he wouldn't get up on it, and he did take some persuading, but once he saw Frank on his horse he was up for it and stayed on for the full 40 minutes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
