An Update

Well My blood pressure seems a little better, but since last Friday I seem to have developed a pain in my chest. It seems to be best to do little things like walk around the garden, do a little bit of weeding ect. but not much. staying in bed does not help much ether it seems to make things worse.

The doctor is sending me to see a NEFROLOGIA which I think is a kidney specialist. we will see how long it will be before we get an appointment and then how long it is before we actually see anyone.

Its still not very good….But better than it was.

One slightly amusing thing though, the last time I was at the doctors the nurse started to take my blood pressure and as she was inflating the cuff there was a loud bang from my arm. The bladder had busted, my pressure was not that high, it did result in all of us laughing including the Doctor… The last two times I had had my pressure taken I had said that it was high enough to break the meter, this time it did!

A Bad Week

I awoke at 1 am on Monday morning with my a pain in my chest like very bad muscle strain. I had to go to the loo and when I got back to bed I was not felling very good but thought that all I had done was strained something the day before with all the work we had done. But then I started to feel something like very energetic muscle twitches in my chest.

It is hard to explain what it felt like, I don’t know if you have felt those small movements that coincide with your heart beat, as if you can feel the blood pulsing through your veins (some times in your ear or on your leg). well this was like that but magnified 1000 times. Also it was not regular, there would be one beat and then a gap of a second or so and another two and then another gap. I just rolled over on to my front and tried to go back to sleep but the beats were so energetic that I felt as if I was being bounced out of bed each time.

I think I did sleep for a bit but after half an hour I had to get up and go to the loo again, and my chest still hurt… Finally I woke Theresa up, she just mumbled that I should go back to sleep, until I got her to listen to my heart and then she was up and awake and helping me up and to the local emergency centre about 20 km away.

We arrived an the staff got me in on the bed and took my blood pressure, it was something like 220/180 which is very bad after a few pills the pain in my chest started to dissolve.

About an hour later, an ecg and more pills, they said I could go home. The doctor did not think there was any problem with my heart but that I should go to my Doctor in the morning. So we went home.

Next morning we went to the Doctors my blood pressure was up again so I ended up with some pills and told to take it easy and go back on Thursday.

Well Thursday came around and our friend Sheila came over to accompany me to the doctors, I was feeling ok, and had been taking it easy. But when the nurse took my pressure she was not happy, so she tried the other arm. and then asked the doctor to take the pressure, it was back up it the very high level again something like 240/160. so it was more pills and then I was told to go straight to the hospital, we arrived at A&E about 1pm.

I think it was the shortest wait in A&E I have ever had, about 1 minute. I was taken in and plugged into a ECG and after off to a cubical where I was attached to several monitors, oxygen supply and a very large syringe of stuff… And there I staid for around 7 hours.

I think Theresa and Sheila expected them to keep me in over night but I was let out and told to get some meds from the pharmacy in Los Sauces in the morning.

Here is a chart of my blood pressure The last but one was after I had been in hospital for several hours

Well its Friday evening and things seem to be going ok, though the meds they gave me were not on the usual prescription so we had to pay full whack for them, around 50€ for a months supply I just hope that the Doc will put the next lot on a cheaper prescription!!!

"YEUCK" a Plague of almost Biblical Proportions.

Things have not gone that well this week. It started well on Monday with a fiesta in Los Sauces so Theresa was off for the day which meant we had a quite day. On Tuesday evening we came home as usual after teaching to find the kitchen window covered, on the inside, with large black flies... I think there must have been around two hundred of them..... Its hard to get flies out of a house when there are fly screens on most windows to stop them coming in! We ended up using the vacuum cleaner to suck them up!
The whole episode sickened my stomach, Once most of the flies were gone I just went to bed and stayed there barricaded into the bed room till almost 3 o'clock the next afternoon. Just coming out to swat any new flies that appeared.
Theresa was so worried about me that she came home lunch time to see how I was doing...
After about 3:00 I finally got up the courage to search for what was the source of the plague. Once I moved a light into what was the old water tank and will be the bathroom I found the SOURCE, the remains of a Rat! Double Yuck! Tabby must have brought it in after killing it and left it there.
We have spent most of the rest of the week cleaning the house, including washing all the crockery etc in the kitchen. The result is that we have a clean house (and the cave of a water tank / bathroom) but nothing else much done, and I have been feeling very off mentally.

Ouchhhhhhhh!!!!!!

Yesterday as I was helping our friend Sheila cook Christmas dinner a wasp flew down and somehow got caught between my face and my glasses and as a consequence I got stung quite badly. This morning my eye has swollen up and hurts like mad.

Catching Up

The last few weeks have been quite, both me and Helen have been ill at one point or another. Despite this, things are progressing on the house at a slow pace, this is mainly due to the fact that we cannot buy any new materials until we have built up a bit more of a cash reserve. Over the summer the job at the schools ends and I don't get paid for July and August which makes life difficult for a couple of months, and last year I didn't have that many after school classed. How things are different this year, I now have at least 2 hours of English classes every afternoon except on Monday and weekends. These don't pay that well for individual classes but some of them are groups which means that the amount per hour can get quite interesting.
We have been able to do a little work on the house and we have built a set of steps going up from the terrace where the house is to the next level up which will make accessing and maintaining that terrace easier, as the existing access was a breeze block balanced half way up a slope which meant that getting any of the gardening tools such as the petrol strimmer up there could be interesting.



We have gotten most of the crops in ready for winter this year, winter being the wettest part of the year is the main growing season over here and the temperature very rarely gets below double figures, so you don't have to worry about frost. So far we have cabbage, cauliflower, leeks, carrots, swede, turnips out in the fields and soon potatoes and onions should be on their way once I have brought the seed potatoes.

Helen has just got back from El Hierro where she had been staying with our friend Norma. Norma made a mistake last week and managed to miss the only direct ferry from La Palma back to El Hierro, So she flew back on the Monday leaving her car behind and Helen drove her car over on the ferry the following Sunday and then Helen flew back this Tuesday.

Death and Taxes

Well the saying goes that there are only two things in life that are certain death and taxes. As I write this I am dying in bed with a bad head cold which has kept me off school for the last two days. And so on to the taxes. This morning we went down to the town hall to pay our annual taxes for the house, rubbish, water and car tax. Yes you don't get the bill sent to to all that happens is a not gets posted on a notice board in town and if you happen to notice it and read it is says that it is now time to go down and see them and pay up. We went there and paid up, House Tax: €20.43, Rubbish Collection: €38, Car tax: €51.72, Water € 14.41. OK we have to pay the water twice a year but as you can see the prices are no where as near as bad as they are in the UK, which is a good thing as we don't have the money at the moment.

Another month gone!

Och... its June and We have not blogged!
True we have had promptings from friends to get down and write something - anything... Its not as if nothing has happened but most of it is all small things. Well one large thing did happen, We got our money back from the local council, yes €600, in cash (we emptied the till). But as to the rest not much has been finished, its all little things; like the wall for the water tank, the rendering on the walls for the Dining room.
There are two main reasons for this, one being that we have had guests over for one week, the other is that we (well to be honest its me) just have not been feeling that much like doing much.
We did help to move one of our friends from Santa Cruz to Puntagorda, I would not say that it was a fun day but it was a good day.. She lived in one of the old water mills above Santa Cruz, and the only access was a donkey trail so it involved around 4 trips back and forth to the car of about 1Km each way but as there were 6 of us and not too much stuff it was not bad. The other end was much better as we could get the car a lot closer to the house (3 m)..
I have been feeling like I have lost my way lately, it may be that the house is talking a lot longer to complete. Part of it is also that we are trying to do to many things at once. At the moment we have the following part done; the dining room, the drains, the grape vine, the garden (veg patch), the solar electric and the bathroom roof (not to meanchon the bathroom its self) oh yes and the tiles in the entertainment room. Then there is the money situation, its running out.. So I think we need to just get some things finished... and have a bit of a brake.

Where, oh Where, DOES all the Crap Go?

This is a very important subject on our minds at the moment, OK it may sound crude or something,but it is REALLY important. Why I hear you ask. Well one of the major tasks this year is to convert the old water tank in to a new bathroom. We now have a roof on the tank and a opening into the house, the next job is to start the pluming, and one of the tasks, as part of that is to lay new drains. Now for you who live in the UK and most major towns this is not hard - find the nearest man hole and connect the new drains to that. Well it is not quite that simple here....
We in the country don't have main drains.. So what do we have? We have what is called a Poso Negro, the direct translation of that is "Black Well", and up to last week we did not know where it was and in what condition it was in. We had some idea that it was located close to the current bathroom, (which is a 1m x 2m concrete hut in the garden). We thought that it might be under about half a meter of soil that was dumped in front of the loo to bring the ground up to the level of the house. Well last week I started clearing a space behind the loo to hold the tank for gray water recycling. while doing so I notest that there appeared to be a concrete wall below the loo....
After some work with a hammer, there was a hole and behold we have the Poso Negro, and what is the poso negro? A large hole in the ground, about 1 meter square and 2 meters deep, (well to the serf ice of the water, I am not going to find out how deep that is!!!!), With the loo on top of it.
So now all I have to do is put in the new pipes and close up the hole and we have somewhere for the new loo to empty into.

Ouch That's gotta Hurt

As I am writing this Helen is in bed resting.

This is due to the fact that Wednesday morning while she was doing some tidying up in the garden, she was walking backwards with the wheelbarrow and thinking about other things, and didn't realize that there was a pile of rocks on the ground behind her.

So over she went, unfortunately behind her was a 1.5M drop to the terrace below, with more rocks and other rubbish down there. She managed to get up and back into the house where it appeared that nothing was obviously broken.

How ever when I got home the pain in her side midway under her arm was worrying me so we went to the health center in Barlovento where the doctor examined her and decided that she best go to the Hospital for and x-ray just to make sure she hadn't cracked a rib.

So off the the Hospital above Santa Cruz, and thankfully all here ribs were intact just badly bruised, so Helen has to rest and take it easy for a week or so.

A YES for the Roof and a Bad Back

YES we have finally got the permission for the roof on the water tank so now all we have to do is get the builder in, its going to cost €2000 just for the roof and to get the door cut in the wall but once that is done we can start work on converting it to a bathroom. The main problem will be running all the wast pipes. I have not found out where they have to end up yet! It's not like the UK where all you have to do is connect the pipes to the nearest main drain, Some ware near the old loo in the back garden is a very big home covered with concrete, and this is ware all the waste from the loo mysteriously disappears....!!!!
We have not been sitting around ether this week, the steps are progressing onward and upward, we only have one small step to do, it seems that all we are doing at the moment is poring concrete, and this is where the bad back comes in. Thursday It seems that while we were working on the steps Theresa pulled a mussel in her back and she has been in a lot of pain, but still manage to help me today to get another step cast.
I am hopping to get the steps finished next week, and then its just the 10m of ramp that needs doing, but a lot of that is just one large amount of concrete.
We also manage to get the first of the vines pruned, only the ones at the front of the house but as these are in the way of the work on the new roof, I felt that these needed to be done.

Slow going

I have been ill recently with a terrible head cold. But on the positive side some things have been happening. Work on the front room has been going on slowly but the walls are almost complete and a lot of the wood work has been stripped. The windows have been re glazed.

We have also now exchanged our UK driving licenses for Spanish ones. After the normal chase around to get all the required bits of paperwork. We just left it up to the hestoria to got to the traffic office and do the paperwork. So we now have two little pieces of card that will do as driving licenses until our proper ones arrive.

We have also paid all our bills at the town hall. Only on slight snag was the fact that we should have gone to the town hall and changed them when we arrived. But this wasn't a major problem. Our town hall bills were as follows Rubbish Collection 38€, Water , Council Tax 16€