A New Web Site

We have just finished and released the website for the following holiday cottage

Casa del Riachuelo

Holiday cottage Casa del Riachuelo, Garafia, La Palma, Canary Islands, a holiday cottage in the north of the islands ideal as a centre for relaxing holidays

Description

In the region of Garafia the canarian people make there living working the land, rearing goats, or tending vines to produce the award winning local wines.
Nestled between the vineyards and the forest you will find the holiday cottage Casa del Riachuelo, named after the ancient spring which used to flow nearby.
Casa del Riachuelo is a single storey self-catering cottage completely restored in the traditional Canarian style.

Email: riachuelo@casaslapalma.es

Website: http://riachuelo.casaslapalma.es

Oh No!!

Well it looks like the brown stuff has hit the fan, there were a couple of reports in the local papers this week about the situation between the education department and social security, and following this everything is stopped, there will be no “convocatoria” until the situation resolved, which could take years. We are now at rock bottom, we cannot at present see any way to move forward, the private teaching will give us a little bit of money to help out but not enough to cover everything.

Oh FFS

It now seems that there has been a delay in the “convocatoria” and we not will not be going back until October at the earliest. We have had no news until this, both me and Helen are going spare with worry over this if we don’t get back to work we have calculated we can just about survive until Christmas. This is causing big problems, as now both me and Helen are paralysed with worry about what is going to happen to us. Neither of us want to go back to the UK, we would have to leave everything we have here, and end up with nothing.

Oh Bugger it..

I have received a letter stating that due to the on-going situation between the education department and social security we will not be going back to work at the start of September as was hoped but we will have to wait for a “convocatoria” which is an official announcement  of positions available and we will have to apply for our jobs back again…

What does this mean, well normally we have to cope without money coming in for the months of July and August, but we are going to have to cope for another month without any money coming in. Luckily Helen’s son had given us some money to do the kitchen but we are going to have to spend this money to tie us over. This is a very worrying development as we do rely on the money from the school work to cover the basic day to day expenses, and without this we can’t keep going indefinitely without another form of income.

Bad News

I received a letter a few days back from Social Security which seems to say that I have been registered as an employee of the Consejria de Educacíon. I seems they have done an audit and consider that use being hired as self employed was illegal and we should be treated as employees. We shall have to see what impact this has when I get back to work in September.

Working in the forest.

With Theresa starting the private classes this year I am again helping out with the young ones. This means that I have to come in with her to school and amuse my self until we go to the classes in San Pedro (near Santa Cruz), as it happens to be  on the day that she has a full morning at School and two private classes in Los Sauces. I have to find something to do for around 5 hours in the morning and 2 in the afternoon (we meet for lunch). I could go home, but that uses petrol so at the moment I read, walk and do other things.

So here I am at 10:20 am sitting in the car with the Laptop powered from a 12v power pack and Inverter catching up with the Blog. Ok no internet here (no mobile coverage ether) but it is a nice environment working in the trees in Los Tilos,  Just took the picture below so you can see the spot.

One day I may try to take the laptop up to the picnic area, really up in the trees and work up there for an hour or so. (I just have not got the courage up yet, and its raining on and off at the moment.)

Spring has sprung

After what has seen like an eternity and like some one just flicked a switch spring has finally arrived in La Palma. Overnight we went from it being cold and rainy to clear blue skies and sunshine. OK at the moment we have calima which is when we get the wind from off the sahara along with a lot of dust. This generates very warm dry conditions and you also get a misty effect like a mild fog.
But with the warm weather arriving we can finally start to get some things done on the outside of the house. One of the major jobs we have been doing is the annual trimming of last years growth off the vines. And as part of this job this year we have been re arranging many of the poles which support the vines top bring them a little bit lower. This has also opened up the area around the old pig pen to the sky which is kind of good considering that I will hopefully be turning it in to an observatory later in the year.

The future home of the telescope the old pig pen!!!!!

The other thing at this time of year is to asses the damage that has been done over the winter.

What last year was just a small collapse!!!

Believe it or not this was just a small area of wall which had collapsed last year however the winter rains have made it a lot worse. so this will need to be cleared so that we can pour concrete in the base and start rebuilding the wall.
The other thing that has started recently is work on the walls outside which eventually become part of the outside kitchen but at the moment they are just mainly there to hold the earth in place and enable us to have a more usable space outside.

The first of the support columns for the wall goes in (and Tabby investigates)

The wall has now been raised to the same hight all along the house terrace

One of the problems we have is that now we only have the small car it is difficult for us to get some of the materials that we need but this week luckily help was at hand from our friends Anne and David from La Casita who kindly offered to pick us up some building supplies while they were out.

One nice pile of reinforcing bars thanks to Anne and David

All Hail Kiki - May She Run For ever

Yes a week and a half ago we finally decided that we could not afford to keep hiring a car and poor old Bertha was not going to get repaired soon, so we took all our reserves out of the Bank and now have a new SMALL car... And here is Kiki, a 1.1 C2. OK She is not good for hauling Building materials, but she does get us from A to B quite cheaply. As the main problem was getting Theresa to all the classes she has to teach she solves that problem quite nicely.
As to the Local Council (Cabildo) paying for the Repairs to Bertha well at the moment that is with the insurance Lawyers and it may take a few months or several years to get that sorted out. In the end I expect that Bertha will soon be meeting a rather nasty end with the local car crusher....
I will not say that things are going well here at the moment, this episode with the car and having to buy a new one has not had a good effect on me or Theresa, we are both feeling down and rather worried about money. Also as we now don't have a van that can carry bloques (breeze blocks), multiple bags of cement or plastic pipe we are going to have to change the way we do things on the house, like having to get things delivered in bulk or hiring a van to go and get things which will cost more...
But we have managed to get some things done, the annual time for pruning the vines is here and is progressing, also I can not access a part of one of the walls that needs finishing as the plants have been pruned down. But apart for that things are going slowly.

Review 2008

Well as the end of the year draws near it's time to review what progress has been made over the last year, and also what has gone wrong.

In January we finally finished decorating the front room which we are calling the library, and the permission came through from the town hall to enable us to put a roof on the old water tank which we are going to turn into a bathroom. Then in February we got the builders in and in 3 days they had the roof on and finished. Meanwhile we got started on the dining room inside which up to this point has just been bear concrete walls. On the outside the mild weather meant that we could finish the steps and ramp down the side of the house. March saw a trip back to the UK to see Helen's grandson Theo. This trip was not as relaxing as I would have liked due to flight delays and missing bags. Also in March we had a scare as Helen fell from one terrace to another requiring a trip to the hospital for an x-ray on suspected broken ribs. Luckily she was OK just badly bruised. April saw work on the area for the water tanks as part of the preparation for the permanent drainage systems.

In May the doorway was converted into a window and the plastering of the walls and ceiling in the dinning room continued. Then in June the first part of the drains went in and the dinning room got painted and woodwork varnished. Then in July the miracle happened we finally got indoor plumbing and the tiles went down in the dining room. Which soon lead in August after a trip to Tenerife to the temporary kitchen going in and finally after 18 months I had a gas cooker with more than 2 rings and sink where the water went somewhere when you pulled the plug out this now means that work can start on the old kitchen which needs the old work tops demolishing and the drainage putting in and also the drainage for the bathroom needs to run through there. Since then it has been crazy I have gone from last year of only having 1 hour of teaching outside of school to having to turn people away as I don't have any more time to give classes. It has not been helped by having a bad head cold which refuses to go away, November and December have also been very cold and damp which has not made things easier. But at the moment the sun is shining.

Recently we have been demolishing the old kitchen. which included a large concrete chimney over what was the old fireplace. Hitting this with a large hammer enabled Helen to get rid of some of her frustrations. All that is left is a very thick concrete beam which goes form wall to wall and will have to be gut out with the angle grinder.

The only bad thing of real note is the continued problems with the car. We have had to have the clutch cable replaced, the ventilation fan is on the blink and I have just been given a price of nearly 400€ to replace it. Without the fan you get a smell of petrol into the car so it has to be replaced soon. The car still has wear on the front tires due to the corners here. And to top it all she still has the intermittent problem where she over revs at idle and despite us cleaning everything it is still happening so I will have to take the car into the workshop early next year and see if they can sort it out.

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.

A disappointment

Well some weeks ago I hinted that something might be going on. Well it isn´t. So what was going on I hear you ask? Well about a month ago I had a job interview over in Tenerife for one of the Telescopes up the mountain here. On Wednesday I finally after a month of waiting I got any email telling me that I didn´t get the job. But I still have the teaching and this year I do have a number of private classes which helps to bring in some money

Back to School

After a few quite weeks, I have gone back to work at the school.

It's the second week of school and we have only just started the English classes. Things are chaotic as we don't have a proper timetable yet, this is very typical for September. Working at the school is OK but I do find it very tiring, I do have something else going on but I am going to keep quite for now until I know for certain.

On the home front things have been at a standstill as we don't have a lot of money to do things. We have built a small area to work on plants and seeds before they are planted out.

Work in Progress

Now that we have the cement mixer set up in an easier position. We have been able to get a lot of jobs done around the house, the two main ones are the position for the water tanks behind the old toilet block which also includes the pipe work for the connection of the new bathroom toilet into the existing sewerage system. This has meant digging out an area and building a block wall to hold back the earth from the top level outside the house.



Also we have been working on putting the roof on the roof. What I mean by that is that on the roof we have a small block built cupboard which will house all the equipment for the solar panels. This week we added the top to this, and once the cement has set we will top this off with some traditional Spanish tiles.

The "Bloody Stupid" Jonhson Sand Delivery System

Well, actually I have decided it can't be called the "Bloody Stupid" Johnson Sand Delivery system as it does in fact work. For those of you who are wondering "Bloody Stupid" Johnson is a character from the disc world novels by Terry Pratchett. The character was an inventor who would make wonderful inventions only they would always have some little quirk which made them next to useless. For example he made a sorting machine for the post office which had a wheel in which PI was exactly 3 and hence would distort space time and sort letters before they had even been written.

But lets get back to the sand delivery system. We have rigged up a system using a piece of large plastic tubbing, some corrugated iron, rope and some wire, and water piping that allows us to shovel sand and gravel in at the top and at the bottom is the cement mixer ready and waiting to receive it's load. With this set up it means that we no longer have to shift large buckets or wheelbarrows full of gravel down every time we want to mix concrete.

The cement mixer in operation to load all you have to do is turn the drum to face the other direction and pour gravel in from the top.

First Days at School and the Paperwork Trail

This Wednesday saw my first day working at the school in Los Sauces. After 6 Months of not working having to get up in the mornings came as a great shock to the system. The job isn't that bad all I have to do is basically talk English to the kids. It is still early days yet but based on the evidence so far I think that I am going to enjoy things there as the kids are really nice and fun to work with.

Of course with me starting work comes a whole raft of extra paper work. As I am effectively self employed I have to register for tax and Social Security. So we started this morning at that Hacienda (Tax Office) and having paid for the appropriate form a filled in the basics we went up to the appropriate desk and to my surprise the guy took the form and filled in the rest for us, stamped the forms and that was it. Next on to the Social Security, took our number, waited, our number was called, got to the desk, two seconds later were out again to get photocopies of the paperwork from the tax office. The nearest place was in town (the Hacienda is down by the port). So a walk into town and back later. We are in the queue again for the Social Security and after a few minutes we are being seen and lo and behold we have sorted out my Social Security. Then in order to get Helen added to it as my dependent we have to go to the office at the far end of town, so off we go expecting when we get there to be told that we will need a translation of the civil partnership certificate, but we get there and everything is fine and Helen gets her health cover to. So when we were expecting this paperwork to take ages and that we would have to run around for obscure bits of paper, the whole lot was done in one morning, and by Spanish standards that's a miracle.

At Home things are going Very well in fact we have now moved the computer and desk back into the entertainment room and all connected in, We also have the surround sound system wired in with the speakers mounted on the wall brackets.