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.

A White Christmas

Well just in case you miss it I can confirm that here in the Canaries we do have a white christmas Ok it's only above 2,500 meters but as you can see there is snow on the mountain top. All we got at our level of 500m was a lot of rain and a thunder storm which took the power out for a short while. Now this morning the sun is out as the sky is blue with just a few clouds out to sea.Snow at the Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory on Xmas Day from the webcam on the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT)

The view from the window here with clouds out to sea

Merry Xmas

Merry Christmas

Just a quick note to all our Blog readers

MERRY CHRISTMAS
AND
A HAPPY NEW YEAR

The Observatory Dome is Built

OK so it's only 20cm diameter and made of cardboard. But it is a prototype. me and Helen made this dome yesterday afternoon to prove if the concept of making a geodesic dome from plywood sheets would work. As you can see the final result looks dome like, it is fairly ridged apart from round the lower edge but then it is held together with scotch tape. The full sized one will also have a solid band around the bottom to support it and keep it round.
If you look on the inside you can see that it is made up of a number of triangles joined together in either hexagons or pentagons the gaps between each will not be as noticeable on the final thing as the measurements will be easier to get exact due to the fact that we will be dealing with something 10 times bigger.

The next thing to do on the model is to coat it with some papermache and then once dried I will then be able to cut the hole in it for the dome opening. In the full scale version it will have a coat of fibreglass for waterproofing. Once I have used this scale model to sort out some of the idea's I would like to be able to make a start on planning to build the observatory next year.

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.

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.

Clutching at straws

Oh Blog posts are like buses wait a while then 3 come along at once. Just a quick note to say that Bertha was in the workshop again this week having a new clutch cable fitted. For the last few weeks it had been getting slowly worse, every time you put your foot on the clutch the pedal would go to the floor and nothing else would happen, sometimes you could flip it up and it would work again but not always. It is so nice now that it is working again

We Plow the Fields

But we haven´t got round to scattering yet.

Yes it´s that time of year again when the rotavator gets it´s annual outing. During the summer not a lot grows here, in fact there is very little or no rain from April through to September. But once September arrives down comes the rain and everything starts to grow. So Finally to day we got round to digging over two of the plots on our land. We got the first one done before the rotavator started to play-up so off up to the workshop under the house where we took the thing apart and managed to get it going again to finish the other patch. We should be planting some cabbages, turnips, carrots & swedes this weekend.

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.

Trip to Tenerife

Living on a small island can have it's problems. One of them is that some times you can develop what they call island fever. The only cure is to GET OFF THE ISLAND!!!!

So that is what we did. We went to Tenerife for a long weekend. We caught the ferry a 4am on Thursday morning, this meant being at the port at 3am to check-in, leaving our house at 2am to drive to the port, which entailed getting up at 1am. So by the time we got on the ferry we had been up for 4 hours and we ready to have a kip. The journey over wasn't to bad, just find a seat a curl up and try to sleep. the ferry takes 4hours to get to Los Chritanos in Tenerife with a 1/2hour stopover in La Gomera to load and unload passengers.

Once we got to Tenerife, a quick coffee and a sandwich and we were on the road to the north of the island and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where we hit the shops. Why come all this way to go shopping ,well with Tenerife being a bigger island and with a larger British population there are more shopping opertunities than in La Palma, there is even a small Marks & Spencers.

After spending the morning shopping it was off to Ikea and then to our hotel in Puerto de La Cruz. We were staying in the Hotel Acuario, which is on the hill just up from the center of Puerto de la Cruz. The Room was small but clean and functional. Where the hotel did excel was in the food, for a 2 star hotel with a buffet breakfast and evening meal, the food was always, hot and not dried out to much. On the Saturday night they had a selection of typical canarian foods and the Rabbit in salmoreno ( Red pepper and onion sauce) was fantastic.

Coming home was interesting we got to the port in good time so that we were more or less the first in the queue for the ferry. So we went into the terminal to get a coffee and sit an watch the ships come in an out. I was about quarter of an hour before our ferry and it hadn't arrived so we wandered down to the car, we were just about to get into the car when there was a garbled announcement on the tannoy and everybody came running out and getting into the cars and driving off, I at first though that people had queued in the wrong place (there are two different ferry companies), but it turned out that our ferry had broken down and that we were all being loaded on the rival ferry which was being diverted to La Palma. So we finally got on having had on of the guys who was directing traffic winding me up by looking at my ticket and saying "oh no you've got to go back over there" before smiling, just as I was about to get uppity, and point for us to go down the priority boarding lane. As it happened this ferry is faster that the one we should have got so we ended up home an hour earlier than we should have been.

Cooking On Gas

Well finally after 18 Months I have a cooker..

We have been running on to small camping stoves since we arrived, now this is OK for you basic Meat and two Veg as I can do the meat on the barbecue and the veg on the camping stoves, But if you want a sauce to go on the meat well that's a different matter. So now having four reasonable burners available is great. OK they run off a gas cylinder that is under the worktop for now (it will go outside once we have built the proper kitchen). The funny thing is the first time I decided to use the cooker properly it ran out of gas so I had to go back to using the camping cookers again!!!!! But I was able to go and exchange the gas bottle at our local village store (which isn't officially open at present as the is a problem with the license), I was a little worried about doing this as I hadn't had to handle this before, the was the system works out here is that you have to jump through all sorts of hoops in order to get your first gas bottle, then you can just exchange the empty for a full one after that. I was worried that I would not be able to get a new bottle, but as it happened there was absolutely no problem in exchanging it. So I now have a full bottle and it will be interesting to see how long it will last, as we only use for cooking.

Everything including the kitchen sink

After 18 months we finally have a kitchen sink! Yes one with taps both in hot and cold and a drain connection.
This may not sound much but our old sink had only a cold tap and if you emptied things down the drain you would end up with wet feet. As well a sink we also have a set of worktops which doubles the amount of space available for cooking. It was very hard to cook in our old kitchen as the work surfaces were about the size of a postage stamp. The outflow from the sink goes directly into the grey water tank which is behind the bathroom in the garden. Along with a plumbed-in sink the washing machine has also been fitted. If you remember before I had to drag the machine across the floor drag a pipe in from the garden and then I could do nothing else while the washing was running. Now it is so easy to just trow the washing in to the machine and forget about it.
At the moment this kitchen has been built temporarily in what will be the dining hall once all the work is finished. We have built a wall of plastic sheeting between the dining hall and the old kitchen so that we can knock the old kitchen to pieces with out filling the rest of the house fully of dust and muck.
Hopefully early next week we should be able to fit the gas hob, at the moment we have been coping with two little camping stoves. So finally having 4 full gas burners fed from a big gas bottle (No mains gas here) should make things a lot easier. Helen has just been taking it easy for a few days, as she pushed quite hard to get the kitchen done and just needs a little rest.

A Week on the Tiles

Although the work on the house is progressing, I will not say that things have been going that well, I seem to be getting more and more uptight and grumpy, a day really goes by without me snapping at Theresa. After a rather tiring week of work finishing with a very late night grouting, the dining room was ready to become a temporary kitchen. Then a day of intense cleaning, to rid the house of construction dust and another day to move the fridge and washing machine in to the newly finished room and put up a false wall to stop dust from the work on the new kitchen and things are looking good.While doing the tiling I thought it would be good to fix the few tiles that had fallen off of the wall in the loo/shower, there were only about 8 or 10 tiles to put up and we had some spare tiles in the under croft (original 1950 or 60 tiles in a wooden crate). So I started removing the old tile cement so that the replacement ones would be at the same level that current ones are. removing the old cement was not to hard as it was quite loose but then the old tiles were not that well attached to the wall ether and stared fulling off.... in the end I hand to put around 30 tiles back on instead of around 10.
The other job that we have managed to get done is to finally have a proper path and steps to the loo so after a year we can now go to the loo without risking a broken ankle.

Inside Plumbing

Finlay Hot water in the house - pity there is no tap yet...
The first stage of the pluming for the temp kitchen is done and so is all the painting and the varnishing of the doors (still have to put the bedroom door on its hinges).
OK the pluming is not much only a few meters of pipe (cast iron, old but it works) And we can plumb the washing machine in.. no more moving it around and connecting it to a long pipe that dumps water in the garden..I will just be glad when we can get rid of the lopsided hot water tank - but that will not be for a while.
The only thing left to do now is put the tiles down and then the dinning room is ready to become a temporary kitchen. How long it will be before the real kitchen is ready will depend on when we get some more money in as our building reserves are now just about run out, but we will have what we need to get on with things and see if we can make a living out here. That is going to be the real test is it not... Mind you we still will move slowly on some things, like knocking the old kitchen about, removing the concrete kitchen units and fire place (shame about that but its is just too big and low).
As to how we are feeling, well things are OK but we are a bit touchy at the moment, I have so many things I want to do and as usual Just cannot seem to get any of them done. As I have never lived in another country for more than two years I am a little worried that it will be the same this time. We will just have to wait and see.

1st Helresa Star Party

A while ago a friend of ours moved from the capital of the island Santa Cruz over to the other side of the island, they moved into a small place just outside puntagorda. She had moved there to escape the noise, she is a singer/songwriter and it was hard for her to record in town.
Having moved over there she commented on how many stars there were in the sky and suggested that we bring over the telescope one time so she could take a look.

So last weekend that is what we did, just like the old days we packed our tent and telescopes into the car and headed off. We got there mid afternoon, having had to make a short detour after getting so far along the road only to be told that there was a rally on and we would have to turn back.

Why the F*** didn't it say that at the junction you ..........

I thought to my self as I turned round.

So as I was saying once we got there we started to put up the tent in the blistering heat. Once the tent was up it was time to sit down a have a cup of tea. Our other friend Sheila was there with her son to enjoy the stars. We had a barbecue tea and settled down to watch the clouds roll in. So there we sat outside drinking red wine and chatting Until at last the clouds parted.

Telescope and Palm Trees at Dusk

There was just enough time for me to swear at my computer as I tried to get it to talk to the telescope, as Helen went old school and manually pointed my old trusty ETX90 at Jupiter. Before the clouds rolled in again and we packed up for the night.

The second night was a little better but not by much, The cloud rolled in again but we did manage to get a good look at the Moon and Saturn before we clouded out again.

The Moon, Saturn, Mars and Regulus

Next year at our house with the scope mounted in it permanent location I hope. More on that in the next week or so I hope

21st Centry arives in Franceses

After a year of trying to cope with an Internet connection that ran at 56 Kb (just like the old dial-up modems), we now have 3 G and at last have something that is usable..
There was no announcement I just logged on one morning and there it was. Now all we have to do is sort out how to connect several systems through one connection that gets re-created each time you connect, so you have to share it a new each time.... We may look at another company if we can not get something that works better.. But it is OK for now.

Look Drains!

Work moves forward... On the outside the gray water tank is now in its correct place and yes it has pipes to the house and to the fields (but not the final irrigation connections). We have a wast water connection to the tank now in the dinning room for the temporary kitchen sink, also the main drain connection to the pozo negro has moved closer to the house.
the old location of the gray water tank is now being converted to a small location for potting seeds etc, and concrete paths are being added from the house to the outside loo etc. we hope to have a small formal herb garden created in front of the dining room with a patio, once all the drains are in.
On the Inside work on the dinning room moves slowly forward, most of the wood work has been striped and the first coat of vanish should be on the front doors today (once I have done this blog and got dressed) I would like to get all the wood work done this week so that the painting can be done over the weekend. As the room will be used as a kitchen for a while we are only going to use white paint for now but that should seal the walls. It will have to be redone once the final kitchen is done. To finish all the wood work I need to make some trimming around the door into our bedroom and will try to use some of the old planking that was on the water tank roof.
As to the rest of the house, money is running low so things may take a bit longer than planed, we plan to do only a few things over the summer as we have to work on the web site etc and anything else that may get money in.
We are fighting the worries that all this is going to come tumbling down due to no money coming in, The teaching job that Theresa has ends for the summer this week, we hope that it will start again in September (we are as sure as anything in the future that it will) but we need a bit more coming in to be able to continue the work on the house and to be able to see the family etc.

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.