We did not figure out until this evening that this past weekend was the switch to daylight savings time in most of Europe. So we moved from UTC+1 to UTC+2 which surprised us and today everything was off. I didn’t realize that time had switched until I went to join my afternoon conference call and it was an hour away still. Very confusing.
We had big plans for today but Dominica had insomnia last night and we did not end up getting to bed until rather late so we gave up on the idea of doing anything at all and just called it a quiet day at home. It is sometimes difficult for us to just relax while here, we are in Spain, after all. It feels like we are on vacation and we need to go out and do things. Go somewhere, see something, make use of the time. But obviously we can’t be doing that all of the time. We need to settle into a life here. This is our day to day life, not a vacation. We have to get over the feeling that we always need to be doing something and be content to just sit at home, work, do school or whatever and go to bed.
One thing that is very handy is that we have absolutely no desire to watch television or anything like that. It is so hard to do that that there is effectively no chance of us falling into that pattern. We have nothing to watch and no easy way to watch it. So that is very healthy for us. I am glad for that.
Our landlords told us today that they decided to upgrade the Internet access here since we were having so many problems. So the ISP is supposed to be coming out sometime this week in order to upgrade the physical equipment here at the house so that we can move up to better speeds. We have WiMAX coming to the house now but they need to put in a better antenna for the faster speeds so a technician needs to come out. We are very hopeful that that will fix a lot of our problems. Our connection is so rough now. We are having a terrible time getting things uploaded and it is hard for the kids to watch YouTube or do anything. It makes working very hard.
The girls pretty much entertained themselves all day. I guess that they needed a down day too. Dominica spent most of the day reading. I camped out on the terraza and was basically there all day.
For lunch I cooked a pizza in the oven for the girls. For dinner Dominica made bocadillos con patatas, cebollas and pimientos. That was really good. Liesl and I had gone to the market to get fresh pan (bread) for dinner and new clothespins so that we could do more laundry.
We got the girls into bed in the guest bedroom around a good time. Luciana put herself to bed at nine thirty. Liesl we put to bed at ten thirty. They are enjoying the guest bedroom much more, I think, because they can easily snuggle and watch YouTube together.
Quiet night for us. Dominica sat in the kitchen reading. I sat on the terraza working until it was quite dark. I love the lights of the little villages around the valley. It is very nice being up here late at night.
Surprisingly, town never gets quiet. I can hear people yelling and talking and playing around town even as it approaches midnight.