Sheep Guarding Llama

Got up this morning to yet another day of the village completely encased in fog.  Unlike yesterday, where the sun burned most of the fog off by mid-afternoon, today it stayed cold and foggy all day.  Very cold.

Dominica had been working on laundry but had to put a stop to it yesterday because it was too cold and damp.  She gave it a try today, though, as we just need some laundry done.

Dominica and I tried to use the terraza this morning but after ten minutes I found that it was so bright, from the sun lighting up the fog from every direction, that I was completely unable to use my laptop at all up there.  I was completely blind from the brightness and was forced to abandon the attempt. A bright sunny day with zero clouds is easier to overcome than that.

This evening we were cold enough that we had to close up the house and Dominica and I attempted to make a fire in the stove in the kitchen.  That went mildly badly.  We had a big log and some kindling but never, even after half an hour of trying, got it to really get going.  It kind of smoldered, but that was all.  Very little heat.

Dominica went to bed pretty early tonight. I stayed up working till around one.

Tonight when I took the garbage out I managed to stumble on a guy taking a whiz on the side of the church, right on the main street well within sight of every person awake in town as he was right across the street from the main bar.  Very bizarre.

Before I went to bed I checked on the fire and it had, after about four hours of doing pretty much nothing, actually turned into a real, but still small, fire.  Sure, now that I am leaving the kitchen and don’t really care anymore since not one tiny BTU of that heat will make it down into our basement cave.  Hopefully it will make the guest room where the girls are sleeping a little bit better.

Tomorrow we leave for Sevilla for a “vacation” weekend seeing more of this lovely country.  We will be staying there for two nights and returning to the Alpujarras on Monday afternoon.

It started raining, the first real rain for us since the day that we arrived and it was raining so much, before I went to bed last night and it rained all night.  This morning I found the outside world very wet and Cáñar completely encased in the clouds.  No sun at all this morning.

It is much colder and I used the kitchen table to work today instead of going outside.  It is too cold and wet to think about doing that.

A very quiet day for us today.  We did nothing special.  I had a lot of work to do so was a the table all day.

It is Thursday and work ended up being very slow this evening.  There was a lot going on and many people were out sick so no one had any time to work with me which left me kind of stuck for much of the day.  So I did not stay up nearly as late tonight and was able to get to bed at a more reasonable time, around one or two in the morning.

Tomorrow is Friday.  We are staying home tomorrow but will be traveling first thing Saturday morning to go to Sevilla.

Today has to be a really “normal” day.  We have settled in.  We are pretty much used to everything.  We are really just not starting to get the hang of being a family in Spain and what that means and how we deal with it.  The kids are just treating every day as normal now.  It is working well.

Did four lessons on DuoLingo today.

Up at nine thirty today.  Got up and showered, getting used to this Spanish style shower at this point.  The kids were up before ten thirty.

I feel like our family has hit our stride, as of today, here in Spain.  Today was productive, real productive like it should be.  So far a lot of our time has been spent dealing with the whole concept of being in Europe and in Spain and kind of freaking out about the whole thing.  I was able to effectively work all day today.  Liesl did great in school today.   Dominica was productive today.  Luciana was happy and entertaining herself learning about craft projects all day.  We are starting to live a normal live here in Spain now.  This was an important breakthrough for all of us.

Our adventure this morning was that Dominica was doing the laundry upstairs and had opened the umbrella on the terraza.  It was a pretty windy morning and when she went up there at one point she discovered that the umbrella was gone!  She called for me in a panic and I ran up to the terraza.  Before I got there she had located the umbrella – over on the neighbour’s roof!  It was caught in the laundry wires there, for the moment, but was struggling to break free and was going to be flying over the village in no time.  Any second it could be on its way someplace truly inaccessible.

Thankfully the neighbour’s whose roof it was on is connected to us and I had a means of getting there by climbing up on our terraza’s railing, three stories above the stone-surfaced plaza and marble steps, and climbing onto the tiles of their roof edge and onto their roof which is another half story above our terraza.  I made it to the umbrella just before it took off and had to fight it to stay under control.

That made for a little bit of an exciting morning.  Later on, Dominica fell down the terraza stairs, but only right at the bottom and managed to only hurt her left arm a little.  She is fine.

I had a very productive morning getting a lot of work done.  Liesl had a really good school day.  She was happy and cooperative and flew through her work doing really well at it.  At one point she said, after doing a lot of reading, that she wanted to be done with that and wanted to do math.  So cute.

I got a new article submitted today.  Hopefully that will be published tomorrow.

The day suddenly turned into evening.  Had a relatively busy evening at work.  I wasn’t tired and ended up working until three thirty in the morning and then took another three hours before I felt like going to bed.  So nearly six thirty in the morning before going to bed

I was up early this morning.  It was a crisp, cold morning.  I went up to the terraza and worked for a while getting posting updated and getting some uploading going.  I had enough time to basically get caught up before the power went off around nine.  We’ve had this happen a few times and it only lasted a minute or two so I really thought nothing of it particularly.  But the power did not come back.

I decided that I would take the time to go for a walk since there was not that much else to do with there being no power and half of the house asleep.  Liesl wanted to come with me so ran and got dressed very quickly.  It is pretty cold out today so she needed warmish clothes and a jacket.

While Liesl was getting ready, Luciana woke up and wanted to come with us.  She did not want to be left behind.  So we had to wait for her to get ready too.  That took a bit longer, but eventually she was ready and we were able to set out.  The power was still not on and Dominica was still in bed.

The girls and I went on a walk around town, explored several places that they have not been yet.  I took them down to see some of the fountains and a little waterfall on the east side of town.  They were really up for walking so we walked the GR7 all the way east of town until it came to the observation deck there and the newly poured section ended.  There were new work done since the last time that I was there.

It was a couple of miles walking with the girls.  Maybe more, easily three miles I guess.  My mobile phone was dead so I was not able to take it with me to use as a pedometer like I normally do.  It was a good walk, though, and it wore the girls out.  Well it wore out Luciana.  Liesl was still going pretty strong even at the end.  They are both getting to be pretty good walkers.

We went back to the house when we heard the church bells ringing again, which they stopped doing while the power was out.  That is a very handy way to let the entire town and surrounding countryside know that the power has returned.

We got back home and I did a little work and Dominica got the girls ready to head down into Órgiva to do some shopping.  It was after noon when we got back from the walk and after one before we were able to head to the car and drive down into town.

We had problems finding parking, it was busy in town.  We were running late enough that it was actually becoming siesta.  We did not think that the supermercado would close for siesta, but even they do (the Dia, that is.)  We made it just in time to run in with the barrier half down and shop very, very quickly.  It was a very rushed shopping excursion, though, we got the necessities but nothing more.

We had planned on eating in town since we were down here and have not had any time to explore Órgiva on previous trips down the mountain.  We parked on “Main” street and walked the little row of restaurants there to see what looked good.  They were all nearly empty.

We looked around a bit and chose the Cafe Nemesis II.  A very odd name, to be sure.  It was a nice little place, very friendly people.  The girls got pizza and Dominica and I got a lasagna sort of thing.

After lunch we decided to try a pastry place on the other side of the street.  We sat outside, got some treats and coffee and relaxed for a bit.  I took a walk to see when things would open and the shops all said that they would open back up at five.  It was getting late enough that we got more coffee and decided to just wait it out.  The girls were freezing, even with jackets on, but were able to tough it out.

Once five o’clock rolled around we went to the Alpujarras Market which is the more European (rather than Spanish) supermercado.  They have a lot of British foods, for example, here.  We shopped there for a little bit.  The big find there was a power strip which is going to come in very handy.  I found it and showed it to Dominica and she was like “perfect!”

We came out of the market and checked the electrical store that we were told was the only place in the region that would sell a razor (I need one pretty badly) but they did not open when the sign said that they would.  It was about twenty minutes after five.  So we gave up on them.

We walked back to the car and paid the parking box (it’s a trust system) and drove out of town.  As we drove past the electrical store, it was open!  Argh.  I turned around and drove back.  I had to do some awkward street parking and run into the store.

It turns out that the store had nothing like a razor whatsoever.  The other thing that I was told that I would definitely be able to get there are power adapters.  No, not at all.  Half the store was, indeed, dedicated to selling power adapters.  But they were all, every single one of them, UK to European, Italian to European or Swiss to European but not a single one was US / North American to anything.  The shop owner, who did not speak a word of English, had never heard of a US power adapter and insisted that I try to use a UK one instead.  So that was a complete bust.  No way to buy anything remotely useful that is powered in Órgiva.  How a region with a population of over fifty thousand people can’t have a single town with a single store that sells anything is pretty amazing.  Where does everyone buy the most basic things around here?

I had to turn around on a busy intersection to leave town.  That was amazing “Spanish” driving if I do say so.  Dominica is regularly impressed with my driving here.

We got back home at six.  It was chilly and overcast so I worked from the kitchen table rather than the terraza.  Today is the coldest day of the week, we are told, and it is quite cold.

Liesl had a hard time getting school done today but she did it.  Our evening was pretty slow.  I ended up working until three in the morning.  Got quite a bit done, though, so that was good.

Just a nice, quiet day in our home village today.  I was the first one up, long before anyone else.  I opened up the house and found that we were up in the clouds this morning.  No sun, no anything, just a dense fog obscuring even much of town itself.  It was very nice but only forty eight degrees which was pretty chilly.

I set myself up on the terraza with my fleece on and got started trying to get SGL updated and our weekend pictures uploaded to Flickr.

I worked for an hour or two before everyone started waking up.  As the sun came up it slowly burned off the clouds and by afternoon it was bright but still pretty hazy.

At ten this morning our tech from the ISP in Granada arrived to install our new Internet connection!  This is very exciting.  We ended up having to have a dish antenna installed on the side of the house and our connection changed from connecting to the little tower at the top of town to instead connecting to the big, giant tower on top of the mountain to the south.  Our connection was given a four fold boost in download speed and a twenty times increase in upload speed!  What a difference this is going to make.

I did a lot of writing this morning.  For lunch we just cooked up some pizza for Liesl and fish fingers for Luciana.  Of course they never want the same thing at the same time.  Liesl ended up having three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches throughout the day today too.  That girl was hungry!

It was pretty cold all day.  By the evening we came inside and even closed up the house because it was so cold.  I hate having to do that.  I like having the continuous fresh air.

The girls put on their new Flamenco dresses and modeled them tonight.  I got pictures posted right up to Flickr and Facebook.  They are so cute.  Those pictures are the highlight of the day.

Most everyone was into bed around eleven.  I had a ton of work to do and was mostly being productive so ended up staying awake until nearly three in the morning getting work done for the office.  It was a really long, exhausting day for me.