I have a feeling...

...that something is going on right under my nose, but I can't quite pin it down. I have found a couple of empty beer cans in the garden, and part of a Jaffa cake box pushed into a stack of empty flowerpots by the woodpile. Now Ruby-Lou has found herself a new pet; a beautiful bronze pine beetle, and the only way she could have caught one is by waiting for it to chew its way out of a log....and that means she must have been hanging around the woodpile. She isn't responsible for the beer cans, because she is a Port 'n Lemon girl, but something is going on....

Flotsam

I am sure you have all read about the boatloads of Africans arriving in the Canary Islands each day, often in a pitiful condition after being abandoned by the boat masters who took their money with the promise of an easy trip to the promised land. Aid from the EU has slowed down the Atlantic traffic with more sea patrols, but Mediterranean Spain is now becoming just as popular a landfall. The increased patrols by Guardia Civil boats along the coast of Almeria are forcing the traffic further north. Last week a boat was found abandoned on a small beach near Benidorm, and a couple of its passengers were later found, soaking wet, close by. How many more made it into the hinterland is as yet unknown.

This happened last Wednesday, and it was no coincidence it seems, that on our way back home about 9.30pm, we were stopped by the Guardia, just as we entered Carrio, and the interior of the car was checked. We were given the all clear and sent on our way. At the same time, Peter, who was leaving Carrio on the other side of the hill was stopped and asked where he had come from and where he was going. Had a boat been seen locally we wonder? Are there strangers in our midst?

Autumn colour

There are photos of autumn colours on so many of the Blogs I visit, that I thought I might follow suit. Then I looked around and realised that there really wasn't much evidence of the season's colour in my garden or the surrounding area. Palm trees, pine trees and rubber trees don't change colour in the Autumn, they seem to drop leaves on an ad hoc basis randomly throughout the year. My one splash of red comes from the virginia creeper, grown from a cutting smuggled in after a holiday in England, and even that didn't last long. The day after I took the photo, Bossman got out his stepladders and stripped the leaves off because he was sick of brushing them up every day! Bloody tidy Swiss!

My hydrangea, also grown from an imported cutting, is showing a tinge of yellow, and the pale pink blossoms have dried to a much deeper shade.

The bamboo stems have changed from bright green to straw, and soon I shall be able to harvest last years growth. The only other Autumnal feature I found was a group of Chrysanths. They had been a potted gift last year, and I split them up and planted them out on the off chance they would survive. The unusually wet Summer has been kind to them, and they are in full bloom.

For the Foodies

Did you know you should be frying your eggs on a block of Himalayan pink salt and not in a frying pan?
http://www.saltnews.com/

Did the earth move?

Well, yes, it seems it did. Last Sunday morning at 6.40am, we were woken by a long low rumble and rattling windows. My first thought was that either it was an earthquake, or the other end of the house had fallen down. My second that there had been a major landslide brought on by the constant heavy rain. We got up and looked out into the surrounding darkness but saw or heard nothing to indicate calamity. As we had just come through two days of continuous thunderstorms, we put it down to an isolated overhead lightening/thunderflash, brewed up, and then made our way back to bed to read.

Later that day, I watched the TV news and scanned the teletext of the half dozen or so channels that carry it. There was no mention of an earthquake, just reports on the clear up operation. People we met commented on the early wake up call, but no one had any definite information, just that it had been noticed over a wide area, as far inland as the Jalon valley. I can now report that it was an earth tremor; 2.2 on the Richter scale, and although nothing like the 7.9 that hit Spain in 1954, it did its little bit towards shaking sodden soil into landslides and tumbling down (not so) drystone walls.

So...next time the windows rattle and the floor vibrates, as it has done many times over the last twenty odd years, I now know to visit the Goverment's Seismic information page and confirm there has been a terremoto.

Small pleasures

I have always preferred the book to the film and radio to TV. Is it because as a child I had regular access to books but not to films, and that radio was available from a battery driven Bush, but a TV hadn't been developed that ran on bottled gas? Is it that we always remember our first loves, even when we appreciate the new? Dan Dare, the Ovaltinies, David Davies reading the Would-be -Goods are all long gone, but the Archers carries on. As a young mother, my morning coffee was timed to coincide with Mrs Dale's Diary, and later, Waggoners Walk. The Archers kept me company as I prepared an evening meal. I have continued to listen whenever I can. Sometimes on shortwave, sometimes by satellite. For the past few years, I have received a daily email with a short synopsis of the previous night's episode, and over the past year have had broadband access to Listen Again on the BBC website when I remembered. Today's small pleasure was in the form of an email from the BBC, inviting me to sign up for a daily podcast of my favourite soap, delivered straight to my blogreader. What more could an exiled Archerphile ask?

Flood levels are falling...

...but it is raining again.

On Saturday the sun shone, and in the morning we were able to shop for food, but only at the supermarket at the bottom of our hill. It was just above the flood water, but we had to park on the road because the underground car park was flooded, and the entrance to the upper car park was inaccessible because of the amount of water coming down the Merced road. The dual carriageway from this point was under water, and we were told that the back road into town was also under water.

After lunch I got itchy feet and set off from home on foot, heading for the cliff top at Calalga. The road was blocked off to cars as the cliff had come down, but I risked ducking under the tapes and walking on the side away from the edge. I reckoned if the houses there hadn't fallen into the sea, the cliff would take my weight. There had been another cliff fall in front of the Esmeralda, but the Levante beach looked unchanged. The paseo on this stretch is between one and two metres higher than the beach and surrounding roads, so the worst of the flood water had all been kept away. It was still lying in all the beach access roads and in the ground floor flats of the low lying blocks.

Our Craft Club room was up to the chair seats in dirty brown water, but I am hopeful that our boxes are still dry, as they are up on the stage behind the music decks. I can't get in to check until the room is pumped out, and that could take a while as residential property is the first priority.


It was only when I walked past the port towards Casita Belga that I saw the full impact of what had happened. I am used to seeing the dual carriageway flood when it rains, but to see it covered in a thick layer of canes from a river bed over a kilometre away was a new experience. I tried the Avenida Europa, parallel to the dual carriageway, but only got as far as the back of the Residential home. The three ambulances that had driven past me on the Levante beach were evacuating the residents. Some were being taken to the local hotels, and some to residences in the neighbouring towns. The police had been called in during the storm to help carry those in groundfloor rooms upstairs away from the rising water. The road down the side of the Home was the main route for the water to flow to the sea from the flooded Salinas area. A bulldozer had driven a path through the paseo to help it on its way, and was in the process of turning the street into a canal by digging out a channel in the tarmac. The Roman villa, the fish sauce factory and the newly discovered cathedral are all under water, and no doubt a thick layer of mud. All the hours the international archeology students put in cleaning the mosaic floors gone to waste! The iron plates laid down over the channel were the only means of access between port and town unless you were prepared to do a long detour inland up to Benissa and then down again, or paddle your canoe.
Blogger is misbehaving tonight; it keeps rejecting photos, so I'm going to put some links in instead. I've put a few photos in a Flickr album, http://www.flickr.com/photos/40774560@N00/sets/72157602414014258/
but they pale into insignificance compared to those uploaded by conmipero. Here's the link; more graphic content, many taken on Friday when the "dry" river bed was overflowing its banks and piling up cars and canes.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/cash01/

I waited my turn to pass over the makeshift bridge and walked on to Playa del Bol. Water had flowed down the street at the side of the Neptune apartments and carved out a deep channel through the sand and deposited a deep tangle of canes. The Arenal beach was a sorry site. Small islands of sand between deeply carved channels. The bars and restaurants along the front were all inundated, but already everyone was hard at work, piling chairs and tables outside, shoveling mud and hosing walls and floors. Our friends at Las Olas had a harder job than most, as they are a foot or so below the level of the paseo, as are the other older buildings that were built before the paseo was built back in the eighties. One of the benefits of having a large extended family is that bucket lines are well manned! Abuela was sat up on bar stool directing operations.
As I got closer to town, I had to choose between wading through dirty smelly water on the paseo, walking on the top of the beach wall, or braving the canyons of the beach. I decided to walk along the beach, and in fact, walked in the surf most of the way, as the surface was fairly smooth there. The tricky part came when I neared the river. I had to climb over tumbled rocks and the remains of the beach wall to get back on to dry land, and then had to walk through a thick layer of mud until I finally reached the fountain. I wasn't sure how high the water had been at its height. La Nina was the worst hit, obviously, but I found La Pinta was in a worst state really, because it was full of mud, whereas La Nina was swept fairly clean by the force of the water. What of Santa Maria? If that had been hit as well, then the Post Office would have been under water, and as our box is now at the bottom of a stack, I might have soggy bills.....but no, the water had stopped short just yards from the Post Office. By now I had been walking for nearly two hours, so I walked back to the Kiwi and sat for half an hour with a bottle of water and the crossword. I made the decision not to walk back along the beach, but to try the back road. The problem was going to be how to get across to it. When in doubt, ask a policeman! He told me that if I made my way down the Avenida Europa as far as the Police station, that the dual carriageway there had now drained, and I could get across and keep walking inland until I hit the old Comix road, so that's what I did. That old road is quite a lot higher, well above the flood plain, so I didn't see water underfoot again until I had to cross the Merced road, still running with the surface water from Pedramala.

Sunday was again sunny. The clear up continued. Ministers, Regional Statesmen, and local politicians made flying visits. Helicopters hovered, heavy equipment from surrounding areas arrived, more army units brought more pumps. We stayed at home and watched it all on TV. More storms were forecast for Monday. The Valencian Goverment promised money, and the mayor announced that an office would be open first thing on Monday morning where residents could register their losses and put in a claim for compensation.

Monday dawned bright and sunny. Anne rang to ask if we were bowling, then Peter rang. If four of us turned up, at least we would have a game, and I had to go up anyway to put up the list for next week's competition, so the decision was made to bowl. I also had to arrange the lunch with Debbie, as Beryl seems to have resigned her position as Social Sec, but hadn't bothered to let anyone know! I only found out when I rang her to ask if she was playing in the Triples. I'm already doing two jobs on that committee and have no intention of taking on a third, so unless someone puts their hand up and volunteers, there ain't gonna be no Christmas Do!

Rain

The lightening started at about 8pm last night. By 9pm the thunder was very close. At 10pm the heavens opened, and it bang crashed and walloped down continuously until teatime today. If you look closely at the wrought iron gate in the picture, you will see 18" of water flowing through it. At one point the water had backed up enough to be flowing through the open bricks at the top of the wall. Luckily for us, the road slopes away from our gate and takes the water through next door but one's garden. He has had this happen before and has built a concrete channel to divert it around his pool so that it doesn't fill up with mud as it did the last time.
We have been fortunate. Calpe town has not. I have just watched a TV report showing the normally dry river bed completely overflowing its banks and flooding the lower part of town. Cars are under water and some are swept on top of others. The force of the water has swept away part of the sea wall. I have no pictures for you, as I can't get out to take them. The dual carriageway that leads to town is under water. Last time this happened we had to head up the mountain and take the high road to the other side of Calpe and then drop down into town. I don't know what tomorrow will bring. It is still thundering, but the rain is not heavy now. Good weather is forecast for tomorrow and Sunday, but more storms are heading our way on Monday. The TV said Calpe had received 400 litres of water per square metre in 24 hours. 1 litre of water per square metre is equal to a millimetre in depth.  That is one hell of a lot of water by the time it has run down the surrounding hills and gathered in the river valley.
I have to go and light some candles; the weather is closing in again and the power may go off again.

Bossman's Birthday;

...he's 74 today, and we have spent a busy morning, ambling from pillar to post. First stop was Lidl as they were having a clear-out sale of bazaar items, as they billed it, and their bargains are usually a good price. His birthday treat was a new drill. A very large, very heavy drill for €30. I'm not sure if he is up to using it at the moment, but if it keeps him happy, what the hell?


His eye also fell on a clear turquoise toilet seat at €7. He was optimistic that it would fit the c.1970 turquoise crapper that graces his bathroom, and as the original has a couple of splits that threaten to pinch his bum, we decided it would be money well spent. When he caught me reading the blurb on the box of a €30 sewing machine, however, he was quick to point out that I had two already, and what I really needed was a new pair of slippers for the winter...preferably with non-slip soles and a fleecy lining...and he had seen just the very ones...next to the extra large singlet vests...

Now then, how many of you are old enough to remember Hilda Baker? Her famous character Nellie had a tag line; "I must get a little hand put on this watch". In this comedy casa, it's "I must get a Lidl watch on this hand". I have had two leather strapped watches from Lidl. The battery died on the first one after two years, and the second is still going, well into its second year. I found the identical watch for €2 this morning, so now I have a reserve for when this one succumbs to old age!
After paying for our bargains we set off for Benissa and the travel agent. The 27th September is the date we have been given to claim our Government subsidised holiday, and it's first come first served. By the time we got to the office, it was jam packed with pensioners, a fair few on sticks or crutches, each clutching a form and asking each other loudly where they planned on going....In true Spanish fashion, there wasn't an orderly queue, so following tradition, I shouted "Quien es ultimo?", and a couple in the far corner waved, and pointed out who was in front of them, so we found an empty space and in our turn, owned up to being the last when the next person entered. We had paid for an hour's parking in the square, and as the hour was coming to an end, Bossman got a bit agitated. I asked the man standing next to me if he lived in Benissa, but he was from Calpe, the same as us, but I found someone who was local, and asked how strict they were about parking. Her advice was to get back to the car and renew the ticket, as the multa had just been raised from €30 to €90! Bossman volunteered to go as he hates standing around, and he returned just as the couple in front of us sat down at the desk. When our turn came, we were told we could go in October, November or December, and had a choice between one week or two, and between the Balearics, Almeria or the Costa Brava. Not a lot different from 10 days in Portugal in the Spring, our first choice! We had speculated about alternatives of course, and had ruled out anything entailing a long coach journey, and because Bossman is a home bird, he didn't want to be in a hotel for two weeks, so we requested, and got, one week in an hotel in, or close to, Palma de Majorca. An hour to the airport, 90 minutes wait, 20 minutes flying, and a 4km drive to the Hotel. When are we going? 12th to the 19th December, so I'm away for my birthday on the 17th. I seem to remember that we spent my 50th on a pensioners' special to Tenerife...
For anyone who is interested, our week's holiday; insurance, flight, transfers, full board, wine and water included, is setting us back €170 each; about £120. The Government's reasoning being that it is better to keep hotel staff gainfully employed entertaining and looking after wrinklies in warm and comfortable surroundings than to pay them unemployment benefit. For very little more money, we could have had a fortnight, but as I said, Bossman likes his own bed and his own mealtimes...

Talking of mealtimes, the natives are getting restless...and have requested chicken breast in a cream sauce with egg noodles and spinach...the new diet isn't too arduous, but he certainly knows when he strays off the prescribed path, so I doubt there will be much alcohol imbibed, well, not on his part anyway!

Something for Barmpot...

...a link I found on another Blog; Making one could keep him amused on a rainy day...

May I bring to your attention...

Rachel Pantechnicon? I first heard her on Radio 4's Poetry Please programme, reading Elf Shelf, and I emailed her to ask if her poems were available on paper. She replied, and sent me a copy of her work. At that time, her website was in an embryonic state, but it is now partly functioning, and some of her work is available there to read or listen to. Go and have a giggle...I am particularly drawn to her works on the coccyx, as mine is in a pretty mangled state, and I wish I had taken her mother's advice...
By the way, Rachel is the alter ego of poet Russel Thompson.

Gather ye almonds while...

...the sun doesn't shine, because it is hot, dirty dusty work! We spread a big cloth beneath the tree and then attacked it with long poles, rattling the branches to make the almonds fall off. Each cloth full was emptied into a wheelbarrow, and as the rattling continued, I started the job of separating the nuts from their partly dried husks. There was a good measure of leaves and twigs in each barrow-load, not to mention thousands of insects. Spiders of every shape size and colour climbed up the sides of the barrow to make their escape, as did stink bugs and ladybirds of varying hue. The ants use the almond tree as their main source of supply at this time of the year, as it exudes sweet sticky resin, so there was a fair number of them too.

This was the biggest thing to climb out! She sat on the edge of the barrow for about 15 minutes, looking this way and that at all the food running around, but didn't make the effort to catch anything.


As you can see, her abdomen is quite swollen. She is probably ready to lay eggs, so I moved her to the Hoya that climbs around the patio doors of the apartment. It is sheltered from the weather there, and a good place to leave her egg case. I love the flowers of the Hoya. They look as if they are made of pink fuzzy felt. Mine has finished flowering, so the link is to another site.


There were three barrows of nuts/twigs/leaves, and each barrowfull yielded a 25 kilo paint bucket of nuts. Any that escaped falling on the cloth got raked up, and were added to the discard pile, as were the many that were reluctant to leave the husk. Husking is hard enough on the fingers without adding broken nails to the tally! The nuts are now sitting in a wheelbarrow waiting for a hot windy day, when they will be spread out to dry off a little before storing. The cloud and rain of the last couple of days has made the work more comfortable, but if the nuts are stored damp, they will grow mouldy and spoil. Kept dry, they will keep edible for years. I just wish there was an easy way to crack and shell them more than a handful at a time!

The sub-heading says it all...

....the boring life of two wrinklies...For the past week I've only been as far as the post office and the supermarkets, and spent my time divided between stitching postcards, knitting socks and blog-hopping around the "fibre artist" world. Everyone seems to know everyone else! What do they say? Something about 6 degrees of connection?

There is a new bird on the Bus. You can see a picture of him on the other blog. He has decided that he is a herd bird, and his mission in life is to keep Barmpot's beetles in order on top of the monitor.

Swiss National Day

The first of August and the flag is flying! The last few years we have spent the day in Switzerland, but this year we are giving it a miss. We celebrated with Thomy Senf, Schabziger cheese, boiled potatoes and bratwürst....and a very unSwiss Sangria!

A Year in Colour

On the Flickr picture site last year, there was a Group who posted photos with a different colour theme each week, based on the colour of a crayon. Their year finished in July, and they have started another year, this time with two colours for each week. I thought I would join in. First week was pink+green, so I used Griller's pink flower, without Griller. Second week was brown+blue, so Barmpot got his picture up, and I added a photo of a busty bronze statue taken a couple of years ago in Coruña. This week is not so easy, as it is blue+orange. Up to now I have a photo of my blue and orange mugs in the washing up bowl, and a happy coincidence when I pegged out the washing this morning.



I haven't posted the washing one yet, as there is a limit of 4 a week, and I am hoping to find something a little more inspiring. My camera is being a pain again. It works fine with ordinary batteries in, but doesn't seem able to make proper contact with re-chargeables. I've tried sand-papering the terminals, as recommended by Robert, but it doesn't seem to help much. I have to keep opening the battery compartment, and tweaking the little springy brass bits, and that means the camera loses its date setting. I can't be bothered to keep on resetting it, so all my photos show they were taken on the 1st of January 2003! Bossman is reluctant to go anywhere that he can't park outside, so I'll have to look around home and garden for inspiration. Things may change later in the year. Our neighbours have decided to sell their holiday home, and are going to give me their little white Opel when they have sold. My own wheels again! Yoooooo-hoooo!!

A Reading Matter

Bossman has finished reading Eragon, and it has been returned to its owner. I am still making heavy weather of the follow up; Eldest. I seem to have so many projects on the go at the moment that reading is relegated to snatched moments in the lav. I have until the end of the week before its owner returns to the UK, so I shall have to get down to it if I want to finish it. I find the language distracting. I realise that the author was only 14 when he wrote the first book, and not much older when he wrote the second, but the sentences don't flow as easily as the tale..

Finding something for Bossman to read is not always easy. The more murder and mayhem the better, usually, so I was surprised when he stuck at Eregon. Fantasy and Sci-Fi are not his cup of tea. To tide him over until I could find something to keep him happy, I offered Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out one Midsummers Morning, knowing that he had read it before, but hoping that as he would recognise the placenames, and it was such a slim book, it would suffice over the weekend. This morning we joined the hardy bowlers for their coffee break, and picked out some books for the next few weeks. One each from Michael Connelly, Jonathan Kellerman, Lee Child, Patricia Cornwell and Anita Burgh.

Coleoptera

This morning on LotSW, Cleggy said to Compo: "How does it feel to live with a ferret on your head?" "Better than down your trousers..." was the reply.

Barmpot was of much the same opinion when he came across this female rhinocerus beetle in the garden today. Weight for weight, they are the strongest creatures in the world, as they can lift 850 times their own weight. If it took her fancy, she could carry him off and have her wicked way with him, but she didn't, she went off to look for a male of her species, with two large curved horns on his head. Unlike her sweet little hornlets.

Down in the garden, something stirred.....the flowers of the Aechmea fasciata have pushed their way out of their green leaf bracts and are standing proud.

Griller decided he needed a little jungle time....I don't think he realises that this plant comes from the jungles of Brazil and not from Africa.....but then he is only a Ninfant Griller.

I did some grown-up things today. Bossman received a letter from his pension company explaining why they had started deducting tax from his pittance. He hadn't even noticed that they had. £16 is easily missed when the amount that arrives in Euros changes from month to month. I spoke to a pleasant, helpful lassie who passed me on to an equally pleasant laddie (guess who the pension company is) and he explained that they had to deduct the tax until they received a new exemption certificate from the IR to replace the old one that was made redundant by the new legislation that came in last month.....He didn't seem at all surprised when I told him that I had filled in the form the IR sent back in June, but thought I should check with them that they had received it, and were not just snowed under with work. He even went so far as to give me the number he used to speak with the horses mouth in the right department. I tried the number three times, twice getting cut off halfway through the if you want...press ...spiel, and the third time got a long-winded recorded message telling me all the lines were busy, to call back later. At that rate it would be cheaper to pay the tax than the overseas call rate. I decided to have a look on the .gov website FAQs. I couldn't find anything relevant, but there was a little button inviting me to "ask Robin", so I did. Within 10 minutes I had a reply from Robin, who after extracting all relevant information in the course of 3 or 4 emails, has promised to send it all to the "annuities team in Leicester" and will "get back to me in due course". We shall see...

When we got home from the beach, I heard the parakeets again. There were on Eladio's roof, just above his open bathroom window. I watched for a while to see if they would go in, but they contented themselves with pecking at the tiles and hanging off the edge.

The sun was shining into the camera, so I had to stand in the shade of the fence to get a photo, and the angle was rather acute. I thought I might do better from the balcony, but chances were that the carob tree would be in the way. I was in luck! A gap in the branches allowed me to get a shot of two of the birds, but it is hard to tell what they are, even though I had my Lidl digi on full zoom.

Technology to the rescue! A little magnification and I think you can just make out what they are. I'll keep trying for a better shot, but by the time the camera has warmed up, they are usually out of sight. Maybe I should get the Minolta out of storage and go back to film. I had some great photos of birds taken with a telephoto lens, but I'm not sure if I am up to holding the great weight of it steady these days, and the tripod is so cumbersome.

The question of how do the beach cleaners dodge the early risers was answered this morning. We arrived just as they were leaving, and they now have a Dinky toy of a beach cleanerupper that is no wider than the tractor. As the big green monster ploughs up and down the wide expanses, this little nipper dodges in and out of the fiddly bits, in the corners, and around the Red Cross huts and the Lifeguard's tower. 20 years ago, the Town Hall employed a Beach Brigade who covered the beach on foot, each equiped with a spike on a stick. a rake, and a capaza. Times change!