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Archive for the ‘Scargill’ Category

What a cracking last day – we drove down to the coast much earlier than usual and headed off to San Javier for some last minute shopping, unsure what the opening situation would be for shops on a Sunday. Any fears were unfounded as most of the shops were in fact open – certainly the shopping centre containing EROSKI was open – and on the way, a BRAND NEW super Chinese store.

We bought some stuff for our next trip and left it in the car… and I have to tell you, you have NEVER seen a range of compact fluorescents like the ones they have in this store, from the tiniest 2w jobs up to a WOPPING great 150w (yes, that’s 150w compact fluorescent – enough to light up a street I should think. if a 13w is equivalent to a 60w old-fashioned filament lamp, these must be something like equivalent of approaching a 1Kw lamp!!!

We then went off to Eroski for some last minute bits and pieces. Mobile users might be interested to know that YOIGO over there are doing the Samsung Galaxy SIII for 29 Euros a month as against much more here – we noticed they have a store within the same shopping centre (for reference Eroski close midnightt normally and 10pm on a Sunday!! – the Chinese stores appeared to be closing early teatime Sunday) before driving back toward the airport but not before stopping off for some late lunch down at the beach.

Ok, the food was just normal keep-the-British-happy stuff but the scenery – my goodness, beautiful blue sky, maybe 33c, nice breeze… we REALLY did not want to leave.

By mid-evening we were on the plane full of screaming babies, by 10pm or so in Edinburgh airport listening to warnings about importing knuckledusters into the UK while they took ages to get the bags (presumably while searching for knuckledusters) and by 1am after a drive through flooded areas of the A68 we were back home in Wark. Our two ginger tom cats are furiously huffed at the fact we have (for a short time) kittens roaming around – life is back to normal – meetings piled up for this week and next….  such a different world…. I’m counting the days to summer (of which there is NO sign in the UK) already….

Our June trip to Spain got off to a flying start when the utterly useless and never to be used again Ryan air sent us a refund on our plane tickets, having decided the trip was not worth doing! We quickly rebooked (at additional cost and hassle) with Jet2.com and on Friday we started our long trip to Spain via Edinburgh.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like Edinburgh – it’s a vibrant city with lots to do… but like most cities it has its share of DUMPS and that’s where we found ourselves on Friday night. After a very pleasant drive up the A68 we arrived at our hotel and headed off in search of food before going to see the new and much-anticipated 3D movie "Prometheus".

No matter where we drove the place was a mess and we ended up at a Kebab joint before heading off to the cinema.  The movie was, as you’d expect from a Ridley Scott production, EPIC and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Maureen by way of contrast found it a tad gross.. well, with Alien-type movies you do tend to get that, but EXCEEDINGLY well done and something I’ve not seen for a long time, presented some ideas to ponder about the origins of mankind…. all in all excellent.

First thing Saturday morning (like, 5.30am) we headed off to Edinburgh airport and that’s where things really started to go badly – the computers were off so the airport staff were operating in headless-chicken mode, we had the entertainers coming round for friendly chats hoping we would not notice we were in very large queues… so that was the relaxing breakfast out of the way. The plan took off only marginally late and we found ourselves wishing to hell we’d brought noise-reduction headphones as the plane was full of exceedingly noisy babies! Not nice for 3 hours.

Other than the landing – which I’ll bet costs the pilot 3 month’s salary as he slammed the wheels into the ground so hard that passengers were, for a second, somewhat alarmed… apart from that it was as you’d expect, SUPERB weather and a relatively friendly welcome.

Our Spanish car was waiting for us (the one we bought last year) and we set off to visit friends on the coast, but not before filling the car wish shopping from a nearby supermarket. We did notice the car seemed to be less keen to start that normal.

Our friends are on a week’s break at a golfing resort and we popped in for a very pleasant lunch, their apartment overlooking the (massive) resort as you can see in the panorama below. Very calm and peaceful.

And that was fine – we set off mid-afternoon at a leisurely pace for the 2-hour trip to Galera. Less than an hour up the road, the car started to stall as if it were out of fuel. It just kept getting slower and slower, the more I pressed the accelerator the more it slowed down. Eventually we stopped on the hard shoulder right on an overpass and contacted the insurance company who after some translation issues eventually sent someone off to come and have a look. After half an hour of waiting I tried the car again and hey presto it was fine. We set off to see how far we could get before updating the insurance company… and managed a few miles – ending up on the RM-15…. same again – slowing down to a half.

The roadside service eventually turned up at teatime and the guy put his jumpstart leads on our car which then appeared to work. We drove off – only to find the same thing happening within half a mile and thankfully he was following us. He’s convinced the battery is to blame, Maureen and I are more inclined to believe there is a problem with filters as the battery had PLENTY of power to turn the starter motor…  it didn’t help that the repair guy didn’t speak a WORD of English and our Spanish is still rubbish.

And that was that, after many phone calls and semi-decipherable discussions, the car headed off in one direction and a taxi turned up courtesy of the insurance company to take us and our bags to Galera, about 100Km away!

Being the weekend of course there is NO way anyone’s even going to look at the car until Monday so I expect we’ll be stranded here until mid-week – we’ve plenty to do but as some of it involves cement we don’t have, the logical choice would be to enjoy the sun and get the wine out – sadly – we don’t have any of that either.  The plan was to attend to all of that stuff today (Sunday) at nearby Huescar. Our neighbours up here in the mountains have come and gone and so here we are.

To add to the problems, the electricity people appear to have "improved" the electricity as promised however in the process, running the hot tub triggers some kind of reset and so we can’t put the hot-tub on! The upside is, as promised the broadband speed has increased and so now we have faster broadband in Spain than we do at home – and better mobile signals!

Arrived yesterday (Saturday), after doing the usual shopping round in San Javier and visiting my favourite Chinese junk store therein.

As you can see, the weather here in February at the coast is not that bad – it’s not summer that’s for sure but you could sit outside and drink coffee at the coast, no problem. For the first time we picked up our own car (usually we do car rentals but if you check earlier posts, we bought a Spanish car in the summer and so this was it’s first test). The storage company guy who dropped it off at the airport (right at the arrivals door – we only ended up walking 4 metres out of the airport!) spoke good English and warned us the battery had gone flat in storage (they check the car and get it working if there is an issue), perhaps not surprising as it’s been sitting doing nothing for 3 months – but as we found out – it was working perfectly and still is 30 hours later.

Our new (old) Spanish Renault Mégane is so quiet when idling you would think it was turned off… and so we had a great 2-hour trip over to our place but not before checking out Aldi and the Chinese store and getting supplies for the week over at San Javier – definitely my favourite place to shop for food and rubbish up to now.

We arrived at teatime Saturday to discover that AT LAST we had proper electricity but no water… it’s sunny and several degrees here in the mountains during the day but it’s been quite cold at night. This morning Maureen got the hair drier out and the water is running but there’s a hairline crack in the cheap Chines crappy water valve…  no surprise there, most of the other stuff the original builder put in was, well, crap.

We took a slightly different and longer route than normal, partly as we decided to manage without the satellite and partly because – well, it was such a nice day.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not summer and along the way we could see the snow in the mountains but for much of the trip the temperature stayed up near 10 degrees or so and perfectly clear skies, dry air and no wind which makes all the difference.

We opened the place up – no surprises other than the odd length of silica trying to fight it’s way through the concrete walls – nothing new there and easy to sort out in the summer… and after getting some heat going we went off to the local pub for a pint – so much for the diet.

Today, as I promised the neighbours, I put up some solar lights we brought over onto the tree on our newly re-furbished roundabout (not enough, needs more) and spent some time getting the NetFlix TV working properly on our limited broadband here in Spain – with great success – see the blog at www.scargill.net for getting Netflix and iPlayer working over here…  and I caught up with paperwork – not to mention both of us watching the best movie of all time (IMHO) – Iron Man 2 – AGAIN… the opening scene with AC/DC playing and Iron Man landing on stage has to be the best movie scene ever. I can’t wait for the Avengers movie coming out in May which will also feature The Hulk, Thor and Captain America to name a few – now they’ve pretty much gotten over the need to make these movies funny for people who never read Marvel, they really are doing a good job. A shame the CD Comics people seem to have missed the boat.

Tomorrow we need to get a hairline crack in the cold water feed tap fixed (well, we need to replace the tap – easy enough other than finding out where on earth the main tap for the area is!) so we need to organise a plumber, then we’re off to the local market to see what’s new. As always you can click on these pics for larger versions, hope you find this interesting.

To our friends in Spain – and also to those we’re just getting to know… a very merry Christmas!

The new Pergola is up and running and just as I was getting the camera out to take a pic, I noticed the most amazing rainbow just across the valley.

This one’s even better – honestly – THIS is what it actually looked like this afternoon, looking down the valley..

and that’s about it – nice day for the time of year, the Pergola is now all wired up again, expecting our new car to arrive tonight – just in time to store it away for a while over the weekend!

Believe it or not, after 3 years of builder’s electricity, it looks like we’re about to get "proper" electricity. The pylon is up, wired and apparently ready to go.

After some disappointing weather over the last few days, we’re set for sunshine today so we’re off to the Orce market to see what’s new there.

After bringing some new lighting technology over with me to add atmospheric lighting to the cave, I’m now onto my second Chinese soldering iron which utterly refuses to do the job and I’m convinced it’s actually the solder. The last one I bought was a 60w device and I bought solder and flux to go with it, yet after 40 years of soldering I cannot even START to tin the iron bit never mind do some sensible soldering – so the logical conclusion is that this is something ELSE the Chinese can’t get right (at least not in the stuff they sell here). So I’m off in search of good old-fashioned European-sourced solder!

Yesterday we went off to the lakes with friends – too cold to go swimming but just to show them around. We’ve also been to the Huescar fair which ended on Sunday night, not much to write about, just a standard market, the same people as usual.

I’m starting to get jaded with the smaller markets you rarely see anything new and interesting… not so bad in the summer when you can just enjoy the weather but we really could do with finding a really large and varying market.

Our Spanish-licenced car should be arriving this week, just in time to go into cold storage until our next trip – but at least this means we can kiss goodbye to extortionate car rentals once the paperwork is sorted and it gives me greater possibilities for short trips over here when there are last-minute cheap flights available, something we’ve not been able to do up to now.

I’m looking forward to some sun today so I can try out some new hi-def video capture software for the iPhone. Yes, I’ve a decent camera that can do video but I get sick of lugging a camera around. A phone on the other hand sits in your pocket – the problem being, the quality is usually rubbish. Well, I’ve already gotten around that with the HDR software on the iPhone to some extent (most of the photos here are HDR taken using the phone) and so now it’s time to turn to video.

Many problems with amateur videos taken on phones can be improved on the iPhone with a little care and the right software. Firstly clean the lens every single time you use it – and secondly use software to turn off the automatic controls. The stuff I’m playing with turns off auto-focus, exposure control, white balance and lets you take 16:9 format video – I’d prefer cinema format but the phone isn’t fast enough for that.. iPhone 4s to the rescue (if only). With these settings as seen in the phone in their normal default it really doesn’t matter what you do – your videos are always going to look home made.  Easy to say, let’s see what I can do with this – results in a later blog providing the weather holds out.

Oh yes, it’s around 20 degrees MAXIMUM here during the day, a far cry from September… and no sign of the builder!!