Bedrock

Today is undoubtedly the WORST day for taking photos we’ve had in months here in Galera, Granada, but then it’s a good day for the plants.

As I couldn’t take any photos and nothing else is new (my wife is in the UK, most of my village companions are away and I’m in-between new gadgets) and having done my shopping and jobs for the day, I went off to play with my latest AI fascination – MidJourney. I did my best inputting the text I’d like to see turned into art – ok job but it missed off the airships I asked for – looks like artists are safe for a little while longer.

“Imagine a city on mars with airships, highly detailed, immersive, volumetric light, realistic, big trees, dramatic lighting, saturated –ar 9:19 –test”

As for the city – I guess that might be a city in the background.

It seems some artists worldwide are up in arms that they have competition (just as clerics were no doubt unhappy when the masses learned to read and write – vinyl record lovers used to claim digital would never be as pure as vinyl and artists who use paint used to go mad about people using computers and digital brushes – will they ever learn). I see lots of people are simply using an existing image and asking for alterations. I start from scratch and leave it up to the AI with my request (probably why I got no airships).

Once this is cracked, I foresee complete video segments entirely generated from a text description, just as it is possible to generate general computer programs from a rather restricted, stylised version of natural language – and hopefully soon we’ll be able to say “Earl Grey – HOT” and have a nice cup of tea emerge – if you don’t know what means, you maybe don’t watch enough TV 🙂 He’s back again for series 3 soon.

Lots of things have happened since my last update to this blog. Firstly after an abysmal August in which it was pretty much too hot to do anything – I splashed out on a new Samsung S22 Ultra smartphone. We also moved on our old black run-around car in favour of a Renault Cleo (which needs a little work but looks like it was a good buy – see further down). Not new I may add, we bought it from a dealer just outside of Granada.

After a busy couple of weeks between guests and setting up a new PC etc., we drove to Granada on Friday and spent a few hours in the city centre doing the usual Nevada shopping centre trip followed by the Medina and finally dinner by the Cathedral before having an early night then dropping my sister in law off at Granada Airport at 7am this morning for her long trip to Chicago via Madrid.

Driving most of yesterday (May 11, 2022) – I drove to Alicante airport to pick up Maureen, stopping off to visit an outlet mall (which I didn’t know existed – La Noria I think, near Centro Comercial Thader) just north of Murcia to grab lunch and have a wander about in the sunshine and break up the trip.

The mall was surprisingly quiet for 1pm on a Wednesday. Distinctly ghost-town-ish but a nice stop for lunch regardless. Very clean and modern.

A lovely day in Galera town centre today – nice and quiet – no doubt hoards of tourists will arrive soon enough now that Covid masks are no longer a thing (other than when using public transport). Still a tad cool OUT of the sun, but lovely and warm in it.

Nice to see that the clean-up operation seems to have restored the buildings opposite the cafe and post office.

Meanwhile I’ve discovered a new lunch-meat variation with olives – lovely. I’m just hoping we can get it locally.

It’s a Bank holiday here in Spain right now so almost everything except for cafes and bars is closed – so sitting eating and drinking seems like the right thing to do. I was up at the crack of dawn, doing a technical write-up of my broadband progress – see next entry.

Lots and lots of work to do around the place as we have friends coming to visit soon as the summer starts up in earnest.

After a particularly drab start to April with rain, more rain and the worst of the Sahara desert falling on us, things are finally looking up… the last couple of days have been just fine and today it got as high as 24c.

Despite frantic tech blog writing since Christmas, it seems I’ve somewhat ignored this blog, our window on life in Galera and thereabouts. This was brought to my attention by a nice couple we met in Galera’s La Posa Pizzeria (Jamie and Lindsay – I hope I spelled that right – if not, let me know, guys) who it seems know all about me due to this blog…. so here’s something hopefully of interest.

Maureen and I have been travelling back and forth to the UK since November and soon after our return to Galera (late February) we discovered our attempts to sell up in the UK were bearing fruit – so once again we headed back to the UK (this time by plane, so much more civilised than driving much of the length of England, spending a full day on the boat then driving much of the length of Spain) to start a clean-out operation over there (so much for retiring) and I came back on April 7, just in time for a local dental appointment (Mrs Sanchez in nearby Huescar) with Maureen returning to Spain a week later.

Neither of us have been out much in the village, so much to do but now with the prospect of several uninterrupted months here in Spain (rather handy for making postal delivery arrangements for my tech blog) I’m beginning to focus – just a slight matter of de-oranging the cavehome after the storms.

Coming up to date, yesterday was an important religious ceremony in Galera (all 15 minutes of action before we headed off the bar) and fortunately the weather held up so I could capture the essence of it on video (see below). I hope someone likes it. If so, view it in YouTube for best effect – and in case the embed doesn’t work – here’s a link to the video). Note: in the video I refer to clan – YouTube videos are a pain to edit – I meant Klan.