Bedrock

Posts Tagged ‘Spain’

Not something you’d expect in the South of Spain in summer, but here’s our local river in Galera after the floods, just as the sun was re-appearing… the weather was bad enough to have me wake up in the early hours – hence the photo taken early evening once the sun re-emerged…

We’ve been here now for a couple of weeks and regular readers may well be wondering why there’s been nothing in here. I referred in my last blog to issues with UPS.. well, that turned into a nightmare, meanwhile my ability to add images to any of my blogs suddenly disappeared.

The UPS affair can only be described as a disaster. They really DO NOT like finishing the job off here and actually delivering to people’s homes – made worse by Google maps which actually points to the wrong place when you try to get to our place (update August 2016 – that has since long been fixed). Many, many emails later, I got my delivery and I got it to my home. However.. the supplier put the wrong amount on the goods, leading UPS to charge too much for the VAT and DUTY on that (despite the inescapable fact that throughout Europe, deliveries of low-value goods from China almost always escape VAT and DUTY when sent through the postal system.  UPS in addition have a range of extras they can charge – handling charges etc. and the long and short of it is – I would recommend STRONGLY against using that company for any kind of overseas purchase.

Meanwhile a supplier in Sweden was shipping some parts to me to take to Boston with me on my forthcoming trip this weekend. He ordered 3 day delivery and…. they let him down – not only that but when he tried to follow this up after they claimed they’d tried to deliver the goods (they had not) the Spanish end of their operation stopped answering phone calls or responding to emails. So all in all not too good on the postal front but at least I proved they’ll deliver to the door.   My normal mail via our friendly postman has been going without a hitch.

And so to the blog – for reasons that foxed me and eventually foxed the service provider, I could not longer send images to any of my blogs. This has been going on for 2 weeks now and only today has it been resolved. I guess in compensation for the time it has taken, they’ve built a managed VPS (virtual Private Server) for me and all my stuff is now in there and up to now, running like a rocket! So up to now we’ve had a good time, done a bit of work on the house, been to the lake, down to Mojacar, Velez Rubio and other places with friend who’ve sadly now gone back to the UK for a while – and we’ve replaced the battery on the car, which it turns out was way over a decade old!!

The weather here has been excellent, rarely dropping below the mid-thirties in the afternoon. Next week I’m off to Boston where it is only marginally cooler, to participate in the Boston FABFEST – if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter you’ll see what I get up to there.  Expect lots of pictures of tech stuff.

In the build-up to our forthcoming trip to Gibraltar, yesterday was pretty ordinary – Maureen spent most of the day doing schoolwork, I spend most of my day answering FSB emails. We’ve had a fair bit of interest in Hollyberry Cottage since moving to the new advertising company so that’s taken some handling and so yesterday, generally was a work day.

We took off late afternoon to head off to Baza to buy some mains cable and to see if we could find a new lamp for our ceiling fan – with success, I have  a couple of holes to drill in metal today to modify a standard lamp to fit the fan and we should be ready to install in the living room sometime this morning with luck. On the way back from Baza we stopped off at a couple of bars and finally ended up in Galera for a short chat with friends which was nice.

Today we’d normally be off to the Huescar market but there is a question mark as to whether it will run as there’s a religious holiday so it could be a short trip, coffee and Churos and back again. Once again I’ve meetings this afternoon and Maureen has much more work to do but I want to get the fan fitted and a couple of other jobs out of the way.

It’s likely to be another clear-sky hot day – yesterday was around 36c most of the time, no doubt it will be similar today. Can’t complain as it makes for REALLY pleasant evenings where you can sit outside until midnight in a t-shirt.