Happy New Year

1 st January. Happy New Year to all our past helpers, and to all our future ones.

My New years resolution is simple, Forget any Deadlines, we had hoped to be in our new kitchen by Xmas [which one I ask] then we thought that just maybe by New Years Eve, well it didn't happen, Simon has spent a couple of days trying to connect up the main water pipes to the new, but kept getting leaks, well more like mini lakes really, but this is outside, so no damage has been done, at last he now has a tight seal ,so just one more pipe to be connected to the hot water tank, and fingers crossed, we might have the C/H up and running.

I have now done the tiling on the work top, so I have to grout it and then get the edging trim on, there is still the new electric ring main to connect up, then maybe we will once again have a large kitchen, and I can finally finish unpacking.
We have now been renovating for twenty months, and it is not something we would ever do again, our last house took us just ten months to build, and that was from scratch, it also cost us half of this renovation job. Still, we are getting there slowly, and then we will have to concentrate on the outside jobs, hopefully we might get good helpers this year as well, last year all barring one were great, so many thanks to you all, and we hope to see some of you again for a holiday.

A Wild Goose Chase

On the 27Th of December we lost our gander, he was only ten months old and appeared fit and healthy , needless to say the geese were very upset as was Simon, not so much me, as Gandhi and I had a love hate relationship, I should say more of a hate relationship as he took every opportunity to attack me! However, as we had five geese we needed a gander, so the next day we went out on the proverbial wild goose chase, we had seen about four farms with geese, so we went to them all to see if we could get a replacement.
As is the way in Spain, if someone cant help you, they might know someone who can, but in this case we drew a blank.
We then traveled to the last farm that we had seen geese, but once again they could not help, so our helper,[also a Simon] asked if they knew anywhere that we might get a 'ganso', dictionary definition of a male goose, the female being an 'oca' and the plural of goose is 'ocas', this however proves not to be the case.
Simon our helper speaks fluent Spanish, so he asked did they just keep the 'ocas' for eggs, no came the reply, we breed them! By now we were all thoroughly confused, but if you have two ocas how do you breed them asked Simon, the reply amidst laughter was simple, one is a 'oca hembra' [female] the other one is a 'oca macho' [male] simple isn't it? so just ignore the dictionary, it doesn't allow for country folk.
The next day was spent trying to phone any breeders listed in the yellow pages, but being Xmas we failed to make contact with any of them, Xmas here continues till the 7th of Jan. However, on the Sunday we made the break through by phoning the shop where we had bought the geese from, and hey presto, they had two ocas macho's, so a mad drive to Padron which is a 100 k away, and we are now the proud owners of two ganders.

We had decided that we needed to try to find out what was the cause of Gandhi's early demise, with the possibility of eating him , it was very obvious on inspection of the internal organs that he had had a heart attack, and I found a large blood clot in his right ventricle, so we had roast goose for dinner, after all, this is why we have geese, to eat, although it should have been his offspring. This also marked our first 100% home produced meal, which is what we are aiming for.

R.I.P Gandhi