We should not be complaining, but what has happened to our winter? This year has been the mildest winter since we moved to Spain, yet other parts of Europe have had lots of snow and some places have had the lowest temperatures for decades. We had a few hours of snow the beginning of December, but since then we have had hardly any frosts and no more snow. It has rained the last four days, in some places very heavily and the river Mino has burst it's banks in Lugo, but today we have had spring like weather and I have even spotted wild birds gathering grass and twigs in preparation for nest building which could spell trouble for them if the weather does change and we get a late winter.
A lot of trees are showing buds and we have even seen some ornamental prunus trees in bloom, the Mimosa trees are already showing colour, this is all a month ahead of normal.
PET HATES.Shopping Centres. We buy very little in supermarkets, only what we would call utility items, we both find these stores soul destroying, this week however we bought even less, every store in this shopping centre had pop 'music' blaring out of their speakers,very, very, loudly. Of course every shop had different 'music' and the result was an assault on the ears, things did not get better as we entered into the supermarket, there the noise, I will refrain from calling it 'music' was so loud we could not even talk to each other to confer on what we needed to buy. The result, a nearly empty shopping trolley, the cat and dog food, a plastic bag of sugar [ they still have not replenished their stock of cane sugar] and that was about it. We could not even think what we wanted, let along discuss it. Why do these stores play this rubbish at full volume, it's bad enough that they play it at all, but customers do need to think, or maybe that is the game plan, dull everyone's senses so they buy unnecessary items. With us this just does not work and we left, having spent about half of what we would have normally spent.
