Saturday 23 April 2011

Being Bored

For many years I have always joked that I would like time to be bored, well now I have and I'm bored being bored. Now we are living in just two rooms and with no garden to tend the days go very slowly, not having a proper kitchen any more does not help, I am used to baking every day, either cakes or bread, now all we have is a gas hob, so not even the pleasure of the Sunday roast.
Some people consider cooking a chore preferring to use tinned or frozen food that requires nothing more than heating up, now that must be boring.
We are still making our own yoghurt which is something, and although the weather is now getting quite warm we are cooking a lot of stews, we don't need an oven for that.
Thankfully we have quite a few friends that we can visit, without them it would not be worth while getting up in the morning. We could go out in the car and do some exploring but that means consuming fuel which we always try to conserve. I just have to bear in mind that it's only for another ten weeks or so and that we are going away for nearly three of them.

Monday 18 April 2011

April Roses



Following what has been the mildest winter we have known in Spain we now seem to be having a very early summer. There are roses out in the garden and yesterday on our way back from friends we spotted the first bluebells, this is a month earlier than normal. Once again the fruit trees have been full of blossom so it promises to be a bumper harvest for the second year running, it seems strange that I will not be bottling all this wonderful bounty this year, I always find it so satisfying seeing a pantry full of bottled fruit, knowing exactly what has gone into the jars and knowing that no chemicals have been used at all.
Last week we discovered that you can still get good service in the 21st century. We had to cancel the insurance on our old Vitara as she had met her maker, no, nothing to do with us, anyway we cancelled the insurance and surprise, the no claims bonus will be ready for us in a couple of weeks. We then took back a cordless drill which I had bought at Christmas, somehow in our absence the charger had been damaged, we thought the shop would order a new charger for us, but no, they replaced the whole package, drill, the works with no questions asked. It's just a shame that this happens to be the store that we have stopped using due to the loud music, maybe we should give it another try and just use earplugs.