Monday 25th October 2010, it's 8:45 am, 18°C and SWMBO is cold.

Yep, she's still tucked in bed complaining about the cold and demanding I put the electric fire on! Looking at the weather back in Forest Row, it's actually at 0°C at the moment so God alone knows how she'll survive back there. The picture shows the thermometer and if you look closely at the bottom of the screen, the time and date (click on picture to expand).

I've been up since 5:50 am, completed SSS and caught up on my forums and blogs and she will not budge until it “warms up”.



Last night's instalment of “24” managed to sink to a new low where the good guys become the bad guys and vice versa and no one ever smiles and are all still constipated. I would give up on it now but SWMBO likes the violence, mayhem, blood and guts, she says it keeps her sane?



El Palmar beach



Today will be a cycle ride to the beach at El Palmar for some exercise.

I have a few jobs to do, clean the outside of the MS, repair a slow puncture on the Navara and throw away the charge controller for the solar panels, as it's duff, bloody Maplins. Don't really need the panels after all, as we very rarely are not on hookup and with 440 AH on tap from the 4 batteries, could go for a few days anyway, depending how often SWMBO uses her 10 megawatt hair dryer. But they do come in handy when the unit is in storage for 2-3 months, back in the UK, keeps the batteries topped up as there is a small current drain, which I just cannot isolate, so they are on a constant tickle charge and don't go flat

I'm pressing on with the steep learning curve that's associated with using Adobe Photoshop Elements which is an unbelievably complicated piece of software but what it can do to photographs is staggering, so I'm doing an hour or so a day. It's taken me three weeks and I can now re-size a photo.

The Kindle now and again drives me nutty. When you are reading an exciting book and you think it must be reaching the end, a mere feel on the 50 pages left tells you right up that it's not the case. With the Kindle you have a thin black line running along the bottom and no page numbers so you don't have a real feel for what's left.

It's now approaching 10 o'clock and she's complaining of being poorly, “Shivering to my bones I am”. “Not feeling right at all”. Now anyone with a history of SWMBO will know this is really a code for she wants something to eat i.e. “her medicine”, accompanied with a nice cup of tea. So I cycle to the supermarket on site and get a few fresh baguettes, one of which I fill with bacon and fried mushrooms, mine, hers is with bacon and then more bacon and a quick wipe round the frying pan.

I may have mentioned this before but Spanish bacon is like the bacon you got as a kid, slightly streaky and no bloody pan full of water when you fry it in it's own juices. Ten slices in a pack costing 95 cents and four slices into each baguette. “What are you doing with the other two?” “Putting them back in the fridge”. “Don't be silly, that's like putting the cork in a bottle of wine that's still a quarter full, just not done, not done at all!” “Putt them back were they belong, in that pan and then into half of a baguette, but with a little less tomato sauce 'cos I'm looking after my figure, then I'm going back to bed.”

She's now happy and the world moves on.

Been to El Parma, ride of about 12 miles, so getting there, increasing our mileage and fitness I hope.

El Palmar beach

The place is basically a surfers paradise, when the waves are big that is, fortunately not today as the wind was light. It must be absolutely packed in season, all that is there is parking space and bar/ restaurants. Got back and decided to clean the MS of insects at last, still some more work with the use of ladders.

El Palmar beach

Next was mending the slow puncture on the rear nearside, or offside, depending on which country you're driving in. Anyroadup my semi professional gun type puncture repair device did not do the job this time and so took it round to the local Kwik Fit equivalent place. They did it straight away, €17 including wheel balancing, which I thought was OK.

I'm been bit to buggery by mosquitoes and I'm sick of it. My legs look like a battlefield from World War I. One actually got me through my sock, how's that happen then?

Tricia is now fully cured from her earlier “illness” and is making sure she makes a full recovery as she is banging as much chicken into the oven as she can manage. These are chicken breast filled with blue cheese and wrapped in Parma Ham, should have been a soft garlic cheese but she picked up the wrong one, guess we try it tonight?

Not looking forward to bloody “24”.

Talked to brother Alan last night, most of the conversation revolved around how Sunderland were doing in the Premier league, as we usually do and our surprise that we (Sunderland) are lying 8^th!

Windows Bastid 7 is still playing up and I'm now getting “Windows 7, Build 7600, This copy of Windows is not genuine”. Yes it bloody well is or Amazon owes me £75! Turns out that the Dell 1737 laptop has a problem with W7, bloody great that is. Already done a complete re-install and it still thinks I running a cross between Vista and W7. Going to try with a brand new disk drive, re-install Vista and then upgrade to W7, as I only bought the upgrade version so it needs an existing OS, after upgrading my BIOS to version 1737_A08 and Roberts your Dad's brother. If anyone understands that, you are, like me, a very sad bastid indeed.

Ate the chicken, er.....not going to try that again I hope, it was so strong even English mustard couldn't tone it down and I didn't know if I was drinking wine or Bat's piss, mind you it was from Lidl so it could well have been the later.

“24” is getting worse if that's possible, last night we were treated to them running from terminal to terminal in an operations centre screaming “We haven’t got time”, all the time, have they never heard of a network or intranet?

On a very important recent birthday, more much later, I got a set of plastic, good quality thoughbut, cups, plates and bowls, from the Leadbetters, for the MS. I was absolutely thrilled because Jeanne L. had the very same set when we were camping in Mendigorria a few months back and I must have mentioned how I liked them. Now remember I said “thrilled” and the tragic part is I really was, it was as if I was seven and got a set of Scalextric!

Downside to the cups is that if you drink a lot of tea and coffee, as I do, they get stained. Although I knew the remedy I did not know that SWMBO had put it into action, you pour Domestos in them. You should then rinse them VERY thoroughly. So I comes up “That cup looks bloody clean must have not used it much, think I'll have a cup of coffee”. I would not recommend Columbian coffee with a hint of bleach, no sir.

Tuesday 26^th October 2010, still at PSJ, work to do.

Fit the original wheel back on, get ladders (not done for three days running), cycle to Conil to top up the mobile 'cos I still can't do it either from ATM or Internet, don't know why just never have been able to. Do some Adobe stuff and learn some more Spanish words.

We are OK on numbers, days of the week, amounts, the time, Lidl and Aldi speak, buying food etc. So SWMBO decided we were now doing parts of the body. So it's Cabeza for Head, (sounds almost like beer?), Pelo for hair, Ojo for eye, Clara for face, Nariz for nose and today it's oído for ear, oídos for ears, pop really.



El Palmar beach



The other big job is putting names/caption to the hundreds of pictures 'er indoors has been taking with her new camera, after looking a stacks of pictures of cows? “Because they're sweet, look at the babies!” Makes me weep, it really does, filling up my computer with gazillions of megabytes because this new camera is 14MP.

Stop press! Just been to the loo, talk about cutting the cheese, this was cutting the blue cheese and I had the place to myself in five minutes!

Been to Conil and back into the teeth of what seemed a gale but was quite honestly a brisk wind, so we are now lying out in the sun for a good long rest until dinner time. We went to get the Spanish mobile topped up and finally succeeded at last and now have €30 on it.

Tomorrow is market day in Barbate so I guess that's to look forward to.