Yep, for a week at least. Not exactly a downpour more like steady drizzle then stop for a while. Slight negative we have is that we are parked under one of the largest pine trees on the site and so we get to have our own miniature weather system. Works like this, raining stops, but our tree has amassed hundred's of litres on it's pines and branches and so when everybody else is walking around in the dry, we are getting rained on for twenty minutes more.
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| Our tree |
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| Shop etc. |
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| The PSJ site |
After being beaten again recently, last night I went back to my G&T (she gets drunk quickly on G&T's) strategy and beat her 3 – 0 and ended up dodging dominoes, all round the MS, as she threw them at me.
This rain reminded me of when we lived “in”, for the first year of my sentence, with SWMBO's mother, “MEGA” SWMBO. In a large miner's house, in a small village called Whitburn, on the north east coast of England,. Nearby, close to the famous Marsden Rock, was Souter Lighthouse. It rained a lot up there and M SWMBO had a saying, “If you cannot see Souter Lighthouse, it's raining, and if you can actually see Souter Lighthouse, it's about to rain”.
One thing about a lighthouse is that it comes with a very large fog horn and you may not be able to see it but you can hear it well enough. So when it was foggy, in between the rain, living less than a mile from the bloody thing was tantamount to all night torture. The sound it made was blasted miles out to sea, which of course is what's it's designed for. Trouble was when it stopped at say, 3:30 am, you couldn't get to sleep again because by now you missed it!
It was a great help, especially financially, as we were able to save for the deposit on our very first house, which turned out to be in...................NEWCASTLE!, oh the shame! Now going from a single fire house in Sunderland to a fire in almost every room (not Tricia's for some reason, so we had to snuggle) because as a Coal Board house, you got free coal. So on a freezing cold evening in say late July, instead of tamping down the fires M SWMBO would open the windows!
They had a dog called Mac, my nemesis, more much later.
One day we sat down to Sunday dinner and when finished I noticed a single Yorkshire pudding left on the tray and as they are up there with sex and Sunderland AFC, I grabbed it and it was gone.
The look I got from M SWMBO was withering, I could actually feel gonads retreating into my body cavity. “That was Mac's Yorkshire pudding!” What! A pudding for a dog! I'm sorry, I like dogs don't get me wrong, but a dog eats dog food, not human food, and especially not Yorkshire puddings! This was the first of many such run ins and that bloody dog was at the bottom of all of them.
It was actually in Whitburn Church I was first cursed at, “Do you take this woman.......”.
Thought I had a sty in my eye the other day but it's turned out to be a bloody mossie bite, how can that be? How can it land on my eyelid, suck gallons (not litres mind) of blood out of it and I don't feel a thing? After a recent visit to Mercadona the other day we are even more armed to the teeth with some extra sprays to go with the little lighty up thingies. I bet you are not suffering many mossies back in Sussex, minus 6 last night wasn't it?
So we are planning on reading and sitting around a lot and going for the odd drive to “interesting” places. A revisit to Gibraltar's shopping and cheap petrol is not out of the question either. That's the beauty of a 5th wheel set up over a large RV, we’ve got a vehicle to do things like that. A large RV cannot easily “pop to the shops”, or “let's have a drive round Cadiz's narrow streets”, and if it's peeing down, cycles are not really user friendly either.
So it looks like a drive to Medina-Sidonia, a small town about 25 miles due north, across to the lakes for a picnic and then back, total distance about 70 miles.
Thursday 25th November 2010, PSJ and it's not raining yet.
It's 7:15 am, I'm up she's not and won't be for most of the morning, main reason being she decided to have one (or five) of my 5.6% strength beers. Which meant that after demanding to watch Zulu, with all those semi naked big black men (no, silly they were in it, well I hope they were) she also issued orders that bread should be unfrozen and sandwiches made. Crabsticks and egg and tomato topped the list, with lots of mayonnaise. Then it was, sweets, nuts and chocolate until I finally herded her off to bed, sans Penguin hot water bottle, 'cos she couldn't feel a thing by now.
So I'm sitting here typing this and all I can hear from the bedroom is whistles, burps and snoring interspersed with the odd grunt and sigh thrown in. Better get the kettle on about noon.
Around noon we decided to go for a cycle ride as the threatened midday rain didn't look like it was going to happen. So set off in the general direction of Vejer and the “yellow brick road”. Turned onto a narrow track just after a very steep hill, which Tricia had to walk the last bit (wimp!), and after about 100 m it turned to the most glutinous mud you have ever seen. It got so bad we turned round but by this time my wheels would not go round as the mud had jammed under the mud guards. (not, apparently, so aptly named, I would ask?)
Took us a while to get going and by now we were both, and the bikes, covered in mud. The picture was taken “after” I had cleaned off enough to move the thing. Still managed nearly 9 miles, so something. It took nearly 4 hours to complete the job as for some reason we became as popular as ice cream on a hot day, no we were not selling ice cream and it was not exactly hot, merely warm. We are at the very bottom of the camp site, otherwise know as, anti social bastids corner. We don't care, we like the quiet and therefore people need to go out of their way to talk to us. Well, for some reason, today they decided to come down for a chat. It was like Piccadilly Circus on a Saturday! They were almost queuing up! Eventually SWMBO's low sugar levels kicked in and she was gone. Inside the MS to cook up some lunch and I joined her, back out to finish the job and there's someone else!
Eventually got finished, showered, dinner, a large G&T for SWMBO and then it was one episode of “Edge of Darkness”, you can't sit through two as you would tend to slit your throat, it's pretty dire and depressing in places. Then finish off with two episodes of “House”, which involved a young child dying of cancer and a black guy suffering from a flesh eating disease, to cheer us up.
Friday 26th November, 2010, PSJ waiting for the deluge.
Apparently the week end is going to be a wash out, literally that is. Saturday, they are predicting 55 mm (almost 2.5 “ in old money) so cycling and walking are right out and lying down and reading is going to be the thing.
Got up 7'ish and went for SSS and as I was shaving remembered my daughter, Heather or Mini SWMBO as she is sometimes known, telling me that if I did not do a good job of shaving the hairs in my nose I'll look like an old crusty git. Now I'm now using my new “6” bladed wet shaver, obviously the old “3” bladed shaver was useless. How did my Dad manage with just a single one, perhaps he started the original trend of having a permanent stubble, who knows? (pun?) Anyway, so I stuck the 6 bladed thing up my right nostril and “Hey Presto!” and my nose is in bits, blood everywhere and the mossies are scrambling around for a piece of the action. So the middle S is off the SSS menu for a while until it heals up.
The new regime of using the Nationwide credit card for everything seems to be working. As they (NW) now charge for using their debit card for any transactions in Europe, but don't for credit card transactions, we use the latter. Seems utterly stupid I know.
In the past I have always paid cash and only use credit cards as a last act, because as my Mum used to say “You know where you are then”. Now admittedly she was Irish and used to come out with some strange sayings, as I've mention in previous blogs, “If I'm in, I'm in and if I'm out, I'm out”, was one of her more clearer ones but “You know where you are then”, has always stumped me.
Still it's working and has an added benefit; I now keep a spreadsheet (I know, how sad is that) and keep a record to the precise cent on how much we spend, keeping an eye on the cash coming in from pensions and rent. So by careful manipulation and the fact that I've got bugger all else to do, I can maximise the amount we keep in savings. Obviously the 5 day wait at either end of paying in and out and the “massive” interest rates we get now are not really conjusive to this practice and hardly worthwhile. But if I can save even 50 cents a month, I don't care, just so those bastids can't have it. Mind you the, savings account I ship it to is owned by Santander, so it's just another set of “banking” bastids who have got it, shit!
Tricia was washing up after breakfast and suddenly let out a yelp. The path was awash with cattle, with those BIG horns, and is the one we regularly use when going for a walk in the “natural park”. They were running along it and up the verges, so if we were on it at the time I don't know what we would have done except that if we had survived SWMBO would have been in therapy for months!
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