i like to watch...

my humans sure are some kind of crazy... first they took away the old kitchen, which i didn't like one bit (the process i mean, not the kitchen), now they're building another one... in exactly the same place... go figure that one out!

the spanish one likes doing things with power tools that make interesting noises... the blonde australian one prefers standing on the sideline shouting instructions... i like to watch...

when they go to bed i carefully inspect all the day's work... on the whole it has been a very interesting experience, but i can't find my pollito and i worry that it has been thrown out with all the rubbish... i know the blonde australian one has a secret stash of them in reserve somewhere, but i suspect that she's forgotten where... so if anybody is reading this, please send more pollitos, urgently...

sama el gato

chupinazo!

today is the first day of the famous san fermin fiesta in pamplona... there are currently thousands of people crowded into the town square to mark the week-long most famous festival in spain... more information can be found here, check out the photo of all those people packed into the square!

sunday's progress...

three more cupboards in place (and hanging those bastards plumb on an inward bowing wall was no mean feat i might tell you), exhaust fan installed and operational (thank you fagor for suppling installation screws that were neither phillips or flat head, but some unknown star shape (?) that required quick trip to brother-in-law's place to borrow required screw driver and then being trapped in the car for nearly an hour while a bicycle race took place on the highway), oven installed and operational (again thank you fagor for supplying shortest power cable in the world that only reached power point via a good amount of creative hole drilling) and somewhere throughout the course of the day have pulled a muscle in my neck...

tomorrow, back to work, habm is working afternoon shift, and i have classes scattered throughout the days, so we will hardly be in the same place at the same time for the whole week... am now resigned to eating microwave meals (could experiment with new oven but am completely overwhelmed by size and thickness of said operating manual and may never figure out how to use it), living with everything packed into boxes, fridge conveniently located in the middle of the living room and doing the washing up in the bath for at least another week... i fear next weekend will be just as tedious as this one... but progress has indeed been made...

saturday's progress...

four cupboards in place, countertop provisionally in place for show, washing machine operational...

out with the old...

and in with, well nothing really....

it's 10pm and i'm sitting on the only available part of the sofa (and indeed the living room that is not covered with boxes or tools) clutching a glass of wine and seeking comfort in my computer... habm (poor bastard is working night shift this week) has gone to work, the cat has emerged from under the furniture and is dozing fitfully on the other inhabitable part of the sofa... after 5 hours of work, arguments and emergency trips to the hardware store we have so far managed to sort of put one kitchen cupboard in it's place... by "sort of" i mean i mean it's sort of hovering near where it should go, but can't go there yet due to various other factors including dodgy plumbing which are too tedious and mind numbing to bother explaining here...

this afternoon's exercise in futility may finally have convinced habm that "don't worry about potential problems until they jump up and bite you on the bum" attitude may not be the most appropriate in the current circumstances (ie we have nothing but a set of well cleaned tiles and one kitchen cupboard where the kitchen should be), and that a bit of planning and logistics might not go astray... either that or i'll keep serving him microwave eroski lasagne (which is the least horrifying of the microwave meals they have on offer) until he gets urge to move just a little bit more efficiently... my plan was to have a functioning kitchen in place by the end of the weekend...by functioning i don't mean every last detail has to be in place, but i do imagine cupboards (doors at this point would be considered a luxury), cooking facilities and running water...

the plan up to this point had all gone swimmingly... intensive pre-planning before hitting the ikea store paid off (nobody could plan for the incompetence of the ikea staff, but that's a story for another post if i ever have the energy), the furniture was duly purchased, collected and brought home... we very luckily got the key to the empty shop which is located below our building, and this we have been using as a warehouse and workshop... in the shop for the last week we have been assembling the ikea flat pack furniture, yesterday the whitegoods were delivered, the old ones taken away and the old kitchen dismantled and removed... last night i cleaned 20 years of grease and grime off the tiles, and today we were to start putting everything together and in place, with the aim to have a functioning kitchen by the end of the weekend...

and somehow or another it all kind of fell apart today... i'm not sure how really, but let's just say unexpected plumbing problems, not a single 90% angle in the place, and the fact that the apparently straight wall bows slightly outwards (which plays havoc with square kitchen cupboards) played a part... it would also seem that the old kitchen was cunningly cut to size to give the illusion of a straight line...

and so here i sit with with one cupborard, kind of in the general direction of where it will eventually go...


packing up the cupboards, el gato is ever helpful when it comes to packing things into boxes...



two wall cupboards down...



further dismantling and the oven is out...



the oven... just to prove to any of you who may have been thinking that i'm a "typical woman who always wants new things" (as many of my male students have informed me, rolling their eyes) that my complaints were justified... and before you make any hasty judgements on my slovenly housekeeping skills, might i just inform you that this was a house rented by university students for at least fourteen years, then taken over by habm and his male flatmate (both of whom never learnt a thing about cleaning from their spanish mothers) before i arrived on the scene...



the nice bit of professional plumbing work we discovered when we pulled out the cupboards... note the powerpoint ideally located in the middle of all that water (which may explain why i received electric shocks every time the stove was on and i touched the stove and the sink at the same time), the grease covered walls and the colour of the floor...



clean, clean clean, and very zen minimalist...



wtf have you done with the kitchen?

i'm having conversations with the great god of wine in the hopes that things will be a little more productive tomorrow...

fishtank tragedy...

those of you who are upset easily may not want to read this...

we woke up the other morning to discover one of the goldfish had died... while this in itself was not unusual (by this i don't wish to give the impression i'm some kind of serial goldfish killer, but they do, you know, die, from time to time) the manner in which this one departed the world was pretty gross...

She was a red oranda goldfish... as you can see from the photo in the link, that means she had a lumpy growth on her head, husband-acquired-by-marriage always referred to her as the one with "la txapela", ie, she looked like she was wearing a red beret...

a couple of months back she started getting really fat... she didn't so much swim around the tank, as wallow her way from side to side... we didn't know why she got so fat, and in a tank shared with two other goldfish, putting her on a diet was not really an option, so we waited to see what would happen...

and what happened next was her beret started growing, and over the course of a few days it swelled to enormous proportions, you could literally see the difference in size overnight... this also seemed to have some effect on her motor functions, she seemed to forget how to swim, and would spend minutes thrashing her front fins around whilst forgetting to use her tail to propel her to where she wanted to go...

and so we continued like this for one day more, until the morning when we woke up and found her floating on the top of the tank... her head had exploded...

we have another, younger one of those red orandas... i really hope this is not some kind of inherited defect (you know, like pug dogs who often suffer from respiratory problems) because i don't think i could stand it if the other one went the same way...

the project begins...

in ten minutes we will start assembling the ikea kitchen... i say ten minutes, because that is exactly the amount of time i am going to give husband-acquired-by-marriage to get out of bed before i march in there and inform him it's time to get up because we have to start assembling the kitchen and ikea kitchens don't just assemble themselves you know...

i am filled with trepidation by the whole plan... there's a hell of a lot of boxes there and am now regretting purchasing the cupboards with the pull out drawers that you can fill with a whole range of ikea cupboard accessories instead of the boring cupboards with shelves... shelves are easier to assemble than drawers... there will be bickering of course, and i fear there may be some shouting as well... i will try and maintain calm by composing blog posts in my head, i have one on the go entitled "being polite", another "the kindness of people you know" and a third which goes something like "why the staff at barakaldo ikea will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes"... but these, dear readers, will have to wait because husband-acquired-by-marriage has just emerged from the bedroom so off we go...

i have new crocs...

i've long been a fan of crocs, i know they're not the most attractive shoes you can put on your feet, and they don't really look good with a skirt, but they're really, really comfortable and light as a feather (which made them ideal to pack as the second pair of shoes on the camino de santiago and which was the reason i got into them in the first place)...

i knew that they'd started making other designs, but they hadn't made it here to the land of no spice accessible only by donkey... until the other day when i wandered into the shop downstairs and feasted my eyes on the new model recently arrived from the big smoke... featherweight and comfortable and just a little bit more stylish... I bought them immediately...it may be a long wait between donkeys...

does my language influence the way i think?

yesterday my friend james sent me an email pointing me to an interesting little snippet... this, he suggested, might explain a lot of the content in my blog...

i followed the link, read what was written, and thought it was interesting... but i had issues with the spanish example given, where it was explained that things (like keys) lose themselves...

extract here:

One of my favorite examples of this is something that Meg told me about years ago. In English, you might say something like, "I lost the keys" whereas in Spanish you could use a reflexive verb and say something more like "the keys lost themselves". Her guess was that difference makes Spanish speakers somewhat less likely to take responsibility for their actions...e.g. I didn't knock that vase over, it knocked itself over. (thx, david)

i emailed my friend and said i'd never heard people here using the reflexive form of "perder" (to lose) when talking about objects... about people yes, "se perdió en madrid" ("she got lost in madrid", or more literally "she lost herself in madrid") but objects no, i was pretty sure people took responsibility for the loss of objects in spanish...

the verb "to fall" (caerse) on the other hand i knew was always used in the reflexive, which means that a hell of a lot of objects around here "fall down themselves" here in the land of no spice...

some hours later i was watching a comedy program on television where a woman was talking about buying a gps to locate her socks when "they lose themselves"... it took me a minute or two to digest this information, and to check with husband-acquired-by-marriage that she had in fact said that, and yes this was in fact the common way to describe losing things (ie things lose themselves)...

this whole little episode has opened my eyes a lot to the way i view my second language and the way i use it... clearly my understanding of spanish is highly influenced by my first language (obviously) and having learnt it later in life i'm probably always going to be at least half thinking in english when i am speaking in spanish... so up to this point i would never have said that the socks had "lost themselves", (but i sure as hell am going to give it a try because hey, it sounds liberating not having to take responsibility for inanimate objects) but the spanish clearly do...i just chose not to hear it, or probably better to say i hear it but make automatic translations in my head into something that makes sense to my english brain!

the original source article How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think? by Lera Boroditsk is also extremely interesting, and i recommend you take five minutes to read it... it certainly made me rethink some of my assumptions and it may well go someway to raising some awareness in this house about the fundamental differences between us about things that seem so obvious to one, and so confusing to the other...

...the possibilities in all of this are endless... i'm wondering, for example, if "the car dented itself" excuse has legs??

Happy Birthday Mum!

today (well yesterday by now in Australia) is my mother's birthday... not the happiest of birthdays this time, as my mother attended the funeral of a dear family friend the day before, but i do hope there were some good moments just the same...



another long distance birthday, and a conversation with my mother got me thinking about childhood memories... here are a few, in no particular order...

- chatting with mum after school about the day's events in the sewing room where she was always working..
- mum making me grated apple with sugar on top when i was sick...
- dad sneaking into the bedroom to give me a cuddle and let me know it was all ok after i'd been sent to my room after doing something REALLY naughty and/or stupid...
- mum and i laughing ourselves stupid over friday night pink panther movies when dad was working (i still get the giggles when i think about the gorilla car chase scene)...
- dad very patiently teaching me to drive in his car and never once (that i can remember) losing his temper and yelling (although god knows he must have feared for the car more than once)...
- both of them not saying a word but patiently moving all our furniture into my first apartment in sydney which i shared with my first live-in boyfriend (who i'm sure they detested)...
- both of them very patiently going through all the whole getting married rigmarole to my first husband (who i know they detested)...
- both of them never saying "i told you so" when any of my mad plans, relationships, or decisions fell flat on their face...
- dad's additions to the household language including GOM, RON and OJ (to name three that spring to mind)...
- mum instilling in me a love of reading at an early age and filling my childhood with the likes of winnie-the-pooh, watership down, enid blyton, may gibbs, the wind in the willows, charlotte's web, alice in wonderland etc...
- mum helping out with all the homework and the endless school "projects", from which i'm not sure the kids learned much but the parents certainly must have gone crazy..
- mum, upon discovering i had stolen a chocolate bar from the supermarket, marching me back in there, and insisting on paying for it whilst informing the bewildered check-out chick "my little girl has just stolen a chocolate from your store"... oh the shame...
- mum teaching me the difference between "can i leave the table please?" and "may i leave the table please?" which has been immensely handy in teaching modal verb functions lately...
- dad ensuring that almost every family photo featured a pair of rabbit ears behind some unsuspecting family member's head...
- mum informing me that the burnt bits in the breakfast toast were vegemite so eat up (yeah right, i was only three but who the hell did she think she was kidding?)...
- dad trying to explain the difference between ohms, watts, and volts (which despite his best efforts i still don't really understand) to get me through high school physics...
- dad's unerring ability to fix anything electrical or mechanical (which i haven't inherited)...
- dad's unsettling ability to size someone up on first meeting and decide if they were a "wanker", "idiot" or "good bloke" and not that i can remember ever being proved wrong afterwards (unsurprisingly most ex-boyfriends and ex-husband have ended up one of the first two categories)...
- mum's apple pie...
- family holidays camping and caravaning all over the place, but especially the houseboat holidays...
- dad introducing me to photography and buying me my first camera...
- and both of them for bringing me up to believe that i could do anything i wanted to do, providing i worked hard at it...

that's probably enough for now...

happy birthday mum, and thinking of you, as always...

lots of love xxx

i had a rather excellent day today...

i'm on holidays this week thanks to San Juan who has been kind enough to have his special day celebrated on 24 June when the weather is usually fine... the fiesta de San Juan is particularly special in our little town, and this means that most businesses take the whole week off... yeah!! oh, but husband-acquired-by-marriage has to work this year... booh!!

so i've been amusing myself on holidays while habm works... today's little treat is one of my ultimate good days... first of all i walk from the town up to the little bario of udala, all very nice along country lanes & etc... then i leave the backpack in the bar in udala, and from there hike up to the top of udalaitx (mondragon's iconic mountain) where i pause for a bit to take in the view and then i head back down to the bar, pick up the backpack and head out the back of the bar to the swimming pool where i laze around for the rest of the afternoon...

seriously, this swimming pool is one of mondragón's hidden gems and one of the most beautiful i've ever visited... perched high above the valley, they provide you with sunlounges and sun umbrellas, there's a restaurant where you can order very nice bocadillos and a good bottle of wine, and you can take in the sun on the terrace with stunning views of the surrounding mountains... very, very civilized!!


yes, yes, i know you've all seen this photo before, but i just wanted to put into perspective exactly what i climbed this morning...


and this is what udalaitx looks like from a bit higher up in the bario of udala...


halfway up, and the view across the valley...


a zoom of the same shot, just so you can see better my reward for all my hard labours... the swimming pool!


at the top...


and now it's time to relax...

i am customer of the month...

yesterday we went to visit the long-suffering woman in the local electrical goods store and ordered our fridge, washing machine (or machine washing as some students like to call it), exhaust fan, oven and cooktop... they will be delivered next week, the old appliances will be taken away and disposed of humanely and we don't have to pay until we've tried the new ones for a couple of weeks to see if we like them... and they gave us a 20% discount for buying so many things at once... on top of that we will then get a discount because husband-acquired-by-marriage is a member of the borg collective fagor group... all very satisfactory...

in light of our newly acquired customer of the month status i will be expecting my photo on the front page of the fagor website (as i informed one of my students i ran into in the town last night), and perhaps a designated parking spot in the company parking lot that is not half a kilometre from the factory entrance...

something that is not about kitchens...

i realise i may be running the risk of alienating some of my regular readers by turning this into a renovating-my-kitchen blog... so for those of you who couldn't give a toss about the colour of my kitchen cupboards, here is a nice photo for you to look at...



and here are some other photos taken on one of our recent walks in the valley...

awol update...

marking exams and writing evaluations is now finished.. hooray! now serious and obsessive perusal of ikea website and whitegoods can begin in earnest... also feel am ready now to take a deep breath and step inside the ikea store, but this dubious pleasure will have to wait till saturday as husband-acquired-by-marriage is working afternoon shift this week...

when i complained that saturday was a long time to wait he suggested that i go by myself, his point being that as i would have the final say what did i need him for? silly man, obviously i need someone to consult when i have doubts (and then dismiss their suggestions out of hand), and someone to lift the heavy objects off the top shelves in the self-service warehouse...

the author of this blog is temporarily awol...

it's june, and close to the end of the teaching year... holidays are approaching and that means exams and evaluations... i have in excess of 50 students, that's more than 50 exams to mark and more than 50 evaluations to write... if i can manage one evaluation in 15 minutes, that's... well you do the maths.. frankly i'm too tired... and i'm getting sick of thinking up synonyms for words like "enthusiastic" and "motivated"...

all of which means that other projects are currently on hold, including devoting inordinate amounts of time studying the ikea catalogue and deciding exactly which model of fagor washing machine/oven/fridge/cooktop/exhaust fan is appropriate for a girl with champagne tastes on a beer budget...

the oven still doesn't work (thanks for asking) and you'd be amazed at how many things one simply must cook with an oven when one doesn't have one... one is getting very tired of pan fried steak/chicken/fish and salad...

normal services will resume when evaluation hell is over...