• The Seer’s Stone
  • The Dodo Dragon and other stories
  • About Sheila Crosby
  • A Breathtaking Window on the Universe

Wind

It’s windy today, even more than yesterday. In fact my son’s school is going to be shut tomorrow, due to the weather alert. My usual weather site says the wind’s gusting up to 57 km/h, which would be 7 on the Beaufort scale. I’d say those gusts are pretty constant, because every time I go outside, I feel I have to be careful. And theoretically, tomorrow should be worse. Mind…

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Argual Flea Market

The flea market in Argual, just outside Los Llanos, takes place every Sunday from about 10 am to about 2 pm. It’s smaller than the monthly market in Santa Cruz, but it’s a much nicer situation. I think it’s been a market square for a very long time. At any rate, it’s surrounded by beautiful old buildings and has trees growing in the middle (which must be really nice on…

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Fun at last

Lately it seems to have been all work and no play (except for writing just a little about my hamster secret agent every day). I’m behind with everything, and more stuff to do arrives faster than I deal with the old lot. So I felt it was urgent to recharge my batteries. I talked Helen and Theresa into visiting both flea markets today: the monthly one in Santa Cruz, and…

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SuperWASP, the Planet-Hunter

Most of the telescopes at the observatory here look spectacular even from the outside. SuperWASP looks like a big garden shed. It’s the white thing at bottom left. Even when it opens up, it still doesn’t look like a professional telescope. To me, it looks more like a small missile launcher. The equipment isn’t that spectacular either. As modern telescopes go, it was built for peanuts. It has eight cameras,…

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E-Bay Pain

On March 18th, my son wanted to buy a PS2 game on E-Bay. Of course that meant he had to use my account to do so. It meant running the anti-spyware scans, which was slow going, because at the time we were still recovering from the computer virus, but eventually we bought it and paid for it. The same evening I got an email saying the payment had been received…

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Prehistoric Rock Carvings

The people who lived here before the Spanish invasion in 1493 were called Benauaritas. Since they didn’t have writing, not all that much is known about them, and what there is comes from the invaders. Not exactly an unbiased source! Their technology was pretty basic, maybe because the climate in La Palma is kind enough not to encourage things like weaving. They wore skins, lived mostly in caves, herded goats…

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