Sunday night was the peak of the Persaid meteor shower, so the local astronomical amateurs were going to meet at a viewpoint ont he ridge of the island. I was keen to see the shooting stars and keen to get to know some more amateur astronomers, so I decided to go, even though it was an hour’s drive away. Then I remembered that I’d promised to take my son camping…
Lourdes (my friend and student) and Luca (my husband’s friend and work colleage) got married last night. I was chief photographer. I’d been rather nervous about it, beause I hadn’t done a wedding for about ten years, and this would be the first one with my new digital camera. Worse, the flash gun I’d ordered in May specially for this wedding hadn’t arrived until mid July. After using it for…
On Friday I showed another group of tourists around the William Herschel Telescope. Afterwards they were going on to GranTeCan, which is the huge telescope the Spanish are building at the Roque (see Thursday, July 26, 2007). I managed to tag along and finally see inside. I’ve seen a lot of telescopes, and I knew it was huge, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sheer size of the thing.This…
Although our garden is tiny, our balconies are large, and this year I decided to see if I could grow a little bit of organic veg in containers. For one thing, there’d be no food miles involved. My friends from Franceses gave me three pea plants. When we went on holiday, they were about a foot high. When we came back they were about four feet high, and caterpillars had…
Last night I went to a hen party – my first in 16 years of living in Spain. It wa great fun of course. Here’s the bride-to-be with two of the entertainers. And I’ll leave the decoration on the cake to your imagination! All in all, I’m really not sorry that my tour-guiding job today was cancelled. It meant that I didn’t have to go easy on the drink and…
We’ve had a heatwave, and I’ve been busy. On Monday afternoon as I passed through town with my son, the thermometer outside the port read 40C (104 F). In that sort of heat, you don’t feel like doing much, although I did continue my battle against the fleas. On Tuesday my friends Helen and Theresa finally collected their Spanish number plates, so later that morning I went with Helen to…