The 23rd of April is world book day, because it’s the anniversary of the birth and death of William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes (author of “Don Quijote”), the death of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Josep Pla, the birth of Maurice Druon, Vladimir Nabokov, Manuel Mejía Vallejo and Halldór Laxness. Actually Shakespeare died ten days after Cervantes, both on April 23rd. How come? At the time, England used the…
No that isn’t a spelling mistake. It was Helen‘s birthday on Wednesday, and she said she didn’t really want anything you could buy in a shop. What she really wanted was some help with getting the house and garden sorted. So the whole family spent yesterday being serfs. We shifted the piles of vine prunings tot eh bonfire, where Theresa burned them. We dug out the old rubbish heap and…
Yponomenta gigas caterpillars and web. I’d never heard of caterpillars that make cobwebs before, but these do. Like many others caterpilars in the family of ermine moths, they form communal webs. I suppose it discourages birds from sticking their beaks in. My book on Canarian insects doesn’t mention them at all, but then they aren’t easy to find unless you know where to look. They live on the Canarian Willow,…
cloud waterfall400 Jigsaw Puzzle Because the island sits in the trade winds, damp air hits the northeast of the island and has to rise, where it turns into clouds. Because La Palma has a north-south spine called the Cumbre Nueva, the cloud quite often reaches up to the ridge and then tumbles over as the cloud waterfall. This is extremely pretty, and best viewed from around the western side of…
Funny how fast it changes. I found the missing files, and yesterday I had a fit of efficiency: I ordered the prints and posted them along with the baby hat, a magnet for my sister-in-law, a birthday card for the kid I sponsor in Sierra Leone, and a letter. Phew! And after I came home I critiqued a friend’s story and finished the first draft of my own. I’m doing…
I’m feeling horribly overloaded again. Since I spent the weekend having fun (gasp!) I’m behind with the housework. The Spanish have a very eloquent expression; “The house is falling on top of me”. That’s how I feel. I’m even more behind with the current translation. And I have a very nice problem in that someone’s ordered some prints from my website, and some of the digital files aren’t where I…