Santa Cruz de la Palma, Los Llanos, and most big villages will have a public dance to celebrate new year. In some cases, that blocks the traffic. For example, Santa Cruz’s main road along the sea front will be shutting at 10 pm. (If you need to get through, use the bypass inland.) Many people dress up – I mean really dress up, as though they were going to the…
One of my new year’s resolutions for 2010 was to send out two submissions per week. Note that this doesn’t mean two new stories — on average I have to send out each story about ten times before it sells, and then I often try for reprint sales. But nothing’s going to sell sitting on my hard drive, is it? Well, two sales per week comes to 104 in a…
The 28th of December is Holy Innocents’ Day, which commemorates the massacre of the innocents by Herod in Matthew’s gospel (although according to Wikipedia, it’s probably not a historical event). In Spain and Spanish-speaking countries, it’s the Spanish equivalent of April Fool’s Day. For example, one year I told my husband that the police had been around asking whether he’d been jogging in the nude. Now my husband does go…
This year the tall ships will be meeting in the port of Santa Cruz de la Palma for Christmas again. It looks as though there will be fewer ships than usual, because of the bad weather we’ve had lately. But there’ll be the usual flea market from 9:30 to 6 pm, the opportunity to visit some of the ships from 10:00 to 12:30, and live music from 10:30 to 6…
Last month I made a (roughly) scale model solar system ready for a group of school kids visiting the telescopes – and then the visit got cancelled by bad weather. Ah well, sooner or later it’ll get used. Here at last is a photo of it. The sun is far too small – it should be about 10 x larger. And then, anticlockwise from the sun, we have marbles for…
You may remember the fuss in 2001 when two geologists, Steven Ward and Simon Day, announced their theory that the west side of the island of La Palma would collapse one day, creating a mega-tsunami that would cross the entire Atlantic and still be anything up to 25 metres high when it hit New York, and indeed everything from Newfoundland in Canada to Recife in Brazil. These days, almost all…