Whew, what a week! On Monday I did the panoramic tour with the Saga Pearl (basically, “Lovely views and quite a few of them”). On Tuesday and Wednesday I worked at the Roque. The first group on Tuesday included a French couple who didn’t speak any English or Spanish. I think they expected to just look, but I felt I had to try, so my extremely rusty French got a…
I took a mini-break to stay at my friend Alison’s new B&B in the Caldera. It was marvelous. How could any writer now be inspired by a spot like this? Rivendell is a good name. It’s “a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.” And here’s the view: I arrived later than…
The lurgy’s doing better than I am. Well no, it’s not that bad in the cosmic scheme of things, but I’m tired and getting a lot less done. I did manage to wrangle chapter 40 into some sort of shape and now I’m struggling with chapter 41. These are very short chapters and it’s not supposed to take a whole week to edit one, or even rewrite it. This morning…
Yay, I got out of the rut a little. We went to see the Queen tribute band, “God Save the Queen” in Tazacorte. We had to think twice about it, because it made for a late night followed by an early start next morning, but we really enjoyed their concert in Santa Cruz last year and we don’t get out of the rut often. After some thought, I asked to…
Today’s visit to Gran Telescopio Canarias was a bit different. Most of the group were bikers from Gran Canaria. It made for a good photo op as they left.
My voice has been working much harder than usual. As well as the usual tour guiding, I gave a talk about the observatory to a group of about 60 people. My first talk with a PowerPoint presentation. It went rather well. At least I think they liked it, because they bought quite a few books. Then I had three parties: great fun, but of course rather noisy. So now I’m a…