It’s been a productive weekend. I’ve been working on an ebook of my SF stories. The stories themselves have each been published at least once, but I still had to produce things like a foreword, biography and acknowledgements, which took much longer than expected since I’ve never done it before. Then there was the problem of where to put information like, “This story was first published in Jackhammer ezine in…
Well, maybe it was the cold at Acropark, and maybe not, but I just spent a week achieving approximately nothing. Well yes, I went and helped friends as an interpreter at the unemployment office on the morning before and the morning after the lurgy, and I sort-of kept up with laundry and minimal housework, but I didn’t do any writing. So I hope the weekend will be better. But today…
There’s a new adventure playground in Breña Alta called Acropark, and we finally got there today. In spite of the mist, I loved it. They give you a proper safety harness and show you how to use it. You’ve got two clips, so you’ve always got at least one clipped onto the lifeline. That meant that I felt safe using both hands for the camera. We went on the…
Francis Drake tried to enter Santa Cruz harbour on November 3rd, 1585. This was after Drake was knighted and before the defeat of the Spanish armada. Drake left Plymouth with 23 ships and over 2,000 men, heading for the Caribbean. The prevailing winds meant that the logical route was via the Canary islands, so he headed for the biggest port in the Canaries at the time – Santa Cruz de…
The oldest rocks on La Palma are 2,000,000 years old, which is very young for geology. But the youngest rocks are just 40 years old, and it’s their birthday this month. The Teneguía volcano erupted during October and November of 1971. My husband was a teenager at the time, and he remembers going to see it from the San Antonio volcano, and he remembers hearing the deep rumbles at…
Exotic-looking dragon trees grow throughout the Canary Islands, and also in Cape Verde, the Azores, Maderia, and western Morocco, but the north of La Palma is one of the few places where they’re still reproducing naturally. The Canary Islands used to have a large, flightless bird, something like a Dodo. This bird ate dragon tree fruits, so the seeds evolved to have a hard protective covering to survive the bird’s…