Bedrock

Not something you’d expect in the South of Spain in summer, but here’s our local river in Galera after the floods, just as the sun was re-appearing… the weather was bad enough to have me wake up in the early hours – hence the photo taken early evening once the sun re-emerged…

Driving around the town itself, Aguilas down at the coast looks fairly average for an over-populated Spanish seaside resort.  However, once you get down to the beach, parts of it perk up nicely. This isn’t the first time we’ve taken this trip and it won’t  be the last. The waterfront is, IMHO much nicer than some other areas.

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Got out of bed a little late this morning but quickly made up for it – first job was to wire one of my new custom home control timers into the hot tub and doing a little software update to get it all working smoothly,

after which, Maureen and I did a joint job working on photos for the Altiplano Camera Club stand at tonight’s Galera festival.

As most of the many thousands of photos I’ve created over the years and put up on Flickr are edited for HD screen use, I had to get a little creative to get them to fit into standard photo frames (which typically still use a format not seen on screens other than apple in many years). On top of that, the dynamics of my Canon photo-printer are very different to a typical screen.

Meanwhile Maureen was practicing her skills with a knife to actually adjust the finished prints to fit into the (glass + wood or card) frames we picked up last week. All of this together took several hours but we were all ready to go help out with the stand by teatime. As it turns out, it seems we could have settled for simpler DIY frames – but what’s done is done.

Of course, being a festival, there was a large turnout in the village and doing a little to help, pre-opening time, we took time out to meet up with friends old and new (way too many to go into detail) at La Posa bar. Blog readers Gary and Jen will no doubt see this and we met up with them briefly in town. We also chatted with several other friends before returning to the club stand for a time to see if more help was needed.

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Well, it’s all happening this morning…

We got a call from a non-English-speaking DHL driver this morning (just after the second Alexa alert in 2 days to say we have packages from Amazon on due today – yesterdays’ didn’t turn up) to say “Peter” then something in Spanish then “Posa”. We headed off down to Pizzeria La Posa, intercepted on the way by the DHL van who had decided after all to deliver to the house – thank goodness there is only on way up to our place.

The driver handed over the slightly bashed parcel and off we went to the cafe where we met Bob from the Altiplano photo club who answered some questions I had about supplying club-promotional photos for the forthcoming Galera fair (Sunday August 18, 2019). Looks like I got over-enthusiastic about the photo frames.

Weather in Galera is sunny but calm today, a good time for some writing and a spot of painting… so our next stop was the local ferreteria.

When in doubt, check local stores. After gasping at the price of a 6-way mains extension on Amazon.es (€14, just under £14 – not only that but there’s a good chance of it ending up in the local pub), I was pleased that my neighbour/friend Dave picked me up an extension during his trip to the coast for a mere €9 – then THIS MORNING while looking for a quick paintbrush purchase at the local ferreteria, I noted the same thing at a staggering €4.90 and bought one. Pays not to make assumptions about prices at local stores.

Now, I would tell you the name of this hardware store in Galera, Granada (Spain) but he has to be the last store on the planet to NOT be on Google Maps. He is however on Calle Cervantes, just seconds away from Parque Infantil Sanchez Faba.

I have to do a technical write-up elsewhere about the sockets and an update on a couple of smart bands (watches ) I  just received so that’s about it for this entry.

Last night after a hot day in which Maureen went off to yoga and I spent the day working on my tech blog,so then not unusually, Maureen and I took two of our cats out for a walk (one chickened out and went back home alone as he often does) and on our way back, we bumped into a couple of Scottish friends, made arrangements for later in the week then took yet another pair of friends back to our cave for a chat.

That led to a late night as is often the case and when they left, instead of going off to bed as might’ve made sense, we started scouring Netflix, Amazon and ShowBox for something to watch – no joy, nothing even remotely interesting.

I don’t know what started me off but I went looking in desperation for the movie “Stepford Wives” and this appeared in a date order search through ShowBox. It didn’t take me long to realise that something was wrong.

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Like parts of the UK, though FAR more consistently, we’ve been having a heat-wave here in Southern Spain recently. Hardly a day has gone by in the past month without the mid-afternoon temperature topping 38c (maybe 100f) in the shade. Accordingly we’ve not done a lot of travel on foot as it is easier to hide indoors or drive somewhere in the heat.

That’s not stopped several car trips as far off as Gibraltar and to various local pools and it CERTAINLY hasn’t stopped us popping out regularly to cafe-bars like Emilio’s (Los Carriones, near Castillejar) for coffee and Tostada – that’s on the cards for this morning in fact.

The weather hasn’t stopped Spanish workmen either – as you see here, three of them drilling holes in the fountain in Galera town centre – the photo really does not convey the fact that it was stinking hot at the time..

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