Tomato Jam

In case you wondered why I finished my last blog post so hastily, it was because Ian was hovering as we'd agree to go for a walk. The sun was - and indeed still is - shining, but the weather forecast is showing more rain, so we decided to go out this morning. The weather forecasts are generally 100% accurate so we decided to go while we could.

The countryside was FULL of Spanish people. I can only think that there was some 'first day of asparagus season' competition going on. There actually wasn't much around. However I can't think of any other reason why there would be so many people around. They weren't hunting or working on trees, nor did they appear to be walking with a purpose, it was more like lurking among olive groves, which can only mean asparagus.

By the way - this is tomato jam.




Which is a sweet jam and which was also a bit of a surprise....

Calm After the Storm

Yesterday we had amazing high winds. No rain, but very strong winds. We'd missed the 'don't go out unless you need to' warnings and headed off to Azuaga to the supermarket and then had a picnic under a tree. We had to stay in the car as the wind would have taken our sandwiches away, but we arrived home unscathed. Azuaga is very exposed and there was certainly a lot of debris around. The wall at the other end of the field has fallen down, but we were OK - no tiles off the roof either. It was one of those funny days where the wind was noticeably warm. I guess that means it was coming up off the Sahara.

I'd been reading about the water system and reservoirs. Some people have been getting worried that one of the reservoirs is getting very full. Someone from the water board was replying in the paper that this is part of their new water management system where they are going to fill one reservoir up and then when the rains stop they'll then fill up other reservoirs from this one main one and distribute the water according to need.

Hola Asparagus

Kate had noticed that a year ago yesterday was the first time we went picking asparagus in 2009 and as the rain had disappeared yesterday afternoon, with occasional flashes of sun, we decided to chance our arm and head out to one of our favourite olive groves to see if the season had started yet.

The picture above probably tells the story quite succinctly. There's not much asparagus about and only in very sheltered spots so far, but we did pretty well on the almonds front - that's the almonds filling most of the bowl. The chickies had produced an egg too when we got back so I added some of our eggs into the pic too for variety - I'm an artist you know!

Is this the most rain since...

Ian and I have been mulling over whether this is the most rain that we've seen ever. And then I looked at our blog from last year and saw that we were saying exactly the same thing then - at exactly the same time! Although I think a year ago I was saying that we were seeing little suns on the weather forecast, whereas we still have little rain clouds for the coming week. It must end soon though - it is nearly asparagus time. It's getting warmer though, Basil has been spent the last couple of nights outside.

We had to pop into Llerena yesterday to go to the post office. Our post man does me the favour of weighing things by hand and then rounding down to save us money - which is why thing then take an age to be delivered (last year's Christmas cards, for instance, arrived in February!). Trouble is, we go into Llerena so rarely that it would probably be quicker to send things from the village anyway. When we were there we saw the lottery ticket seller who sold the ticket for the 11 million dollar win and I was musing as to whether his sales would have gone up seeing that he had sold the winning ticket, or gone down on the basis that it wouldn't happen twice...?

There's a concert on Saturday to raise money for Haiti, I was thinking about taking my ukulele along, perhaps they'll pay me not to! I have found a website that I can strum along to. Ian is delighted!

Impression

Well, Ian has spent much of this week honing his impression of me falling over in the mud. Patently his memory is as flawed as his acting ability. He has missed totally the cried shout of 'it's ok to walk up here' which preceded my disappearing into a quagmire.

I've smiled politely, however, as he has spent a lot of time clearing my workshop out. It is very damp in there, with standing water much of the time. We'll need to clear it when Manuel comes to do the roof, so it hopefully was time well spent. There has been a LOT of rain. A house collapsed in Azuaga, killing a child because of the roof getting waterlogged as a result of so much rain. The weather forecast is showing 100% chance of rain for the next four days and then a sun. I seem to remember that it was like this last year as Manuel was doing the front of the house and they couldn't work for a couple of days because of the heavy rain followed by sudden sun - and then Antonio got sunstroke and they couldn't work for another couple of days.

Someone from Llerena won 11 million euros. The ticket seller works in the hospital and in the bar over the road. I think it was a syndicate of hospital workers and patients. I wonder if it was anyone I know. The lottery is run by the society for the blind and it was their biggest ever payout.

Off to buy a lottery ticket.....

Mud

We went for a walk yesterday afternoon, returning to find that there was dancing at the nave. This seemed odd, but everything seems a little topsy-turvy this year. Carnival, which I thought was always celebrated before Mardi Gras, this year is being celebrated next weekend, which doesn't seem that Lent-like. I noticed when we went to Portugal that they had posters up saying that Carnival was starting on the 19th, and we both commented that this was odd, however I've now noticed that it's the same here, Llerena etc. Good job we didn't turn up at the Nave Saturday night in our fancy dress.

Anyway, we didn't go to take a look at the dancing as we didn't know what it was about - and because I was covered in mud. Not a little mud, but a huge mud-monster amount of mud. Ian and I differ in our memories of how it happened. I remember his saying 'walk up here, it's not so muddy', which he now doesn't remember saying. However I sank up to my knees in a muddy patch and I fell over. I was wearing my Crocs and they had disappeared completely. Luckily, after digging me out, Ian dug the Crocs out, and they were full with mud so we had to wash them in a puddle. I was exactly at the half point in our walk, so I was drying and crusting by the time we got home. Ian did manage not to take a photo of my mud misery, which was nice of him and showed a great deal of restraint!

If you've been following Ian's photos on Flickr, then you will see that yesterdays was a heart that he'd carved in the wall of the barn. I must admit, I did wonder what he was doing, as had disappeared into the barn and he kept coming into the house, bloody handed to warm up in front of the fire. I was sat there, lips pursed as we had agreed to forsake fun and work on our knitting and crochet websites instead, and I know that this might not be Ian's favorite thing, but scraping the skin off his fingers and hiding in the barn seemed like extreme measures to get out of it. However when the heart was unveiled all was forgiven!!

Why dont my chicken pictures look like this

feb_13, originally uploaded by ian_pullen.

Ian's picture yesterday was of one of our cockerels. Why don't mine look so arty? His most popular photo so far is the one of the toilet. I'm not sure what that says about his work...!!

Pullen's Pics

Ian is thinking about selling postcards, calendars and prints from some of his photos. This is quite exciting. Luckily, there are several places where you can sell photos online. The biggest is Etsy.com which is a large international handmade online marketplace, but there are some smaller places too. I don't think he'll be calling himself 'Pullen's Pics' though.

I'll try to talk him out of selling the self portraits...

Ian has shaved his beard off

well, most of it...

feb_10_after, originally uploaded by ian_pullen.

Badajoz and Portugal

We went to the rastro in Badajoz yesterday then nipped across the border to stock up on Vinho Verde, which is a light Portuguese wine that we like. How extravagant to go to another country to get our wine!! It was a really nice day, over 17 in the sun, but still chilly in the shade.

Knitting Freedom has now be launched, it's here - knittingfreedom.com. This is the one that Ian and I had artistic differences over. I liked the knitting princess, however she got relegated from the top of the page to the bottom as Ian wanted something more professional looking. We've got over 1000 links, but there are thousands left to find. It's still work in progress as we've a long way to go to build the database up. But by getting it live now the search engines can start to find it and index it which takes a bit of time.

We had a sort of disaster on FreeNeedle. All but 12 of our links 'disappeared' for 48 hours, so there were just empty pages. Interestingly, our advertising income actually went up those days as people found the empty pages and clicked on adverts rather than sewing patterns. It took us two days to find out - not a good user experience, but hopefully we won't have lost too many visitors long term.

Crochet Freedom will be next to launch, and then I want to rebrand the Christmas one to 'celebrations and holidays' to broaden the appeal.

I remember when....

I remember that over the years, I have said how I longed to write a blog post that said 'not much to report'.

So here it is...

Not much to report

I'm not complaining, as it is quite nice to be leading some sort of settled and normal life, however there is a danger that the blog might end up as 'had jacket potatoes for lunch'.........