Dennis Hollingsworth

Up, Periscope...

Hello everybody! I/we really feel like a submariner without a dsl connection. We have an internet cafe just a few doors down the street, an African by the name of Hamed runs it. Islam prayer calculators on the counter and groups of Muslim guys hang in the streets at night (we don?t see them much, but when we do it seems they hang together tight), all very quiet. All this mixed with tourists checking emails.

The telephone is due in a week or two (we don?t really know much more than that we are on Telefonica?s waiting list... they say the adsl will be available shortly after), until then, teh weekly reports are all we got.

Last Tuesday, a friend took us to the local Home Depot, or Bauhaus as the the buiding stores are known here. I was bummed out after visiting the local hardware stores here in Tossa since the prices are sky high. After visiting Bauhaus, I realised that we could buy super discounted tools manufactured in Eastern Europe. We blew a few hundred on basics (cordless drill, saber saw, house paintings supplies, an axe, lighting, stuff like that) and off we were to the home improvement races.

I thought that we would spend one day scraping the walls, one day prepping and one day painting. The plan was to get the first floor together... it?s a stone building that?s three hundred years old... and it sits on beach sand, where capillary action draws water up into the walls, causing the plaster and paint to fuzz up and pop off to the floor in a pile of dirt (people here call it "polvo", hay mucho polvo en nuestro floors)...there?s also an old wainscot that skirts these crumbling walls, no doubt to cover the crumble, and it?s perfect for teh old bar/restaurant but nasty for a home, so we began to take some of them off and burn the wood in the fireplace (and the temperature is getting warmer now, guys), hay mucho lena (where,s the frickin?enye key here?), anyway...

Anyway, we?ve been scraping for three days now. I feel like a miner, there?s so much dust. And today, we?ve been painting for the first time. Alll day, and we only got the kitchen done. Brutal. The paint is funny, like a mix of paint and plaster. You have to goop it on in the crumbly places in a certain manner so that the mortar doesn?t slip and give way under your brush.

So that?s been the routine so far. I wish we could get pics on this blog for you all. Later, lots of pics later when we get online. Our TV is from the old restaurant, all old and a little busted. All we get is BBC World and that?s with the cable all twisted up in a pretzel. In other words, not much news. Trouble in Irak, America?s fault. A train blows up in NKorea, America?s fault. And the news is short and repeated all day long.

We watch movies on our laptops at night, rewatching them over and over. Stephanie?s into making paella (a kind of Spanish Risotto with seafood), she?s done it twice now. The food is great... not the variety we have in the States, but lots of character (for example, we?ve been cooking sliced baby artichokes that are home grown), there?s a farmer?s market on Thurdays that?s cool.

Gotta go. We are going to hear our frined Ana sing in a choral here at the inglesia (church) right next to our place. Super cool. Ana is the daughter of Joan and Rosa, mom?s friends. We hear that ther is a big football game tonight, Barcelona vs Madrid... and we can watch and drink cortados in a nearby bar. Oh yea...

I?ll try to get to the internet cafe after the game tonight to reply to some emails. Laters!