Building building building

This is a small sample of the complete mess the house is in now...I hardly dare look at it, and thanks to our superb builder Francisco Leon, master ruin saver and generally as sweet as he is short, a man of incredible patience when it comes to explaining things to us ignoramuses (please don't let me regret those words, so far he has been a pure joy to work with...) I don't have to worry too much about it right now. The work is mainly gruntwork now and his team of Russian strong and silent men are just getting on with it, at a breakneck speed. I guess our input will be more required when it comes down to the details, as usual.

The cold has set in, and has been quite brutal for a few days. Well, or perhaps we are just wimps. One good thing with building in the winter is that you become acutely aware of such necessities as central heating, how to lead the chimneys from the log fires so that they heat up a maximum area of the house and so on...things you might not have considered quite so closely on a 35 degree summer's day. A sauna has featured heavily among plans for future projects, I can tell you...We are lucky though - due to some topographical or geographical whim, we are strangely free of the freezing fog that the rest of the Burga valley is well-known for (another little detail estate agents tend to skate around in their pitch...). On several days we have been like a little island floating in fog all around, can't see the mountain peaks or the valley for the fog, but around us the sky is clear. Giving thanks for small wonders :-)

An extremely positive writeup of this area in the Sunday Telegraph on December the 3rd also gave reason to rejoice - using terms like "Spain's most stunning landscape", and "this extremely beautiful, cosmopolitan (???) part of Spain". We had a good giggle at the word cosmopolitan....may be many things, this area, but that it is NOT :-))) Enough for this time, the animals need feeding and so does the man! Felices fiestas a todos, and don't forget your grapes on New Year's Eve!

Lunar solstice

This is the 4th of December 2006, the day before the Lunar solstice. This is about 6 in the evening, and no torches were needed that night...Never seen a moon so bright and large! Bring on tonight...!

The gutting begins...