…and the Good News is….

I’m not allergic to red wine!

I took a very disappointing trek up to the health centre on Friday morning.  In fact I had to race up as I had left the house late.  Time suddenly slipped away while I was brushing my face and putting WD40 on my feet.  I arrived, a bit out of breath, with five minutes to spare before my appointment only to be left waiting.  I had chosen what I figured would be the first or second appointment of the morning and I was not wrong, however I had not banked on the strange little doctor arriving ten minutes late himself and reeking of cigarette smoke.  He unlocked his door, donned his white coat and sat down behind the computer, which never functions fast enough for him.  He began talking to it and clicking the mouse and tut-tutting at it.  Then finally he called me in.  He did not look at me, but continued tut-tutting and clicking and, after bashing the mouse a couple of times on his desk, managed to print out a copy of my blood and other bodily functions’ analyses.  Then he read them, mainly to himself, but the upshot, I gathered, was that there was nothing ominous.  I have no allergies, no intolerances and I am not suffering with amoebic dysentery.  I was quite disappointed to be honest.  My heart leaped for an instant when he asked me if I had recently travelled to any at-risk countries because then he could have ordered another test for some rare tropical disease, but disappointingly I had to admit that I had never travelled in any Third World Country.  Ireland didn’t count.

“What now?” I asked as he began his furious tapping and mouse bashing again.  

“What’s this?” he said “some tests are still pending??”  

“Those are the regular ones for my hormonal condition.” I told him, just as he realised the same thing.  

“We will have to wait for the results of those,” he said, plainly delighted that he had a get-out clause, “before we order any other tests.”

A gratuitous beautiful sunset to lift my spirits should I be downcast by life's little hurdles...but I'm not.

“That’s it?”  I asked.  

“Yes, that’s it.” He said

And that was that.  I left.  No colonoscopy or barium meal was ordered and I am not a penny the wiser about my condition and it seems he could not care less.

So I shall continue eating like a bird and drinking like a fish.  Oddly. While I am afraid to eat I feel that the drinking, especially red wine or a brandy and port, in some way makes everything ok.  Well, it does.

Every day has been supremely busy of late and this day was no exception.  After the inconclusive clinic visit I rushed home to walk the doggies, all of them together on this occasion.  Quite a feat I might say, especially as I am struggling to teach Harold how to walk to heel.  Still it had to be done as I was meeting Beverley early to go for a recce of some winter firewood.  She had been reliably informed by a friend that this supplier charged way below the usual rate for his wood so we were very eager.  However, and after a 45 minute wait as he was out on delivery when we arrived to his yard, we discovered that her friend had mistakenly priced for two bags instead of three so in fact this new supplier was the same price as everybody else and actually more expensive than the guy I used last winter.  Bev put in an order, but I declined.  Another good reason being that delivery to my house is a nightmare.  As we live in the heart of the Centro Historico of our lovely White Pueblo access is difficult.  Up windy lanes and with sharp corners to manoeuvre it is not for the fainthearted and certainly not for a five ton lorry.  The man I use knows the terrain and has a method of delivery especially tailored to our home.  If it ain’t broke why fix it?  I just hope he brings me dry wood this year. (Another story for another day!)

Back at base it was lunchtime already and I fed the dogs, but I was afraid to eat, so nipped out to do the little bit of weekend shopping I needed.  All went well and on my return I poured myself a Brandy and port and made some tiny nibbles to go with that.  I indulged myself with watching a bit of daytime TV but pretty soon I had to deal with ‘The Phonecall’ I had been putting off for a couple of days. 

In July I switched my electricity supplier.  But company number one has been billing me for the past two months for 7.09 euros.  Not a lot.  I let the first one go as I thought it was some adjustment but now I couldn’t understand why I was still being billed three months later.  Firstly I rang company number two as the sales lady had been so very kind to me and had spoken such lovely clear Spanish that I knew I could ask her advice and would be able to understand her also.  Unfortunately she told me, very kindly, that I needed to ring the customer service of company number one, which I subsequently did.  It was not too bad, but at the final hurdle I had to ask them for an operator who spoke English.  Sometimes you just need the comfort of being able to argue your point in your own language.  So in conclusion to the inconclusive week that I have had, all round it would seem, there was nobody available to cancel my insurance, for that is what it is, an unsolicited insurance for my white goods, and I will have to wait for a call back on Monday morning.

Still, at least I can pour myself another glass of wine.

...and some gratuitous pumpkins waiting to be made into pumpkin soup and pumpkin pie.

Harold

Harold has come to live with us.  Harold has the most disgusting bad breath.  Poor Harold I can hardly bear to be in the same room as him, because with my current tummy problems there is a real danger of me vomiting.

Harold is a sweetie though.  He is very loving and would love me to kiss him, but I really can’t right now.

He arrived at lunchtime on Thursday, which was a bit tough as I had to introduce him to the Westies, feed him, show him the garden and get him settled in all within only a couple of hours before I set off to school for one of my longer teaching days.  I didn’t know if I would find him alive when I got back at 8.15 or whether he would have been eaten by Westies.  He certainly did not like being left and just as I walked away from the house I heard him barking and scrabbling at the door.  He will acclimatise.

Harold sits with his new siblings in the Westie-mobile, our new mode of transport, especially for trips to the vet which at the moment seem to be very often.  You cannot smell his bad breath from here and the other kids don't seem to mind.

So my teaching day was clouded somewhat by dreadful gory thoughts every so often.  Not while I was actually teaching, but between lessons.  When you are teaching you think of nothing except what is in front of you.  ABCs, 123s, present continuous, past participles, colours of the rainbow and days of the week.  It seemed like a long day, but happily, upon my return, with Bev in tow for a much needed glass of vino, I found all the Westies and a joyful Harold delighted to see me again and even more delighted for the extra person to snuggle up against.  He is very needy right now, but that is understandable.  He has just been abandoned by his owner of ten years and probably simply does not have a clue what is going on.

On a theme of smells, the chestnut sellers have returned to the streets of Alhaurín el Grande.  With the temperatures we are having of late it hardly feels like autumn yet the smell of the chestnuts roasting fills my brain with thoughts of crispy brown and golden leaves piled high and beechnuts and chestnuts crunching beneath my feet.  It makes me think of woolly gloves and scarves, of misty mornings and damp earth.  It is one of the many smells of Spain that sends my thoughts into overdrive. 

Passing through the busy town now after school in the evenings I often catch the heavy scent of Jasmine or Dame de Noche or other olfactory delights that are not so beautiful, but equally evocative.  Diesel fumes from the back of rickety old scooters, the faint whiff of a blocked drain and occasionally the pencil smell of BO from someone who is not as fastidious as they should be.  And now I come home to the overwhelming smell of rotten dog breath.  A smell I will gladly forget as soon as I possibly can,

On Friday morning I had a zillion jobs to do, but managed to give Harold a bath.  He is another dog in my life who, it would appear, hates water.  I had to chase him and carry him bodily into the bathroom and firmly close the door.  It was then that I also tried to scrub his teeth.  What I saw in his mouth made me recoil in horror.  His teeth look like they are melting.  I think the brush hurt him, so I stopped even trying.  Instead I took him to the vet after lunch to book an appointment to get his teeth cleaned and the wobbly, disgusting ones extracted.  His appointment is not until the 31^st of October unfortunately, so we will have to bear the stench until then.  If only I could have switched his appointment with Looki’s, whose teeth are nowhere near as bad.  But his is too close now and he has already begun his course of antibiotics. 

On the whole Harold is a good boy.  I have had to tell him off for marking the furniture and I also had a bit of a battle with him today as he was staring at me while I was eating.  Something that is not allowed in our house.  Eventually he slunk out to the garden, no doubt to eat worms.  But he will get the hang of it.  He does not understand the command to sit, I wonder if it is because he speaks Spanish.  He seems to be getting the hang of The Westie Life here though, which is to follow mum around the house and then find a spot close by to lie down and start snoring, grunting or twitching in your sleep.

And now this morning I am cooking up a batch of food for the dogs.  The house is filled with the aroma of chicken and fish boiling away merrily with Mediterranean vegetables, spliced with the covering scent of incense burning in the front room to cover the underlying foul breath, which somehow does not seem so bad today.  Perhaps the boy is improving, or perhaps I am just getting used to it.

The Music of Life

It has been a satisfying month.  I have settled into my classes and am very happy with the groups that I have been allocated.  Most of the children are joyous and this year I have no really difficult characters to deal with, only a couple of stubborn mules and one or two chatterboxes, that is the luck of the draw.  In the past couple of years I have had some really difficult students who could singlehandedly disrupt an otherwise peaceful and productive class and almost reduce me to tears. 

The Westies lending a hand with a bit of lesson planning.

The children in one of my classes in particular really enjoy singing.  We sing songs about everything and, while the children work filling out worksheets and cutting and pasting, we sing together.  At the drop of a hat they can begin singing spontaneously.  It puts a spring in my step as they mimic my voice without even realising they are doing it.  I have to drink a lot of water to keep my vocal chords supple and I conduct the choir with my hands while doling out scissors and glue and pencils.  Talk about multitasking, no wonder I am exhausted at the end of the day.

A couple of my groups are fairly motoring through the books, which gives us a great opportunity to play a game or do a structured activity at the end of class.  Of course they enjoy this and they all seem to play fairly, though of course, they all love to win!  I, however, must now spend this weekend researching, devising and making some new games to play.  The children are voracious!

On the last day of the month I also finally felt that I was getting into a groove with my PET (exam) group.  The first two classes simply did not work, for me at any rate, I cannot speak for the students.  But sometimes you just have to fish around before you get it right.  Still, that lack of spark in my work depresses me and I had been walking home on my PET nights with stooping shoulders and a slower gait.  Last night I felt more lighthearted leaving the academy, surely that had nothing to with it being our first TNO (Teachers’ Night Out) of the new academic year!  A couple of bevvies later and I was fairly dancing my way home, though today I am nursing a slight hangover.

The wind has been blowing violently for the past two days.  I went out yesterday morning to find my tomato vines lying flattened under the huge tobacco plant, I have several of these growing wild in my garden.  I almost wish I smoked.  This one was a particularly impressive specimen, with candelabra branches ending in clusters of pretty pink flowers.  

The tobacco plants (topped with pink) can be pretty impressive.  Though neither of these pictured match the 'King' that was knocked down by the gales.

For over an hour yesterday morning I battled with the storm trying to prop the tomatoes up again and to dissect the tobacco plant, which was unsalvageable.  It was a pretty tough battle and after I went inside half of the vines sank once more to the ground.  

Looki, with a greenish face, protects the remains of the King of Tobacco plants.  The tomatoes have been propped up in this picture, only to be knocked flat half an hour later.

There they lay, within striking distance of Looki, the tomato thief.  His face is stained green by this time from foraging.  He loves picking tomatoes.  He does not always eat them, thank goodness, because I think that one can eat too many tomatoes, especially if that one is a smallish dog.  I find tomatoes now in all sorts of random places, usually with a dog’s nose resting a few inches from them.  This morning Looki has been walking around with a huge tomato in his mouth.  When he lies down he puts the tomato close to him so he can keep an eye on it and when we all troop upstairs or downstairs again he gently picks it up and brings it with him.  If I really wanted to I could tell him to relinquish it, but he is catching no harm and it keeps him happy.  It is too late for the tomato anyway as it has puncture marks all over from Looki’s remaining teeth.

Tomatoes with teeth marks are popping up all over the house.....

I came home rather late last night on account of the TNO.  The dogs started making their funny welcoming sounds long before I put the key in the door and they went absolutely mad when I got in.  Looki did his ‘mad five minutes’, running up and down the corridor and skidding with glee on the tiles as he turned to run back the other way and then jump at me in delight.  Kerry gargled and barked with reckless abandon following me at a Lippizzaner trot as I walked towards the living room.  Candy was doing her crazy circles, chasing her tail. Then she suddenly took off ahead of me and must have taken a swooping dive at the couch….from across the coffee table.  Being a few feet behind her I only heard the noise of a Whoooosh!  But on entering the room I saw her sitting, looking slightly dazed on the couch and the coffee table was cleared along the middle.  On the floor to the left and to the right were pencils, papers, remote controls a candle and a rubber.  One piece of paper was still gently see-sawing down to the floor.  Looki took advantage of the situation and tried to eat the rubber.  No!  I said sharply and he dropped it immediately.  I suddenly had a vision of his poos bouncing all over the place in the morning. 

Those dogs are not only tomato thieves, every day they steal a little bit more of my singing heart.

Hectic Tangents and Grasshopper Brainwaves!

We are only three weeks in and the somnambulant summer is already a distant memory.  The lazy days of long siestas and aimless nights are well and truly gone and I am finding my working days getting longer and more filled by the day.

It is true that I asked Gail (my boss) for more hours at the academy at the start of the term.  I think I was half hoping that it would not happen, although I really do need the money to keep myself and the doggies above water.  This week she came through for me and I have a new class that I will teach from 7.00 to 8.00 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  It is an exam class, a PET group, a grade higher than the KET group that I teach already, so I have to study a bit more grammar myself.  Well, to be honest, quite a lot of grammar to keep ahead of the posse.  I speak English well, though not always perfectly like most native English speakers, but I have not studied grammar since I was a schoolgirl and even then I was not very good at it.  I’ve never been much for rules to be honest.  Still I will persevere and get on top of my nouns and pronouns, my verbs and adverbs, my present simple, continuous and perfects.  I will practice prepositions and conjunctions, determiners and discourse markers until my brain is rigid with rules and I will be the best teacher I can possibly be.

I have to stretch myself.  This is something I have learned about myself over the years.  I have a very low boredom threshold.  I need new challenges daily and push myself to do things that I couldn’t do last week, whether those are physical boundaries or mental ones in the case of the grammar and teaching.  I am just not a person who can stand still.  I have to be learning all the time.  But it does make a lot of extra work for me and it’s not as if I did not have enough on my plate:

I finally got to see the doctor today, a funny man.  He sat behind a computer screen and spoke to the computer, not to me.  He was reading my notes and typing in new ones as we went along.  But the computer kept misbehaving, so he was giving out to it as well.  I thought he was talking to me, but I couldn’t quite work out what he was saying.  It was a very strange encounter.  I never even gave him the full list of my symptoms, which I had carefully noted down on a piece of paper, as he seemed wholly uninterested in them.  Still, as I had pre-empted, he issued me with documents overflowing with tests for this and that; allergies, sensitivities and intolerances.  Over the next couple of weeks my blood and other bodily samples will be collected and examined.  There will ensue a complete analysis of every part of me.  We will find something I am sure, as I am pretty certain it is something that I have had all my life, just undiagnosed, and I have lived with it, because that is what I do.  But at this point in time it is too much, so it has to be dealt with.

Candy had to go to the vet last week.  She has a vaginal infection.  Who thought that dogs suffered from things like that too, but they do.  Still I was much relieved she did not have a prolapsed womb!  That was my first thought. (Though an impossibility in fact as she has been neutered.)  She is on a mountain of pills for inflammation and now a huge course of antibiotics to clear the infection. 

Candy, our little invalid, wearing a fetching leaf over one eye.

This afternoon was our second visit and I brought all the dogs with me, as I did not have time to give them a walk this morning.  I took the opportunity to ask the vet what she thought of Looki’s teeth.  Very sadly he is already missing a few, gone long before I knew him and now his two tiny little front teeth are rotting out of his head.  So it is time to take them out.  He will go in for surgery in two weeks time and will also have his teeth cleaned while under anaesthetic, so at least he will come home with a Hollywood smile of sorts...if polished gums count.

Today I also had to address the roof.  “Hello Roof!” I said.

Hello Roof!

Spanish flat roofs are not that weathertight.  Ours is new, but it already seeps water in parts, so I have resigned myself to painting it with Caucho, a product that I had never heard of before coming to Spain.  It is much like PVA glue, that good old staple which, along with Blue Tack, Sellotape and Sticky Post-its keeps art colleges and teachers chugging happily along. 

I spent the early afternoon (before the vet visit) on my hands and knees in the blistering sun with a tiny brush painting Caucho into all the grout lines on the roof.  These have to be inundated with a dilute mix first.  They are the weakest link.  Tomorrow I will get the roller out and paint over the whole roof, pulling it all together into one great big rubberised sheet.  A further, thicker coat will have to be added on Sunday.  Why can’t they just build the roofs properly in the first place?  Save an awful lot of palaver.

I would have started earlier, except for my doctor’s appointment and a visit, finally, from the heat engineer to fix a leak in the new filter he installed on the solar panels a couple of months ago.  I told you it was all go.

Oh yes, and did I mention that I am contemplating fostering/adopting another wee geriatric dog….Yes, it may be official now...I'm crazy!

Looki helping me with the roof

First Two Weeks and I’m Still Standing….Just

My first week is down. I had wanted to give my immediate impressions of the week as it happened, but I was just too sick.  My whole first week was marred by sickness and now my second week too.  I suppose it is just my turn to be ill, but I will have to take it in hand.

Basically I crashed after week one.  Week two has been a bit more structured and more fun, in spite of continuing diarrhoea and cramps.

All my anxieties had rested on my fear of being unprepared for classes.  I never thought I would be battling volcanic upheavals in my netherparts as well.  In fact I was fully prepared for all my classes as it turns out, with lesson plans, worksheets and games a-plenty and a couple in reserve as well. Some classes I got  right, with others I missed the mark a bit, but that’s normal.  You have to feel your way and get to know the kids anyway in the first couple of weeks.  There is no sure-fire method of knowing how they are going to behave and interact before you meet them.  Every lesson has its own dynamic also, even with the same kids.  Some days they are in a good mood and on others they come with the devil inside…like the teachers I suppose.

I like the routine of school.  I like to know that I have so many hours in the morning to do housework, shopping, devise games and activities and have fun with the Westies.  When twelve noon strikes it is time to start the run-in to school.  This consists of feeding the dogs and then me, resting up a little bit, showering and getting changed and doing any last minute bits and pieces to my lesson plans and activities.  I usually sweep through the house then and collect all the rubbish from bathrooms, garden and kitchen.  This gets dumped on the way to school.  I’m out the door at 2.30.

I would like to say that I am slowly cranking back into gear.  But teaching isn’t like that.  You tend to go from nought to sixty within five seconds flat.  There is no easing in gently.

Come Thursday (end of the week for us. Yay!) Beverley, (friend and colleague) suggested, or was it I?  That we go for a glass of vino and a tapa or two to celebrate our first week down.  This sounded like a wonderful idea, which it was.  I had my two glasses of rather lovely wine and some rather less lovely tapas and we chatted for ages, sitting together in the square, which was positively burbling with life.  Then we ambled back to mine to be met by gorgeous Westies, ecstatic to see me again, even though I had already nipped home before the drinkies to feed them and to let them out for a tinkle.  Bev had a cup of tea and I had a pineapple juice with a shot of gin.  After she left I poured another small drink, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I stayed up quite late watching reruns of Hawaii 5.0 and CSI Miami and so woke up late on Friday feeling slow, very slow.  The plague I had been nurturing through the summer was reasserting itself though I didn’t quite realise it.

I have deleted further details of my stomach and its overactive workings to protect the innocent. 

Week two was a good week and the cramps have subsided somewhat, though not completely.  On the whole I am glad to be back and I will regain my saddle in time and get on top of my mysterious virus, doctor’s appointment has been made Helen (Mother)!  Meanwhile I will keep my head down and just keep devising interesting strategies to try to get headstrong children to do what I want.

I will have a very quiet weekend, no socialising.  Give the tum a good rest.  Even though I am mostly vegetarian, tomorrow I will buy a chicken and make a big pot of chicken soup, like mama used to make.  That will be my weekend diet and that should put paid to any lingering bugs.

Now what can I do with the left over boiled carcass from my broth?   Where might I find someone to help with that.......?

.....on the stairs?

Under the coffee table.....?

Or simply sleeping with one eye open........?