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