Observation of Kids at The Tinkers School

I am not one for poking fun at folks with disabilities but I have been observing a startling number of kids that look abnormal at the little tinkers school. Kids with obvious genetic problems, gigantic ears and funny eyes, a little girl who looks like a fat old woman of 50, I am shocked by it and was wondering what the cause could be, too many agro-chemicals in the water?, perhap, or radon gas from the granite?, possibly, but one comment from another Brit probably summed it up, more than likely in-breeding, an insular mountain village does have its drawbacks and one is the limited availability of women, so marrying your cousin is the answer, but your ancestors pay the price for it.

A week of Mad Building Work

This week has been total madness with keeping up the paper chase and also carrying out some urgent building work before the furniture arrives, which is sometime around wednesday next week, Jenny had a great idea of removing the dividing wall between the two downstairs rooms, i was worried that it was a load bearing wall but I was assured it wasn't, I found a retired british builder who was happy to help and instruct and bring all his tools as i have nothing, we used a large grinder to cut through this wall which turned out to eb only 10cms thich, but the amount of dust was astronomical, the dust filled every inch of surface in the house and around trhe wall was nigh on an inch thick, i was almost disheartened by the immense scale of the cleaning job and the arch we cut wasn't perfect as the grinder was like a lethal weapon, it would snag in the brick and jump out and almost hit me and almost hit Brian the builder in the head, very dangerous, I did my health and safety thing, i had steel toe boots, safety glasses and ear plugs, plus a dust mask which was critical, the dust was so thick it was like fog and was just amazing. I have never used an angle grinder on bricks before. Never again, we spent the next day trying to find a way to cover the ugly cut brick ends, I thought about fancy plaster work and Jenny thought about a wood finish, i went to a large DIY place in Malaga and walked around looking for inspiration, i found some thin marble tiles on a web backing, probably used for swimming pools and I thought of tiling along the cut edge, this was the answer, one the material looks nice, the rustic finish is perfect to cover up the imperfections of the cutting, and we also had to patch the floor and the tiles have been great and look fantastic, we also put in some fancy plaster coving that is really cheap here in spain, but it has been non-stop cleaning sweeping dusting, mopping and more mopping, to kill all the dust, I will never do any wall cutting with a grinder ever again, maybe a big hammer but never a grinder, just too much dust, today we bought some pain, a summery yellow and a nice pale beige as a contrast, now the house looks 3 times bigger downstairs and we can eat in a normal dining room that isn't a black hole.

Me and Brian the retired builder. that is floating dust particles that are reflecting the light.






We have been into Malaga to carry on with the immigration thing and we were told that we have completed 90% of the worady in Costa Rica, this was great news, we only had to get two papers sent to Madrid for authentication and a paper from the town hall saying Jenny lived at a certain house(Ours) and that was it, we have an appointment on the 14th of April and hopefully Jenny will get her residency ID Card which will allow her to work for 5 years, the step after that is permanent residency so we have jumped to the last square of the snakes and ladders game, that was more by luck than planning but at least the hard work we put in has paid off. this sunday we are going out for a meal at the Fuente De Peidre lake, it has 9000 breeding Flamigo's there right now and it is about 50 miles away. Next week trying to get my furniture is No1 priority and and making sure the painting is all finished.

The First Crazy Week in Malaga

The last week has been a crazy whirlwind of going from one office to another to obtain papers for the customs for my furniture, which has only just docked in Cadiz. Also for the visa extension for Jenny and the little tinker. The weather has been pretty fantastic just pure blue skies everyday and warm but at night it really get cold, maybe even a little frost in the mornings. The heater i had installed has been working fantastic. The larger unit downstairs is sufficient to heat the whole house including upstairs and it fills the house with a lovely airy atmosphere and you can walk about without worrying about how cold it is outside. We have a brilliant neighbour, that retired bank manager, he is just great, he has all the names of good contacts and knows where all the offices are for paperwork, he also like to drink nice wine and that is the sort of guy I like to have as a neighbour.

We also have a car now, just a runabout banger, which is perfect for here as the local drivers are a little overenthusiastic and every car has bumps and scratches. So as Jenny doesn't intent to do much driving then this is the perfect car, I used the GPS Sat Nav i bought last month to drive into Malaga downtown and it was heaven as it new exactly how to get to the address and how to get me home, I like Gadgets.

When we went to Malaga by bus one day we spent a few hours walking across the town to the port and found a delightful park and old some interesting old buildings which is the historical part of town.




This could be a really nice place is everything is easy, but if you have problems it could be a nightmare, but if you look at most places that is the story. as long as the weather keeps getting warmer and warmer, I will be happy.

I am Leaving on Jet Plane, La la la la

Well I am at the airport with my bags packed and with my wife having just boarded the flight to Bogota heading to Madrid and myself luckily flying direct, that was just the way the different bookings turned out. We meet again in Madrid and fly onwards together to Malaga. It has been mostly a smooth operation with multiple hiccups along the way with hidden paperwork to be completed along the way but that is the nature of Latin America, The British Consulate kept on saying how the British dont need this paperwork and it is all unnecessary but if i want to live in Spain then I had to keep on plugging away at it all, like getting it all stamped by several offices, I found this maddening, it is just a way to keep people employed.

I have found a great guy in Spain who is my neighbour, a retired Bank Manager who has his head screwed on right and is dead reliable, he is my taxi driver and project manager in all things housey in spain, he has supervised the installation of my super heating/airconditioning system and hot water heater and sat dish and decorating and probably other things i didn't know about, what a guy and he loves red wine, what a combination, I will have to buy him a crate of wine.

I have my manager desperate to get me working and I am trying to get more time off to get things sorted in spain before i start traveling again. Life is a burst of energy in the beee hive then you die so lets get buzzing. Later from the sunny if cold Costa Del Sol

Movie Review Update

I have again been watching lots of movies as I have a high speed internet connection and it is easier to download one than go and rent a movie from the shop that also has all pirated DVD's anyway. So I am trying to catch up on all the Oscar nominated movies and I can say that once again the nominations have gone for the misery filled human tragedy cases, why oh why do the oscars want to do this, life is so full of misery we want to be uplifted with laughter and humour and action, not some sad case of human exploitation and mental illness. So I am following on with this months updates.

1) Slumdog Millionaire 5/10, I can say seeing the misery of Indian life made my wife feel ill and asked me to turn it off, especially the mutilation of a child to make them better beggars, it was well filmed but the ending didn't justify me watching the movie to accept what i already new that india is as corrupt and any other third world country and Police torture just at a whim is pretty typical of the third world so I wouldn't recommend it.

2) Inkheart 4/10, watching Bredon Fraser be a useless whimp is hard to accept in a movie so he was very badly selected for this movie maybe Hugh Grant but not him. It centred around him being useless and that was it really, could have been a good plot but lost on him.

3) Bedtime stories 6/10, Adam Sandler in another silly movie but it was well put together and kept all of us here entertained for the whole movie. Still a bit silly but I laughed a few times.

4) The Forbidden Kingdom 8/10, I was not expecting much from this but in the end , jackie chan did a great job of making it very watchable and we had a very good time, it was really well filmed and well put together and I saw Jet Li laugh for the first time ever, he is a very moody actor normally.

5) The Duchess 9/10, I like historic costume dramas and this one was up to the mark,
Keira Knightley was excellent in this and she is getting better as an actress, what made this even better for me was the fact that the house it was based around, Chatsworth House, is about 10 miles from where I was born. I have been around it several times and it is quite stunning.

6) Burn After Reading 5/10, This was overblown and it was a very silly movie with no real start or end and just drifted along, Brad Pit only did this for his friend George Clooney, he was wasted and so was the film, not recommended

7)Madea Goes to Jail 0/10, the director also deserves to go to Jail for this pile of crap, why it is in the top of the movie charts must say something about the quality of the movies going about at the moment, it was two movies in one and not really joined, not funny and a rip off of Big Mama, and it was conspicuous of its absence of white actors, don't they call these movies sploitation movies, just awful acting awful directing and nothing going for it at all, I couldn't actually finish it as it was so awful.

8) Underworld: Rise of the Lycans 8/10, this was well filmed and had a great sense of the underworld all the time, a love story in the plot which didn't seem like two movies in one, unlike the previous film, the action was gory but entertaining, a real cinema movie and i would recommend this to an action horror movie buff.



9) The Mummy, tomb of the emperor, 2/10, it could have been the tomb of Brendon Fraser, this was a dead movie from the start, with two wooden actors, the lead woman and the supposed son of Brendan, this destroyed the movie and her horrible fake posh english accent just deserved to be dubbed over it was so bad. The plot was silly and too loose. Just an excuse for Brendan Fraser to be the mummy killer again. Rubbish, yes I know it is an old film.

10) City of Ember, watched 15 minutes before i fell asleep. so I will review it next time around

Last Few Days in the Summer Sunshine in Costa Rica

Well I am all packed up and all paperwork is completed, apart from collecting said paperwork from the respective Consulates on Tuesday, we are trying to enjoy the lovely sunshine and nice climate before we decamp to winter Spain on Wednesday. The house is in the middle of having some essential work, a combined heating and Air conditioning system, cost, 2500 Euros, which includes a total upgrade of the electrical system. A new hot water heater as the other was sufficient for washing the dirty pots after a meal but not for having a nice shower. Also a shower system running off the hot water heater I am installing, insluding shower curtains for the first time, if you wanted a shower you had to squat down like a pakistani in the bath to rinse off, and the water supply was so weak that if you tried to bath it would take 30 minutes to put enough water into it, pretty abysmal, so all that is being changed, plus a little decorating as that was needed to hide the damage caused by the water leak in the front bedroom.

So all in all we are nearly ready just collecting some more documents for customs and any other potential immigration requirement not noticed as once we are left we are not coming back to Costa Rica for a while.

The hotel we are staying at is really nice, a nicely kep place run by some italians. The gardens are huge for a hotel of this size and the pool is fantastic but cool as there is no heating. The rooms are Ok but the only thing that irritates me is the same as anywhere, outside noise from cars and trucks and motorcycles and a noisy neighbour who plays music to all hours, we did have the police looking around some of the surrounding hedging, it turned out the police were following someone who had robbed something and he dumped everything in the hedge including gun and robbed items which didn't seem like much. as not many folks have much here anyway.

Pool Area with Little Tinker




Pool Area again

The Agony and the Ecstacy Continues

Yesterday i went for my Costa Rican residence, It was very straight forward as all the hard work has gone on in the previous 3 years. So it was smile for the camera and then have your fingerprint scanned, it took 5 minutes, but the fly in the ointment was the fact that the residence only lasts 1 year only, yes i have to go through this every year if i want to keep my residence, if i had known it was such a short term thing i wouldn't have bothered until i retire here. I think the lawyers probably new that and never mentioned the 1 year thing. I have probably wasted $3000 on this escapade and as I am now about to go to spain I will have to start the whole thing again at some point in the future. There is a possible and only possible solution is that I actually apply for a suspension of my residence for a certain number of years, I cannot guarantee the length of my stay away but we will see how it goes, I think i will apply for a 5 year thing and if i come back early then we are OK, but if it is later I am not sure what is going to happen, but lets say goodbye to my money.

Madrid Airport, A Lesson in Real Airport Design and Use-ability

I travelled back to Costa Rica this last Thursday and went through Madrid Airport, this si the first time since is has opened the new terminals, i was delighted to find a very nice airy, spacious and well designed place which to travel through. It only took me 10 minutes to move from one terminal to the other and find my gate, very easy when it has been laid out for ease of use and in a way as not to make you stressed but to make you relaxed and happy to be in it, a far cry from Heathrow and Paris charles de gaul. My return trip to spain is in 12 days time and I am flying direct from Costa Rica to Madrid and not through the USA, the airports in the USA are great but man the pain in the ass of getting through Immigration and customs and then security checks are a real killer to motivation of ever using their airlines to fly about. If I have to never fly through the USA again then i may be a little happier with my life. Three cheers for Madrid and good design for air travellers.

The New Market Square

Here is the market square, this is great now as it has cut about 50% of the traffic from the town centre and slowed the rest down and removed all parking from it, perfect for that piazza coffee in the summer and even al fresco lunch, again only in the non winter months,

I am looking forward to the challenge of making my little house a little relaxation palace.

Summer Sun In Costa Rica

Summer time and the living is easy, sounds like a good song title , must have been written about Costa Rica as the weather here right now is perfection. We are staying in a little apart-hotel and the gardens are really nice and we have a pool and a kitchen and everything we need for the next 10 days, I have my interview this week for my Residence in Costa Rica, this has been three years in the planning and fruition comes just as I was out of the country, ah well things come to challenge us and make us stronger. I have to have my fingerprints taken again and a fresh photo taken for them to make up my ID card, ID cards are no big sweat, only criminals and terrorists need to fear them and I say everyone on the planet should have them and then exterminate all criminals, Jenny told me of a burglary that went wrong just across the road last week, some robbers broke into a house in the evening holding everyone at gunpoint and a little girl was able to make a call on the cell phone, but she called the old man next door instead of the police and he instead of calling the police came round waving a stick about like the old fart he probably was and the robbers shot him dead, and then escaped. I hate criminals and have no problem with the death penalty for all criminals not just killers. We have enough of a problem on the planet without having to deal with scum. Anyway back to the good things, we are in the last home run for things to do, we have all the paperwork for spain completed and just a run to the Spanish Embassy to collect all the documents that needed legalising, Marriage certificate and the little girls birth certificate and Vaccination Card, as that is needed at the school in spain. It is nice to be making plans for a change to our life again, I have even had a few job offers, some were Ok and some were rubbish but it feels nice to be getting them anyway. If anyone makes a good enough offer I may seriously consider it, not flying every month may be enough to tempt me, I am beginning to hate flying especially if it requires loss of sleep and Jetlag.