Our 8th week in Los Llanos

We started the week with a return visit from our locksmith, who finished changing the locks on the garage doors. We then asked him to change the locks on the front and rear doors of the villa - you never know what has happened to keys during the building process, so it's always a good idea to get them all changed - just in case! The electrician also returned to fit the heated towel rails in the bathrooms. They take the chill off during the cooler mornings and evenings and don't consume much electricity. We have reaped the benefit already as the temperatures have dropped over the last few days, especially at the beginning of the week when it was very windy. We also had some rain on Sunday, although not the cold rain one gets in the UK.

Monday was a lazy day as it was too blowy to continue with the painting so we poodled around inside of the house. Our main activity was resetting the master trip on the electricity supply as the wind seemed to be causing spikes in the supply (not uncommon around here!) which caused the trips to go off, either on ours or our neighbours. In the evening we joined another Spanish class, this one in La Alfoquia (our nearest big village), which is free and run by the Junta de Andalucia. However this also seemed to beset by electricity problems with the power going off twice. Marion provided some light with our wind up torch, but eventually we had to finish early! We joined this class because our other teacher is going to the States for about five weeks and we didn't want to get rusty in the meantime.

Tuesday was less blustery (and not unpleasant out of the wind) so we managed to get on with painting the garage. Marion started creating space inside the garage so that we can get on with the interior when the outside is finished. Afternoon was spent shopping and the evening was quiz night; although we did quite well we weren't amongst the prize winners.

Wednesday we had a phone call from Senor Lopez to say that we could pick up our car that evening. So some time was spent finalising the insurance before finishing off the garage wall. Michael started with two shirts and a pullover as per the previous day, but the wind had dropped and the sun was very warm so he soon stripped down to just a T shirt ( well not "just!"). The outside is now finished, well at least the first coat. When we have finished the interior we will come back outside and give it a top coat in the same colour as the villa. Then it was off to Albox for the main highlight - collecting the new car! It is another Xsara Picasso, this time the colour is "nocciola" - it's like our old one "sahara gold" but with a tan! It's a sort of bronze with a hint of olive or mink depending on your point of view. We will post a picture when blogger eventually allows us to so you can make up your own mind.

Thursday morning we had to go and check the local property inventory to get our new house number and to check that house, garage and pool were all on it, in the event none of them were! There was no rhyme or reason to it, some of the first to be finished weren't on whilst some of the later ones were. But that was the purpose of the exercise to make sure it was all accurate! We now know that we are No 6; although don't write to us at that as it will be a week or two (or six months or so) before the corrected list gets to the Post Office and another 6 before they start deliveries up here!. We will probably call the house Casa Paloma - this is the Spanish equivalent of Dove Cottage and Paloma was the name of Picasso's daughter. We had thought of Casa Perdiz (Partridge) as Los Llanos del Peral means "Plain of the Pear Trees" so we would have been "a partridge in the pear trees," but we thought that was a bit too subtle and the Woolnoughs have never been known for doing subtle! Following this little trip, when we also joined the neighbourhood watch scheme, we went off to our usual Spanish lesson. The afternoon was spent returning the hire car and in the evening we were joined by a neighbour for a session of games on the Wii!

Friday we had to go to the bank as Marion's cash card had been guzzled by a cash machine at another branch; we had been topping up our mobile phone when the phone rang, whilst dealing with that the machine returned the card and because we didn't retrieve it in time it took it back! The message told us to go to our own branch, which we did only to find that it was still at the other one and we now have to wait until next Friday to get it back! (Monday and Tuesday next week are bank holidays.) To cap it all Brad's Bar was closed so we missed out on our bacon sarnie!! But it was very nice down on the promenade, no wind, calm sea and pleasantly warm sunshine(19deg C). It was a chance to try out the car though! We also bought some more paint and a nice No 6 tile, we were going to get the letters for the name but they didn't have any 'A's so that will have to wait. We compromised with bacon sarnies at our local chippy, quite nice but without the sea view!