In my admittedly rather limited trips to Spain, I’ve never experienced anything like this. We’ve been coming here for two or three weeks at a time for the last seven years but I’d have to describe the weather that we’ve endured for the last eight or nine days as unusual. For over a week the skies have resembled those of an English winter, being a solid grey overcast with frequent, occasionally heavy spells of rain. It got worse today. Today had me dipping into my smart phone translation package – isn’t modern technology wonderful? – wondering what the Spanish words were for what we were suffering.

Our education began in a restrained manner with a little modest lluvia [rain]. We’ve seen plenty of this over the last week so no surprise there, though we had not previously bothered to look up the word.

The skies gradually got darker and heavy, black nubes [clouds] covered our part of the valley. The nubes began to be accompanied by some sound effects in the form of several rumbles of trueno [thunder]. After a few more rumbles, the lighting department, not wishing to be left out, got in on the act with some swift flashes of relámpago [lightning].

As the tormenta [storm] increased in ferocity, so did the rain. Soon, the rain became solid in nature and lumps of it began bouncing back up off our external window sills. We were being treated to some granizo [hail].

Casa Libélule is on the back/high row of our development There is a run of five blocks, each one of four or five houses, the roofs of which act as a catchment area for the rear pathway.onto which they spill their collected rain/hail. The only way down for the water and ice mixture to reach it’s point of lowest potential energy is down the flights of steps beside Casa. That flight of steps had now turned into something resembling a Welsh mountain cascada [waterfall]. The hail stones washed down and were collected in white piles at various strategic points. They remained for some time, not melting. Please forgive the crappy phone camera picture but hailstones were bouncing inside when I opened the window to take it.

Eventually the storm abated and we were left with just the hailstone debris.

Shortly afterwards, a good looking young English man who, judging by his upper torso development, spends a lot of time in the gym (and, I’d guess, women :shock:), arrived and proceeded to install the radio dish and router for our eagerly awaited Internet access. He did a very neat job, even using a spirit level to make sure the cable running between the dish and door frame was horizontal. After a little drilling we were online. At least, we were for a few minutes. The storm was cloaking the hillside across the opposite side of the valley, where the Internet service mast is located, and we soon lost our newly established contact with the outside world.

A reboot of the router fixed our connection problems, comme d’habitude/como siempre.

How educational weather can be.

Back in the UK our bed is what we Brits amusingly call a king-size, 5’ wide by 6’ 6” long. Acting on advice, we bought English bedding with us including fitted bottom sheets for a UK king-size bed. Having got here and started buying our beds in Spain, we discovered that the mattresses do not share our exact sizes. The net result, after buying a 150cms by 190cms beds, is that out fitted bottom sheets do not actually fit, they are about an inch too wide and about three inches too long. Consequently, they tend to ruck up during the night. [No comments, please.] We decided to pop into the bed shop to get some euro fitted sheets of the appropriate size for our mattress.

Imagine my surprise when we were told that the fitted sheets all allowed for the euro king-size mattresses, i.e. were 200cms long – just a tad over 6’ 6”. “Can we not get a fitted sheet made with the 190cms length in mind?”, we enquired. No, apparently not.

What on earth is the purpose of a fitted sheet that doesn’t fit, I wonder? On yet another philosophical note, if this can be called philosophical: is a fitted sheet made to different dimensions actually fitted at all? I would suggest that it isn’t; it would more correctly be called an unfitted sheet. Actually, it’s little better than a mattress bag. We’ve already got a couple of mattress bags that we brought out here with us.

There was available a jersey-type material unfitted sheet/mattress bag that was supposedly slightly stretchy and better at taking up the slack, so it should wrinkle less. That was the theory, anyway. In the startling absence of any better solution, we decided to try one. If it doesn’t work, we can always cut it up for rags with which to oil our collection of oak furniture, next time it needs it. 😀

The spending continues. This time we’ve purchased a set of two towel rails and towel ring for our shower room together with a floor-standing cabinet for Francine’s hair potions and the like. This little lot came from Aitana, again. Incredibly, they delivered it this very evening and for free. The cabinet, though, came ready assembled so there was nothing to keep me occupied during the evening’s thrashing downpour. Nothing, that is, except for drilling towel rail holes through bathroom wall tiles that were harder than concrete.

Different weather in the valley.

Friends more experienced than us at living here have often mentioned the varying weather from valley to valley. If the weather is pants in the Jalón valley, try popping over the hills into the next one; it may be different. Today we experienced this localized weather effect.

The Jalón valley had a promising dawn; the mountain tops on the opposite side of the valley from us were once again visible after having been obscured for two days and there were sizable patches of blue. Out towards the coast still glowered, though. We drove over the hills behind us and headed towards Dénia with its interesting lighting shop in search of our last electrical fitments, two lights for the bathrooms. As soon as we crossed the high ground and descended into the next valley, the dark skies looked decidedly threatening.

An attack of sanity hit Francine in the lighting shop. There are some interesting “bathroom lighting solutions” available in the form of LED bar lights designed to clip on the top of mirrors. They range typically from 70€ to 100€ each and look quite stylish. On the verge of saying “sod it, let’s have them”, Francine spotted a notice on the box stating that the LEDs in these things could not be replaced. So, these stylish little “lighting solutions” are essentially 70€ to 100€ light bulbs – if/when they fail, throw them away and buy 70€ to 100€ replacements. In a fit of rational behaviour, we went for two 15€ clip-on fitments into which we could screw replaceable LED bulbs.

Rain began as we headed back with our new purchases. We climbed up the pass into our valley, descended and turned the corner at Alcalalí and there before us was Casa bathed in sunshine. Spirits lifted.

The critters spirits had lifted, too. After a couple of days of crap, I imagine some of the locals were getting a bit peckish. The Red Valerian on the hillside behind Casa was once again attracting the nectar feeders. There was a constant buzz of bees. On the larger side, two Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui) butterflies were flitting about, one of which posed very advantageously for me. I did manage to snag a Hummingbird Hawkmoth (Macroglossum stellatarum), too, though it might’ve chosen to hover briefly in front of a background without two white diagonal streaks. Never happy, some photographers. 😉

The evening remained pleasant and, after darkness fell, I gazed from our balcony into the valley and noticed that a chirping sound of crickets was drifting up from the fields beneath. Now there’s a sound that evokes summer – soon, perhaps.

“Drip, drip, drip little April showers …”

Actually, it’s March, still, and it’s more like March downpours than showers. Yes, we awoke once again to the sound of the rain which has now been with us for over 24 hours. The mountains on the opposite side of our valley are completely obscured, the valley floor is just about visible and Jalón is there if you are prepared to strain your eyes peering through the murk. Oops, spoke too soon – not only Jalón but the valley floor just disappeared completely. Actually, half the houses below us in the urbanization disappeared as well. We are in the clouds.

Another day of solid rain is in prospect and here I am with no remaining construction projects to keep me amused. On the bright side, though, some of the shops should be open today. Oh joy, more shopping! I say some of the shops because we’ve been told that some businesses are likely to take an extra day off to span the single day from St. Joseph’s Day, yesterday, to the weekend, making a four day break.

We bought me another construction distraction – a small side table. It’s another of the Royal Oak range from JYSK and is called a taburete, which actually translates as stool rather than table. IMHO, it makes a poor stool but an excellent small side table that can sit between our two sofas for wine glasses, brandy glasses and the like. If you really wanted to sober up, I’m sure it could also hold cups of coffee quite well, too. Unfortunately, it was a very simple assembly job that lasted only about 20 minutes, requiring just the four legs to be bolted into place.

Francine amused herself oiling some more of our already-assembled furniture. I had little choice but to start rubbing off and buffing up the pieces that she’d oiled yesterday.

Spain can be very tiring.

OK, 17 down. We can’t afford any more bad weather ‘cos we’re running out of space for additional furniture.

There have often been times at our favourite dog-sitting house down in the Jalón valley that we’ve stared westwards up the valley and watched the mountain/hill tops being obscured by a threatening set of gloomy low clouds. This morning waking up in Casa Libélule, our perspective was very different; we were, ourselves, now up the valley and half way up one of those mountains whose head had been obscured by those gloomy low clouds. We could hardly see the valley floor at our feet, far less our favourite dog-sitting house nor even, indeed, Jalón itself. The weather forecasters had been predicting a day or so of rain for some time. It was supposed to turn up yesterday but it would appear its progress slowed and it looks as though it took longer to get here. It was certainly here now.

Also unknown to us, today is St. Joseph’s Day, celebrated in the Valencia region, and all the shops are closed. Happily, entirely by luck rather than by planning, we had bought food for today yesterday. Also fortunately, since the weather was crap and the shops were closed, we had some jobs to keep us amused indoors.

I began by checking my glued and clamped TV unit repair. All appeared well so I finished that off before opening the last two of my original 16 cardboard boxes to assemble our last piece of oak furniture, a small 2-door sideboard unit. I discovered that I had left the most complex assembly job ‘til last, more by luck than judgement; the instruction booklet ran to 17 pages. Unbounded joy! The booklet wittily informed me that it should take an hour. Oh how I laughed. With multiple shapes of assembly hardware components (screws, drawer runners, handles etc) consecutively lettered from A to V, not having been packed in bagged sets and not actually themselves being lettered, it took me almost an hour to sort the components and to verify that I had been supplied all the correct bits. I must now have been a seasoned professional, however, and assembly went smoothly, albeit rather slowly. More haste, less speed is definitely the approach to take with these things. I think it actually took me three hours to build but it looked splendid when finished. It’s a good job that Francine and I still love the style of this stuff because we’ve got a considerable amount of it.

Speaking of Francine, while I was building the sideboard she volunteered to set about oiling some of the pieces that were already assembled. There are some chipboard components in the furniture but the things like the legs and table tops are solid oak – well, solid spliced-together oak, anyway. In JYSK, whilst paying for our order and arranging for delivery, we had been regaled to treat the wood with a special oil. This should be done before the furniture was first used. The oil should be applied, quite lavishly, with a mildly abrasive sponge and allowed to soak in, before removing any excess with kitchen towel prior to buffing up with a clean cotton cloth. Francine started with our downstairs items of furniture, massaging oil into our escritorio, filing cabinet and two of the six chairs (two that would be used as office chairs when not needed as dining chairs). We decided not to oil our bookcase, largely because we didn’t want pages of books getting oily. Oh, the fact that it would be a bugger of a job might also have had a bearing. 🙂

All this took until about 2:00 PM.

The weather has not changed and is still utter crap. If it would stop raining, I could get rid of the second mountain of discarded cardboard that has been steadily building up at one end of our dining area. However, the weather shows no sign of improvement as yet.

16 down, zero to go. Yay!

Why did we buy a house in Spain?

One of the challenges we’d begun to organize on Spanish Venture Part 1 was to get a quote for fitting shower screens, one to our upstairs/guest bathroom and another to our downstairs/main shower room. Upon our return this time, the plumber who’d provided the quote was anxious to get the job done, as were we – we’ve hitherto been showering in a shower tray with no screens around it, in effect using the bathroom as a wet room, which means a sizeable mopping up job afterwards. As promised, the plumber turned up between 8:00 AM and 8:30 AM and set about his work.

Flushed with the success of fixing my first dragonfly to the wall of Casa Libélule, I started today by fixing another one. This one had been a Christmas present purchased in Oxford by Francine. Since it’s eyes do not meet on top of its head, I decided it most resembled a Gomphus and christened this one Gomphus oxfordiensis. G. oxfordiensis proved a little more difficult to secure, requiring two holes to be drilled instead of one. I wanted to position him high up, too, which meant borrowing a pair of steps from a friend on our urbanization. He’s up, though, and looks very good, albeit less colourful than his friend.

As the plumber banged away downstairs, the doorbell rang again, this time announcing the arrival of a very exciting visitor. We were now going to be surveyed for Internet access. Yay! How cut off one now feels when disconnected from the Internet. The service offered by this company is a radio connection to a mast across the valley so we need no landline into the house. By English standards the service is slow but we are neither trying to stream videos nor to indulge in any Internet gaming, both of which would require a faster connection than the basic 2Mb on offer. If it proves less than adequate, we can upgrade to 4Mb. We’ve also abandoned the idea of a PAYG installation. This is largely because the installation charge of PAYG is 299 whereas the installation charge for an 18-month contract is on 69 and the monthly charges are also halved. so, 18 months full time connection will cost less than, say, 4 months of PAYG over an 18-month period. Neither will we have to mess about getting the connection (de)activated. Bottom line, we should be installed and connected on Tuesday next week. Exciting stuff!

After the Internet site survey and while the plumber continued drilling and banging fitting our main shower screen down below, I set about opening another two cardboard boxes from my 16-box 3D jigsaw to assemble the TV unit, even though we are not, as yet anticipating having a TV. Let’s face it, the TV programmes in England are crap. Over here in Spain, you can get hooked in to the same English TV which is still crap and, to make matters worse, is an hour later, Spain being an hour ahead of UK time.

Long story short: all was going well with my TV unit until I realized that I’d assembled a vital piece the wrong way around – an unfinished raw edge of chipboard was showing at the front. Unfortunately, the piece was symmetrical and would go in equally well either way around. I muttered something unrepeatable and began taking it apart again, the act of which split a couple of flaps of chipboard away. I muttered something else unrepeatable, this time slightly louder, and paused for breath and to take stock. Francine was out shopping [now there’s a surprise] and I needed the car to go and get some clamps so I could glue everything back together again. Eventually Francine turned up and I high-tailed it down to Tot Util, a.k.a. Totties, for a few cheap clamps. [Aside: coincidentally, there happens to be a very appealing young piece of totty in Totties, and she speaks very good English.] The unit is now glued and essentially finished. Must concentrate harder.

14 down, 2 to go.

A beautiful morning dawned, cool but sunny. There’s an interesting phenomenon we’ve noticed on other visits to our friends’ house which is also half way up the mountain; fire smoke rises so far above the vineyards and then spreads out in a layer You don’t see it from down on the valley floor, you have to be in an elevated situation. This morning a fire was putting up smoke and it was forming a layer for Francine to capture, still clad in her dressing gown. We really are being spoilt being the only ones here.

In the same way that major construction works celebrate their start by breaking the ground, I thought I should bite the bullet and drill my hole in a Spanish wall. I’m familiar with English constructions methods and am comfortable drilling holes in English walls but Spanish construction is something new; they use blocks with large holes in them. I could imagine drilling into nothingness looking for a fixing. A friend over here, living full time in the same urbanization had kindly lent me a collection of wall plugs and screws. The very same friend was the reason I needed to drill this first hole in the first place. Being aware of my dragonfly obsession, he had purchased for Casa Libélule, a magnificent ornamental dragonfly to put up on a wall.  Anatomically accurate it isn’t – it seems to have eight wings though that isn’t obvious from the picture. So, to note both its curious wing configuration and also its purchaser, I have dubbed it Octodoptera murdochii. As you can see, my first Spanish drilling was successful.

Flushed with success, I went on to attack our partially finished filling cabinet – partially finished because a couple of screw holes proved a little too big for the screws provided. Before resorting to messy resin mixtures, I tried a trimmed plastic wall plug. Strewth, it worked! Once the drawer runners were securely fixed, our badly behaved cabinet was soon finished. Downstairs with it.

Enough work, time for some play. Today is March 17th. Along with a few other friends in the valley, the folks we dog-sit for and the purchaser of Octodoptera murdochii, we had been invited to lunch by a Scottish couple, living over here full time, and instructed to dress in either green, orange or white. Fortunately I had packed a distressingly bright green fleece. Now here was what I can only describe as complete international confusion: an English car load (Francine volunteered to drive) descended upon a Scottish household in Spain to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Go figure, as they say in America! There was another couple invited to the gathering, the man of which proved to be the Irish connection.  Mind you, his wife was Italian, despite sounding like a Londoner and nothing at all like an Italian. Mind you, the Irishman didn’t sound in the vaguest bit Irish. I felt more than a little relieved that the two Scotsmen at least sounded Scottish, even if one of them was dressed as a Leprechaun. Well done, chaps! [Inset your own joke beginning, “An Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman went into a bar …”] The green beer was an inventive twist, I thought. 😀

And I got confused on the ferry because of “welcome to Malta” messages and Norwegian Google search screens. Sheesh!

Monday: bed delivery day. Today we should get our own bed (as opposed to the guest room bed that we’ve been using hitherto). Since the bed delivery men had my mobile phone number, I was tasked with waiting at home for the call announcing that they were on their way. Meantime Francine – yes, you guessed it – would go shopping again. This arrangement suited me fine; anything that got me a day without dragged around shops was fine by me.

Actually, I did have an early morning flirtation with the shops, to a local building supply hardware store called “Tot Util”, known affectionately as Totty’s. I was in search of sandpaper to smooth down my glued dead table, a protective sheet to stand the oak furniture pieces on whilst oiling them, some drill bits and a solution to my drawer cabinet’s problem of screw holes that are too big. I returned with a bag full of goodies from Totty’s whose assistant happily spoke enough English to be able to understand my needs and help me.

Francine hit the shops. Her only task that I was particularly interested in was her trip to Moraira to visit Telitec to see if we could arrange for some Internet access. Telitec offers a Pay-As-You-Go Wi-Fi service by radio dish, no landline required, that sounded ideal for occasional visitors to Spain. Phone ‘em up when you arrive at Alicante airport, or wherever, and get them to switch the service on. Tell ‘em when to stop it as you leave and just pay for when you’re here. 40€ for four weeks gets a 2Mb service, 50€ for four weeks gets a 4Mb service – both plus IVA [VAT], of course. The only alternative would be paying for a full 12 months which, whilst cheaper per month, would still mean paying for the whole year. The PAYG approach seemed most appropriate.

Francine returned with a booking on Wednesday morning for a site survey to make sure that a signal existed, plus a Spanish PAYG mobile telephone. also from Telitec. There were a few other items in her bag of goodies but they were incidental, a thermometer for the balcony, for example. Incidentally, today has been quite cool topping out at a disappointing 11°C. Spain, warm?

While Francine was out doing good works, I amused myself assembling the remaining four dining chairs. Two more cardboard boxes bit the dust. OI also opened the dining table’s extension leaf fully expecting it to be just a slab of oak that required no assembly. Wrong! There were three pieces of wood to screw to it. I duly screwed them to it and another cardboard box bit the dust. 3 more down, 4 to go.

Just as Francine was returning, my phone rang. It was the bed delivery men saying they’d be here in 30-40 minutes. Great! I sat with a beer and watched. Eventually, a white van dawdled along a narrow lane down in the valley and turned up a dirt track just before our development. It reversed back to the narrow lane and continued into our development. The white van disappeared from view but I then spotted the roof of the van between some houses getting closer. It didn’t seem to get any closer and I feared they’d stopped too soon, perhaps wondering where we were. Since Hobble-along Cassidy was incapacitated, Francine went down to show them where we actually were. She was gone a long time. I then saw the suspect white van exiting the development and turn towards Alcalalí. This was either the wrong van or the driver was completely confused. I jumped in the car to rescue Francine from climbing back up the countless steps.

A dark blue van appeared and headed for us. This van was definitely the correct van ‘cos we could see that it had “Bed Specialists” emblazoned across its side panels.It almost made it but, as I went out to greet it, it reverse into our parking area and used it to turn around rather than coming on in. It drove back down the hill and turned up the wrong road, a blind alley. I gave chase in the car, met them and beckoned them in. Finally, two guys delivered and built our new bed along with a very sexy headboard and the bedside cabinets which is what we really wanted. [The headboard and cabinets came as a discounted bulk purchase, ex-display, but we’d seen none better.] We have a bed and very splendid it looks, too. We’ll be trying it out tomorrow night. Too tired to change rooms tonight. 😉

I’m saving the last four cardboard boxes for Wednesday which is forecast to have horrendous rain all day long.

Almost? Well, yes, almost.

With a quiet Sunday morning and early afternoon in prospect prior to visiting our friends down in the valley for Sunday dinner, I thought it was a good time to attack more of my 16-box 3D jigsaw of oak furniture that had been delivered. One of the items that we’d selected was a 3-drawer unit on castors, acting as sort of a filing cabinet, that was designed to go with our escritorio [writing desk]. With three drawers, each of which would doubtless need assembling, it was likely to be one of the more complex sections of jigsaw. I unpacked it and sure enough, the box of hardware fittings was huge.

All was going well until I came to attach the drawer runners to the inside of the cabinet. Six runners were each fixed by three screws. Of the 18 pre-drilled screw holes, two failed to provide a solid fixing for their screws. The runners may not have been screwed but I was. 😀 I finished assembling everything that I could and left the sides of the cabinet awaiting a solution, whatever that might be – thinking caps on and hardware store browsing required.

I turned my attention to the two boxes containing the dining table. This, I’d hoped, would be as straightforward as the escritorio had been. I unpacked it and, sure enough, the table top was ready assembled and really only needed the legs bolting in place. That done, Francine spotted a small split and raised splinter of wood on one side rail of the table top. Bother! Sunday’s aren’t quite completely dead in Spain, a coffee shop was open in Jalón and so was a glory hole like “bazaar” run by enterprising Chinese individuals and containing all manner of both useful and useless items – affectionately referred to as Chinese takeaways. After a coffee, we found a small pot of white wood glue in the Chinese takeaway. We now have a dead dining room table, flat on its back with its legs in the air, complete with glued splinter weighed down by a tool box supported by a tin of olives. Very inventive!

Anxious for some success, I decided to attack a couple of the six dining chairs. Dining chairs come in boxes of two so I unpacked one box and set about checking all the supplied components. It all seemed to be there so I started screwing them together. Large bolts of three different lengths seemed to hold each chair together quite securely. The trick with chairs, of course, is get all four legs to touch the ground at the same time so they don’t wobble. Here i was on a completely tiled Spanish floor and naturally soem of the tiles are at slightly different levels. So, pick a set of four tiles and adjust the chair legs on those. Then hope that your unsuspecting diner picks a set of four similarly arranged tiles. It was impossible to adjust the legs such they were totally stable in an infinite set of locations. Such is life.

We left the glue on the dead dining table drying while we went for a very relaxing dinner with our friends.

That should be singular, or course. Whereas most women appear to regard shopping as a recreational pastime,  if not an Olympic sport, most men, in my experience, are the exact opposite. A man’s approach is this: if you must go to the shops, grab what you want, pay for it and leave – get it over with – don’t window shop – don’t dilly-dally. Our two weeks over in Spain during February, when we actually bought Casa Libélule, were largely subsequently spent shopping to kit it out. Now we are back on our second trip, our initial goal was not so much shopping as visiting the same businesses again paying balances and arranging delivery of items previously shopped. Two of those visits, however, almost inevitably resulted in further purchases. What a thrill, more shopping. Arghhh!

Today, as had been forecast, rain arrived accompanied by a dramatic fall in temperature. Our butterfly attracting 23°C of yesterday fell to an Anglo-Saxon chilling 8°C this morning. With such fluctuations, anyone would think we were in England , except for yesterday’s 23°C in March, I suppose. Never mind, cold rain is perfect weather for some recreational shopping. Oh joy! We were off in search of more lights, external, this time, one for the front door and two for the balconies. We also wanted ceiling fans for the two main bedrooms. A business in Dénia had been recommended so that’s where we headed. One of this shops advantages for us was that it was directly above a Casa (the house-ware shop chain, not our house) where we also wanted to buy some decent wine glasses. We set off having first loaded the car with the waste cardboard from yesterday’s construction activities to dump it in the local basura for recycling.

There was a free parking space right outside the shop – yeah! Inside the shop was a bewildering array of lights: wall lights for inside, uplighters, bedside lights, wall lights for outside, ceiling fans with lights, ceiling fans without lights, artistic flight of fancy lights … and so it went on. I don’t know what has happened to us over in Spain but, once again, we both agreed on our favourite design of external wall light and on the most appropriate ceiling fan plus light for our bedrooms. I breathed a sigh of relief at a quick decision and picked up three outside wall lights and two remote control, 3-bladed ceiling fans. We carried them to the cash register where a lady, much more adept than we would be, picked out the relevant LED light bulbs to go with them plus couple of batteries for our fans’ remotes. We’d also seen a decent, simple uplighter for our dining area and added that to the mix. 462.00€. I patted my heart and muttered, “keep going you fool”. The shop assistant smiled and changed the price to 450.00€ – not a huge discount but worth a bit of Tom Foolery. 🙂

On to Casa and wine glasses. A little up-front research had shown that Casa had an event with 40% off it’s premium range of wine glasses. Choosing a dozen 47cl stemmed wine glasses and half a dozen cava glasses was easy. Naturally, the female of our party couldn’t leave it at that and started shopping around for other things that we didn’t know we needed. The salad spinner, I thought, did look useful. The hooked dangly crappy plastic thing to hold who-knows-what in the shower cubicle (when we’ve actually got a cubicle), I thought was perhaps destined for failure.

We returned with our carload of purchases and I was vindicated – the tacky shower doobrie did, indeed, turn out to be a waste of space, in the shower at least; it now lives under the sink holding Darwin knows what.

Our sun returned in the afternoon though the air was still chill. I warmed myself up assembling our five-shelf bookcase, which was blissfully straightforward, followed by our strong-enough-to-support-the-Bismarck escritorio [writing desk], which was also, rather surprisingly, very straightforward, only the legs needing bolting into place. This Danish wooden furniture certainly seems to be built to last. This is what another three cardboard boxes produced.

5 down, 11 to go. I’m hoping that the dining table will be as straightforward as the escritorio. 🙂