SWMBO has been banging on about going up to The Tabernas Desert, the “only” real desert in Europe which is in the middle of the Sierra Navada mountains, about 20 miles north of Roquetas. It was the scene of many of the “spaghetti” westerns, “Fist full of Dollars” etc. Unfortunately the walk that she wanted us to do, which took you into this desert and back, started in the middle of nowhere and I didn't want to leave the truck. Also it was getting a bit misty so you couldn't see much either, so we will leave it to another time.
SWMBO turned herself loose in the kitchen and announced that she was going to make a authentic Moroccan dish based around the kilo of lamb she had recently captured from a local butchers, next to Lidl as a matter of fact, how had we missed it so far? Well she had never used Cumin before and obviously didn't quite make out the Spanish for half a teaspoon and used a desert spoon instead, well it certainly had a hint of that particular ingredient. It became quite edible if the correct number of mouthfuls of red wine were taken between each forkful, actually it wasn't that bad.
I'm making my extra special chili tonight with the two large extra hot fresh chilies I was given by Dave, from the Spinnaker pub, “They were freshly stolen just this morning”. You probably know but there are some misconceptions about chilies, the seeds are not the hot bit it's the membrane you scrape out when you de-seed them, and also to test the “hotness” bite off the tip, if that's hottish then the chili will be very hot. So I did, and my tongue fell off, Jeez these were hot buggers. So went ahead and made the thing, no de-seeding, just chopped them up, obviously adding a good shake of cayenne powder, Worcestershire sauce and dried chilies, just for taste, had a spoonful just before bed and my teeth were still tingling this morning.
We have not been wearing cycle helmets as most of the time we are off road, I know it shouldn't make any difference but now around here there is more road work, and then Lidl got them in. €9 compared with €30 at a sports shop and what can you do? Got two, one white and one black. Also got SWMBO a cycle computer for next to nothing. At least I won't suffer the constant “How far have we got so far?” etc. Thing is the instructions are in Spanish and it's got more computing power than they took to the moon. Not only will it tell you speed and distance it also tells you how many calories you've used, trip, average, total, split and it must have a inclinometer because it informs you how hard you have worked when you've finished! Put it on after a lot of use from Babel translator and it actually works! €6!
Petrol and diesel prices are going up here although I hear it's much worse back in the UK, here it's €1/litre for diesel, it was 83 cents when we first got here. But as Lidl is only 3 miles away and we only really use the truck when getting heavy stuff like water and beer etc. we cycle most of the time.
She's washing again so I'm looking at the waste hog and it's empty, fill, empty, fill until I'm sick of it, but it has to be done.
Read something the other day on a forum that made me smile, it was about divorce I think, “I've been married for 35 years and I can't be bothered to train another”. Quite like that, I do.
Ludo has taken over as the preferred game in the evenings, if someone had told me twenty years ago that I would be spending a Friday evening playing Ludo I would have thought they were out of their mind. I had found a down loadable version of the game and so now we play by those rules and not the ones we “remembered”. It can be so brutal as a game, you could be one throw from getting all your counters home but if you don't throw the exact number your competitor could still win with counters still not out. I tend to win most of the time and she usually throws a fit, or anything close at hand when she loses and is “not playing ever again!” Until the next time, that is.
We are now re-watching, for the third time, I think, “Band of Brothers”, tried again to watch series three of “Prison Break” but it's a heap of shit.
It's Sunday morning and I'm recovering from the extra bowlful of chili that I had late last night, there has been some rumblings but no hectic dash to the loo as yet, must be something missing from the recipe? It tipped it down all night and is now in for the day, 11am and SWMBO is still in bed reading with a cup of tea, after her two chucky eggs and toast. Don't blame her because there's nothing much to do today. I just had half a baguette filled with crispy Spanish bacon and it was delicious, just like the bacon I used to have when I was a nipper, what do they do with it now?
Missed my usual SSS early this morning so later on I'm going to have a wade down there to do the necessary, take up some time I guess, may take a book. I'm reading “Sum of all fears”, another Tom Clancy novel and I'm sure I read it before but I'm half way through it and nothing is ringing a bell.
I have a bunch of things planned for days like these, stitching together my old motorcycling videos and adding some decent sound tracks, re reading my Olympus user manual so I can use the camera properly, ditto with the Camcorder, learning more Spanish, putting Windows 7 on SWMBO's laptop, getting blogs 1 & 2 together and formating them to put in an on-line book, exporting all my contacts from Microsoft Outlook into OpenOffice format so I can finally dump MS office completely, a thousand things really, but I can't be arsed. Why put off today what you can put off again tomorrow?
I think I'll read my book.
6 pm and it's still raining, bugger!
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