Christmas in England Part 2 The South

Our second week in England was a lot more quieter and calmer. It was good to have a power shower back (the one problem about staying in my mums is that her shower has as much pressure as a balloon). Although the missus parents shower can sometimes be TOO power shower and take off a limb.

We do do a lot of playing out in London and my alcohol tolerance had improved somewhat so I was able to not get too drunk, phew.

But there was a lot of pointing...


The missus points


I point

And kissing (maybe too many festive parties was the problem)


The missus friends kiss


I kiss not one...


but two friends.


And my friend kisses the barmaid (which is often referred to as a "normal night out."


Look, presents
I did get a present of my friend, some marbles, which we then played in the corner of the bar. I won. Of course.

But there was also even better times at the missus which included eating Christmas Roasts!

Tuck in

But then it was time to leave. And after booking an additional suitcase on the return flight due to the missus clothes shopping and Christmas presents we went the airport.

Our plane

And I decided to play about with the missus present a little more.

Big plane taking off

And after horrible horrible weather all week, catching two mini colds and having a horrible runny nose we arrived back to Spain to find this.

Hardly a cloud in sight

And this is the view from the coach off the coast as we pulled back in to Nerja

Glad to be back

Slideshow from two weeks


But despite having missed all my family and friends for the last year and all the fun I had in those two weeks in England I am really pleased to be back in Spain.

From espana with Love

Hope all my readers have a great Christmas meal and fun New Year festivities and that you all get tons of presents.

Merry Christmas

Christmas in England Part 1 The North

My short week in Runcorn was pretty insane.

I'm unsure whether I like flying anymore? I used to love flying loads. But my last few trips have been plagued by cramped conditions (although the missus forward thinking prebooked us extra leg room on one journey) and getting very dry eyes and mouth from the recycled air.

But there is still something childishly exciting about being a few thousand feet in the air flying over cities.
But I'm quite sad to say the very first thing we did when we arrived in to Manchester was to head to the nearest McDonalds. You can take the man out of England but you can't take English out of the man (or something like that)

Trying to squeeze in seeing my mum was a hard task as she had made plans to go to Leeds for two days and Liverpool for one whole day during the six days I returned from Spain.
Trying to get work (we work from home and in this case holiday) done while having two screaming and very loud kids in the house was really difficult (although easily more managed when one of them went back to school).
Almost as difficult as trying to find a place to put our laptops.

Count 'em. Five laptops.

Most of my time though was spent catching up with my 10 month old nephew, who misses out on sharing a birthday with my by 24 hours.
And we did get a lot of photos of him including

Him enjoying his new booster chair so he can have toast at the table like everyone else.


And his thoughts on girls....or Chelsea's awful awful home game against Cluj (I was making pretty much the same face at that game)

In my first week my poor tolerence of alcohol seemed to take over when I had to cut short a night out with a friend after only two drinks due to meeting up with my dad earlier that afternoon for a few pints.
And I'm pretty sure one very slurred conversation over curry with another friend. But that one is ok as it wasn't just me that was drunk.

Although good things do come from drinking with my dad, including this Holiday season Christmas card-esque photo


I did spend some time in Liverpool myself so the missus could do exactly 1.75 hours worth of shopping before exploding at the sheer amount of people cashing in on early sales.
I got to see my stepbrother who I hadn't seen in a while. Almost swear at a few bus drivers, first one closed the doors and drove off just as we were about to get on. Second one was driving close to the speed of sound on the way back.
And we also spotted this guy out early

Aren't there supposed to be reindeers?

But almost too quickly my time was over and we had to head down South to the missus parents. Although we almost saved the best till last.
We got first class tickets down to London and enjoyed lots of free foods and drinks, loads of leg room and more importantly lots of peace and quite and calm.

Happy Christmas via Flickr

Do you have a favourite pic on flickr that you would like to Christmas-up?

Well all you have to do is add a new note with the text "ho ho ho hat" or "ho ho ho beard" and you get a Santa hat or beard that you can resize on any of your photos.

Also adding "?snow=1" at the end of any flickr url gives you snow.

So your Christmas e-cards could look a little like this or this or this.

Whats that coming over the hill?

today i wanted to start off writing about my little journey to the chilly island of England

but i have something better to write about

much better

having bought the missus a brand spanking new fancy zoomy dslr camera we decided to 'take that baby for a test drive' and headed down to the beach

we got LOADS of aces photos
i recommend you check out flickr/thepinkjellybaby shortly for some really good photos

but as we walked in to some garden to try and get some 'flowery' macro shots the missus spotted this guy having a rest on a plant


a goddamn praying mantis (with the missus elbow in the background, she was too scared to get close :D ha)
-and check out the bigger pictures for much better detail-

how many levels of awesome is that?

and i am so pleased that the camera not only has a great macro mode but is aces at capturing fantastic colours

but now i'm not sure whether this or the octopus is the best thing i've seen EVER!

[update]
here are some of my favourite photos of the praying mantis




Are you looking at me?


I spy...

Good Bye

well i finally got to the shower...

but for some reason i did everything backwards today?

normally i go
shampoo-wash face-wash body

but today i went
wash body-wash face-shampoo

i might be entering Bizarro World

Hello, good morning!

Home on the range

Since coming back to England I've gotten less sleep then normal, drank more alcohol in the last few days then in the last few weeks (not just thanks to me dad)


You will be able to see that we do have some milk and cheese in there for tea and the missus does have her own drink as well. That lonely little Smirnoff.

Also it's been freezing here. And as I kind of threw out most of my clothes before leaving for Spain I didn't have many warm clothes.
In fact all I had were three jumpers.
And I shrunk one when at me mums.
Which now leads to, I have had a cold (or flu, don't know which?) which weirdly only lasted a few hours but made me feel really run down and horrible last night.

Although a few of the good points are opening presents early. Including the missus brand spanking new camera which has a pretty cool supermacro mode.

Click for a bigger picture were you can see all the leg hairs. Maybe this fly was a little too scared of hearing of a Venus.

I do want to try and take some photos of the moon with the 18x zoom but not until I have some warmer clothes.

Hot off the press

Just released is Opera 10 Preview. It's like a mini Christmas present.

Shame I have to travel for the next 6 hours and don't get to play on it for a while.

Go have a play with it.

[Link]

Several kinds of joy

Tomorrow I haed back to England for a few days for Christmas and catch up with friends.
I'm very much looking forward to it. Having a drink and watching football with me dad. Chewing the fat and catching up with friends. Having a tasty pizza from The Asda.

Oh and having an early Christmas.

(Although Christmas has come an little early as me mum purchased me the fantasic 100 billion zombie on screen, shoot em up left4dead. Very Christmas-y)

Speaking of Christmas last year my dad got me Star Wars 4 and 6 (the very first and third movies released, for those not sure)
As you can tell he had missed out episode 5. Which is kind of important in a trilogy.
I never got round to watching those DVD's, but hopefully I should be getting the missing piece to the jigsaw.
(To dad, if you're reading this, this doesn't mean you should go out and get 5, it may already be wrapped up and under a tree somewhere.)

But for those people out there loking to get DVD's for friends and family, if your gonna get a trilogy of films, make sure you get all three.

Snow

A little weather news.

This weekend it has been freezing cold here.

So cold I even felt chilly with just my jumper on in the evening!

So cold that it actually snowed on the hills right behind where we live.


The big hill right behind where we live with it's snowy top.


I was actually on my way to play football when I took these shots with my phone.
And yes, it was chilly playing football.


Some of the more mountain-y hills a little further away where covered even more in snow.

I was told by someone that this was the closest there had been snow fall to Nerja (probably less then 5km away) in a very long time.

I did get a few other better shots today as I made my way to the market with my camera, I'll upload/post them a little later.


This is a shot from the bus.


And this (slightly) snowy hill panorama.



It's very unfortunate that I didn't have the missus BRAND SPANKING NEW camera.
I've just ordered for her (it's ok she knows already) some Fujifilm long zoom range Finepix that has 18x zoom on it. I could of taken photographs of the frozen, snow covered plants on top of them mountains from where I was stood with that camera!

Tie me up

Last year, off the missus, I got a pair of trainers. Very nice ones. After a few weeks or months of wearing them I perfected the perfect knot.

I'm the kind of guy that doesn't like to get tied up in all that shoe lace tying business.

I don't want to tie my laces everytime I pop out to the shop so if I can get my trainers on and off without undoing my laces I'm a happy man.
Infact when shoe shopping, if I can find a trainer that doesn't even have laces then that's even better.
*And by that I don't mean a pair of shoes that DO need laces but just got shipped without them.

So for the last few months I've had these one pair of trainers that I haven't had to tie the laces for, for as long as I can remember.
Then a few weeks back I was doing my first game of linesman-ing for a football game and had to un-tie and re-tie my laces very tight to stop all the tiny pieces of astroturf going in to my trainer.
Now when I try to tie my laces they never stay tied.

I hate it.

There have even been times when I've had to re-tie my laces on one walk around town 4 or more times. That's just not on.

And alot of the time it's the left trainer.

I just can't seem to get that perfect knot tied again.

No matter how much I try.

I need me some Back to the Future Nikes.


In other news,
This video has recently popped up on digg, it's possibly the most funniest innocent thing I've laughed hard at in a long time.

Needs sound

A walk in the rio

I heard a few weeks after moving to Spain about a walk where you follow a river, the Rio Chillar, upstream, as far as you want, and continually pass by beautiful waterfalls and pools. Places where crowds of people would stop in the middle of their walk and take a dip, cooling down in refreshing cold and clean water.
I didn't get chance to do that walk although it's top of my list come Spring 2009.

My weekends walk did take me to the Rio Chillar, although it was more of a glimpse at it then a walk down it.


*Although the distance shown comes in at a little under 8.5km this doesn't include the 5km walk I do to and from the bus stop.
Speaking of which, the best thing about all of these walks I am doing is they are a 5 minute bus ride away from my house.


Sun in the trees
It was another lovely day for walking at the weekend.
I was told on my last walk that there is apparently 20 days of rain per year in this area, meaning there is very little chance that you will have a walk and have bad weather.
(Although I understand some bad weather is currently being blown from north Spain and parts of Malaga are on a Rain Warning.


Green hills
Despite all the sun there is lots of green in the hills around here thanks to regular sea mists which help "water" the area daily.


The Group
Despite this walk being classed as a medium difficulty I thought a lot of the walk was a little past the group averages abilities. That always worries me, espeically when you are walking close to the edges of mountains.


Rio Chillar from above
As we walked down the side of the hill towards the Rio Chillar there was a lot of slipping. Due to the large amount loose stones under foot there was someone slipping almost everyone metre or two.

But we finally reached the river.

Start of the Rio Chillar
Although it was just a trickle where we crossed it.

But I did find an example of one of the pools

Small pool
And even on a warm Autumn (it is still autumn right?) day it looked refreshing. But I'm guessing it was freezing.


Wet doggy
Although there is one person who knows how cold the water is. But it doesn't look like he is letting it bother him.


More houses
And we didn't miss out on seeing houses on this walk either. Except this one is a little more upmarket then the caves from last time.


Hard work
After a bit of difficulty getting back up the hill (and scarey at times) from the river we finally started to make it home, alsnog some rather strangley cut roads in the side of the mountain.

And here are some much better panoramas (this time) thanks to Microsofts ICE, which I highly recommend, especially if you want to manually stitch your photos.






Bigger slide show here

I did get quite a bit more from this walk. I now know a few extra walks, I've seen a path near the rio that leads to Frigiliana, which isn't far from where we live (and somewhere where we almost deciding on living).
Plus I found out that people and families are still barbequeing up in the parks even this late in the year. If the weather stays like this I might try and persuade the missus family to go for a barbeque when they visit over Christmas. That'd be a first for everyone.
Plus next month is the walk I've been looking forward to. The one up the big proper mountain.

Tit and tat

and on that note

i went for another walk in the park yesterday which i want to blog about
ive been too lazy to upload the photos on to flickr
but today ive mostly been playing around/installing various user scripts for opera, working and anything else that meant i didnt have to get out of my seat

this is due to having a very late friday night (out until they started putting the furniture away, something i havent done in a long time) and then a walk totalling 5 hours yesterday ive need a bit of a rest

but despite being a vary lazy blogger of late i want to get any unwritten posts out of my system before i go back to england for 2 weeks
which im very looking forward to
not the weather though

and now the answer

if you missed the question come here first

and now the answer...

Cloudy day

i spotted some crazy clouds t'other day





what i like about the above photo is that someone has a palm tree planted on their roof terrace
nice!


and this last one, although not taken on the same day i still think its a good shot