Not much has changed

So I’ve been back in the UK for almost two weeks now. Already looking forward to getting back to Spain. Not that I’ve hated or even disliked my time here, it’s just been way too busy here and the weather is well rubbish.

I’ve not been up to much since getting back. Seen some old friends. Not much has changed. I don’t have much to update them with (another reason why my blog stays quiet for weeks on end these days)

Some highlights have been.

Watching Chelsea beat United in community shield. Many reasons for this, I’m a Chelsea fan, was good to be drinking with me dad while watching football (always a favourite past time) and it also means that football is back. (It’s even better that today’s back pages are full of Ferguson’s rants rather then the actual football.)

BBQ. My dad decided to throw a last minute BBQ. Well, one had been half planned for last weekend but it was a bit on/off. Friday we made a definite plan it was on the the very next day. In all there was about 15~18 people there and I was the lone chef. It was a bit tricky trying to cook for that many people. Some sausages did get burnt but no one has since complained about stomach bugs, which is nice.
I was even told that the plain chicken I cooked for the step brother was ate, despite him being one of the highest critics of food I’ve know. Even in restaurants he might not eat if the food isn’t perfect, so for him to eat my BBQd plain chicken was good to hear.

During the BBQ there was also a challenge set by my dad. He challenged my friend to jump on some massive trampoline in the garden, bounce down on to his bum and bounce back on to his feet. All in one go. My dad (initial) failed and took him three attempts. Here is mine..

Check out the celebration.

Some lowlights.

Drinking everyday. I’m not a huge drinker of alcohol. Just a social drinker. Except since being in England I’ve seen different people each day in different social situations….and drank at all of them. Don’t think my body can take much more.

My trainers. I came over with just one pair of trainers. Early on in the “holiday” the sole on my left shoe became unglued and now slides down my foot by about an inch or so. That means that when I stand (which is something I’ve done a lot in pubs and bars) my heel rests on the edge of the thick sole giving me a sore heel. Unfortunately all my other shoes are back in Spain.

Insect bites. Since living in Spain for about 16 months I’ve been a bit lucky and only had a handful of insect bites. Being in England for a few days I’ve received a back full of bites. I guess that might have something to do with the fact that there is more skin on offer in Spain and in England all skin is covered up under jumpers and coats at the moment, so any exposed skin for any amount of time, say a topless guy doing some lawn mowing and gardening for his dad, might get a load on his back.

And that’s been it. Apart from the big wedding at the end of the “holiday” I have not much else planned. eat a pasty, maybe a KFC. Speaking of which I haven’t even had a single sandwich yet, should really sort that out asap. Perhaps tomorrow when I’m in Liverpool (which is home to my all time favourite sandwich shop).

And I have to do it all again in a few weeks time when I return in November.

Since I’ve been gone

A few days ago my 1 year since moving here anniversary passed. Me and the missus didn’t do anything to celebrate, I had family visiting so we were probably out anyway. But some thing’s haven’t really change here that I wished had.

The biggest thing has been the let down that Spanish culture has yet, well at least here, to embrace the fantastic idea of sandwich deli’s. I love a good deli. I love a good sandwich. But I don’t have the patience for all that preparation to make the type of selection they have in deli’s. Or the knowledge. If anyone can teach me to make that chicken mayo fusion filling that you get in deli’s I’d be more then thankful.

There was some interest in one starting up but that never materialised.
One restaurant that does serve tasty, but slightly expensive, sandwiches had stopped. Although I have seen they stuck their sandwich board outside again.

But it’s not quite a deli.

I’ve resorted to having to find different, simple, fillings that I can stick between my two slices of Bimbo bread myself. I’ve starred at the meat counter for far too long then is allowed for a health sane person to.
And the best I could come up with is having corned beef filling. But I never really know what to have with corned beef, apart from salady stuff but at least it’s a change from having ham and salady stuff.
So I was doing at little investigating to see what I could have with my new meat and found some simple sandwich ideas that all ended with toasting the sandwich.
Which made me remember, I saw an advert for a genius idea on the TV the other day. You guys back in the UK now have the fantastic invention of Tostabag.

What a great idea. Any sandwich filling can now be doubled thanks to the easy idea of toasting your sandwich in a little sleeve and using a toaster, which I assume is in every home in the World. Ever. By law.

Amazing stuff.

But not only have the UK made advancements in dinner time snacks since I’ve been gone. No. You’ve also improved breakfast.
Watching some more English TV the other day, I promise, English TV is something that I see very close to nothing off. These are the only two things I remember watching. I don’t even remember what shows I was watching at the time, just the adverts.
Anyway, I now learnt that you have Weetabix Bitesize.

Now this is more of an “about time” invention then a “bloody marvellous” like the first one but I could so do with Bitesize Weetabix over here due to the fact that we have tiny tiny little bowls. My Weetabix look more like Weetastax then Weetabix in these tiny bowls.
Plus it means the bottom one gets very soggy and not very sugared and the top one is dry and over sugared.
I just want my Weetabix side by side.
Or in BiteSize.

Video killed the radio star

I think the missus hit the nail on the head when she recently commented that Twitter had taken away from blogging. Anyone else finding this? Most of my tweets would of been padded out to more then 160 letters and turned in to an actually blog entry, Twitter spam followers, craving for pasties, messy sandwich eater. It's time to claw some blog time back.

Recently on The Boy Who Likes To...

Work has been taking up A LOT of time for me. Until very recently I was doing regular 8 hours days all month. And I don't mean being in the office from 9 to 5 and actually doing half a days work, really working for 8 hours.
In the current job climate that is a good thing. Whereas many people are finding it hard looking for work I'm getting snowed under. Plus with working in the car industry that is quite a surprise.

My work though has effected other parts of my life. Blogging has gone awol, although I put time aside to comment on blogs when I can. But mainly hobbies and especially my Spanish lessons have gone. Not finishing work until gone six most nights has prevented me from attending class. I do have Spanish lessons that I can do from home but by time I finish I'm not really in the mood to sit behind the computer for another hour listening to more audio.
I hope that the weather gets more stable and warmer quicker as I will be able to sit on the balcony, away from being indoors and all electrical "entertainment" appliances that get in the way of my learning.

All this work has got me thinking about the summer to. Or at least when it starts to get hot in a few months. What will happen with my work routine? Will I be able to juggle work and beach/snorkeling. I hope so, I'd hate to lose fish chasing as well as Spanish class.

In other news. The sandwich deli that was supposed to turn up down on the beach still hasn't materialised. I did go down there for a sandwich a few weeks back and all they had to offer was ham and cheese, which I can get from my fridge. But I have started recently buying tomato and lettuce, never sure why I stopped buying them in the first place, as well as adding ham to egg sandwiches and I'm going through an explosion in sandwich fillings. Which is all good.

Still, it no deli.

Update on house move and more

So we are in the new apartment now and all is going well.

The place is lovely. It's bigger, more spacious. It has a big patio window/door opening out on to the terrace so we get much more light in the apartment then the last place did.

What tea time will look like.

One slight downside is the kitchen and living room are together

We wanna be together

This kind of combination is bad when you are either cooking(smell, noise) or using washing machine (noise). I'm sure I'll adjust.

And here is the new office.

I get a decent window view now

Some other good points are I've exchanged this carpack view...



For this beach/town/moutain view...



But now we can see much more of the outside, which having been "locked" up in an apartment with a tiny window and no balcony is fantastic.


The Moon and Venus


Sunrise over the beach


Fishermen packing up after a nights work


A bird taking a rest

All taken from the comfort of the balcony




In other news

We've had some strange weather the last few days.
A day or two after moving in we had a sea mist that covered the town for most of the afternoon, lasting a few hours.



It was very strange as the neighbours mentioned how they had just got back from Malaga and the sea mist was only over Nerja and no where else.

We've also been battered by storms the last few days. Non-stop rain. A few times being woken up by thunder. Once slightly after the alarm goes off so that was a strange snooze alarm.

There are also some new additions to the house.

There is a new toilet. Well a new flush system on the toilet. Rather the the old fashioned "pull up" flush handle, we now have a current fashion push button. The 'fontanero' did demonstrate for us how to "push to flush" button. Just incase we hadn't seen a push flush before. Although it's very nice of him to go that one step beyond.

The other newer edition to the house is a brand spanking new 32 inch flat screen TV.


Very pleased with the birthday present


Its very fancy and has lots of hightech stuff on it

I'll be able to play Mario Kart wide screen now and also being a modern flat screen I can connect the laptop, which means we can watch all our DVDs and stream films and American TV right on to the big screen. No more watching The Office US on a small laptop hooked up to ipod speakers for us!


Watching Seinfeld big screen style/You can compare the previous laptop screen that we used to use too.

And finally some GREAT news. I read this article in the local magazine.



It appears that one of the supermarket/deli places down on the beach front will now be having a "london style" deli counter for sandwiches. This is possibly the best news I've heard in a long time and especially looking forward to being able to pop out on dinner hour to get a proper sandwich. Rather then just using the same 5 ingredients I have been using for sandwiches for the last 11 months.

Hi ho. Hi ho.

So I've been working from home for about 2 months now. I've still not had my first proper pay. In fact it's been about 3 months since I last got a decent pay. But things are going well.

At first I wasn't getting that much work. I'm not doing a 9-5 job were I get paid no matter how much -or little- I do, my pay depends on how much work there is.

When I first started there wasn't that much. I was able to go the beach or pool of a morning, come back during the hottest part of the day and do my work and be finished before lunch. It didn't really feel like work.
And not being paid helped with that feeling too.

In the last few days there has been a huge leap in the amount of work I have. It's been good to do some actual work. It's taken up the whole of my day though and I've not really been outside. It's felt like a proper day's work in fact.
And for the first time in a long time I actually looked foward to the weekend -and that's not just because the football season starts. Infact I was so excited about the weekend I set the alarm to get up early and beat everyone to the beach -more on that later.

But working from home has some major downsides. Mainly there aren't many people to talk to. Infact there's just this one guy in the "office." He often gets distracted by the internet and wastes a lot of time. And he hardly talks.
Also he seems to go anywhere I go, canteen/kitchen; he's there, bathroom; he's there. He keep's following me.
Also there is this one other girl in the "office." I never see her work. I'm pretty sure she doesn't actually work for the company. And most of the time she will come in about 2 or 3 o'clock for a few hours and totally distract me. She'll just stick the TV on or make me cook her something to eat. She is quite a distraction. And then she will leave.

I miss being able to socialise with other colleagues -I'm still looking out for a bar job to help with this. I miss going for my lunch time sandwich.
But I get paid next week so things are really starting to look up.

Circle peg in a square tray

The last few weeks I've noticed a strange change in the ham that we regularly buy.

Without any notice the ham maker ahs gone from making square slices of ham to round slices of ham.
They haven't mentioned anything, anywhere about this major change.

I quite prefered square ham. It fitted perfectly on the strangly smaller sized bread. Absolutely perfect. It was almost like the ham makers made and effort to go out, measure the size of bread come back and make ham that size.
It was a minute detail to the ham, but it made sandwiches that much better. There was never and excess breadness* on the edges.

Now the makers have changed the design to round ham. This of course means that my sandwiches now have corners of sandwiches where there is nothing but butter. It's pretty plain in those corners.

I just can't understand why a ham maker, without notice and without sticking some sort of "New Improved Ham" (in Spanish of course) label on the front so people would know I don't understand.

Although one good point about the new circle ham is that it's a little tougher. Not that I like tough ham, but I hate it when it's so thin and flimsy that it falls apart as you pull it out of the plastic tray.

*I hate taking a bread only bite in to a sandwich

The cheese just ain't the same

I've started to find that I'm getting excited about really strange things.

When my mum was over visiting she bought me Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit. I've spent so much time on these two games (and before you ask 35. My damn Wii Fit age is 35. Stupid frickin balance board)
And it's not just me. The missus has been playing a lot more Wii and even beating me on some Mario Kart time trials.
I love these two games and they are great presents.
But I'm trying to get a point across here, bare with me.
The best present I got that week was not the games but in fact a block of cheese.

Cheese over here just isn't the same.

It's all expensive and I just want a decent block of English Mature Cheddar. But it's so hard to come by.
They do have a lot of sliced cheese or grated cheese. But just not a lot of choice on affordable blocks of cheese.
So I've not had a cheese and (Branston) pickle sandwich in weeks. I'm missing them.

Another great thing that I've bought and I'm happy about is a pineapple. I'm so pleased I've bought a pineapple.
I've never bought a whole pineapple before. I've bought half of one or tinned rings, but never a whole pineapple.
I feel like my life has moved on a lot now.

But the greatest thing I have bought in the last few days, in fact for some time, was a double socket scart adapter.
Seriously.
A simple adapter for the TV that lets me plug in my Wii and my DVD in to the TV at the same time. The TV only has one scart plug/AV channel. This causes some unnecessary time wasting.
Before yesterday if I wanted to play some Mario Kart I'd have to turn the TV around, check what scart was plugged in the TV and swap them around if needed.
If after playing some Mario Kart and then wanting to watch some Seinfeld I still have no clue what they are saying on Spanish TV so I don't watch that) then I have to turn the TV around. Unplug the Wii. Plug in the DVD and then turn the TV back round the right way.
And vice verse if swapping from the DVD to the Wii.
But now, thanks to the special magical properties of a little black box I now have both the Wii and DVD plugged in to the TV and to use one all I have to do is switch it on. I don't even need to turn the channel.

And I wouldn't give up my Mario Kart Wii or Wii Fit for any amount of blocks of cheese.

I can't believe it's spreadable.

On a recent Big Shop we picked up a different butter to normal, due to our prefered bread spread not having a smaller tub size.
But not all went too plan.

This other brand boasts that it's Spreadable, which is always a selling point in my eyes. If a butter/margarine can spread on bread within seconds of being taken out of the fridge, WITHOUT leaving holes then thats just perfect. (Something our favoured brand does, without boasting)

This butter , despite having Spreadable on its lid and sides, just tore up my bread when taken out of the fridge due to it being too hard.

No problem we can just leave it on the side.
This though, I feel, makes the Spreadable wording on lid and sides pretty pointless as all butter is Spreadable at room temperature, thats a Fact.
So what they are advertising here is basically the natural properties of putter. If they were in the bottled water business would they stick 'Wet' on the sides of their bottles?

But this specially Spreadable butter turns in to some sort of thick soup when left a room temperature.

A soupy butter

Soup butter is far too runny. It acts like an oil on the bread, rather being one with the bread. It falls off the knife causing a mess. It doesn't have the same 'mouth-feel.'
It's. Just. Not. Butter.

Now I have to think about sandwiches 15 minutes earlier to give myself enough preperation. And it doesn't help that the clocks went forward and hour, now I can't tell if I would like a tasty sandwich or if I had just had one?

What the frek where the butter guys thinking when they decided to make a Spreadable butter that was too hard when in the fridge and too runny when at room temperature? Those fools!

PS Please no one comment on the differences between butter and margarine. I've taken some artistic lisence.

Wet or cold

Have you noticed how sometimes things can feel so cold that they seem wet or damp?

Well take that image and apply it to something edible, like bread for instanc,e and your in a whole new World of confusion.

Which was how I was feeing when I got home after being the shop and opened the loaf to make myself a cheese and pickle sandwich.

Que lots of touching the bread and pressing the bread against the cheeks of my face with a look of puzzlement to try and tell if the bread was wet or just cold.
I don't know what made me think of using my face as a dampness test, I think it's just all those soap powder adverts where the mum is using her face to feel her washed towels.
That's educational TV for you!

In the end I dared to believe that the bread was dry, just cold, and made my sandwich. It tasted normal. Just a little softer then normally, whatever that means?