spain – Page 92 – don't confuse the narrator

utilities are useful

Water, electricity, telephone, adsl… we tend to take them for granted, don’t we?

water: one of the things we take for granted

That’s one of the things about living in rural Spain: you never know whether the standard utilities will actually be available. You may go to bed with everything working fine and wake up – like I did today – with certain basic services unavailable.

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taxing my patience

Buying blank cds to back up my ever-growing collection of photographs, I am reminded of university days when I studied Adam’s Smiths canons of taxation.

Every blank cd sold in Spain is subject to el canon – popularly referred to as “un impuesto por si acaso“. That pretty much describes it: a “just-in-case tax”.
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baaaa, humbug!

Although the festivities go on for the best part of a month – starting with la Concepción Inmaculada on December 8th (or possibly el Día de la Constitución on the 6th) and not ending until Twelfth Night when los Reyes bring the children’s presents – it never seems very Christmassy in Spain.

For a start there may be snow on the mountains, but there’s also glorious sunshine and it’s still daylight till after 6pm.

For the last few days we’ve been having carols piped over the council tannoy system for a couple of hours every morning in the village, but other than the Little Drummer Boy, Continue reading “baaaa, humbug!”

bubbles, butterflies & baseball

Apparently unrelated, perhaps, but the words in the title do, in fact, have something in common: they are the topics of the three new titles in the T-Tales collection by Topka.

And those are the books I’ll be reading at two separate readings/story-telling sessions in Madrid this coming Saturday, December 13th.
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kilometers of ink?

Although the ballpoint mechanism was first patented in 1888, it was another 40 years before Biro invented and commercialised the first popular ballpoint pen, the Bic, in 1938.

Since then, the technology has come a long way and different “biros” offer very different value for money. At least, so it would seem from this Spanish consumer report.