Making progress and baking process

In the past few weeks, we made more progress decorating the house, while Mirjam expanded her skills in preparing dishes she has never made before.

I created a cabinet for our bathroom Not a medicine cabinet, but a shallow and tall cabinet for our toiletry supplies. OK, to be fair, we bought a bookshelf and I just added doors to it with wood that I found in one of the sheds.

It took some doing though: Finding the wood, designing the doors, sawing, mitering, sanding, placing (and sinking) hinges, adding magnets and handles. But the end-result is not too shabby, if I may say so myself.

Mirjam set out to create some much-missed Dutch snacks Bitterballen, kroketten and white rolls to go with the kroketten.

The thing is, we bought a small deep fryer on sale at the local supermarket. Then, we needed to have something to deep fry. OK – French fries (which Mirjam made from a few large potatoes we had), but what should we have to go with that. The Dutch “delicacies” of kroketten and bitterballen quickly sprung to mind. So Mirjam set out to copy the taste of these most popular Dutch treats. And boy did she nail it. It is an acquired taste, but once acquired, they are so good. And –bless her cotton socks– Mirjam replaced all the beef -which is standard in these snacks – with chicken, because that is what I prefer.

*Click on a picture for a larger version*

But Mirjam made more: Bread, for the days we don’t have fruit for breakfast, a really lovely orange cake and a great strawberry cheesecake.

The weather sucked As the weatherman said “Dull, grey, cold, miserable… and that is just me. And the weather hasn’t been great either.” Yes, you read it right: the weather sucked. It was grey and overcast and it rained. “Come to Spain,” they said. “It’ll be fun,” they said. “Bring your sunglasses,” they said. Actually, the rain is welcome, because it will be dry for most of the rest of the year, but wet and cold is just not a nice combination, certainly not if that is the very reason you left Holland. Now, I have to be frank and explain that on most of these grey days, it was sunny either in the morning, or in the afternoon. And we spent most of our days outside, so not all that bad. But there have been a few days that outside just wasn’t an option. And we used those to finish our projects indoors.

We finally got around to doing the office The room that we call the office had walls painted a sort of baby blue and that needed to be changed to white and taupe. It took two days and two coats, but the result is perfect. There is a futon in that room, which means it can be used as a guest room if needed.

We finished the dressing room Most of that room had been done already, with the exception of some of the clothes – small detail. We finally got around to unpacking everything, storing extra duvets, pillows, winter clothes etc. under the high-sleeper in that room, hanging up the art and just finalizing everything.

We updated the upstairs hallway It was lovely already, but adding taupe to the wall behind the mirror and whitewashing the table, lifted this area to a whole new level. As Charles Aznavour sang in ‘Comme ils disent’: “Je suis un peut decorateur, un peut styliste.” All credit goes to Mirjam.

This also marks the end of all the painting we wanted to do inside the house.

A work bench to die for One day, Mark came over and asked if I was interested in his huge work bench. It took me around .07 seconds to come up with the answer “Yes please”. I was going to build one myself, but mine would never have been as big and sturdy as what Mark created. Mark explained that it was simply too big for him to load it on the lorry that is going to bring all their stuff back to England. That same afternoon, Mark brought the thing over: 240x180cm, with a metal frame and legs that can be adjusted to level the top. I’m very happy, both with the table and with the fact that I can scratch “Create work bench” off my to-do list.

Mark also gave me a bunch of bits and bobs for which he will have no use in the UK. Things like European plugs and European plumbing joints. I am so lucky and realize that I am all the time.

We swam in the pool! As I said, the weather wasn’t bad all the time and one day, having cleaned the pool and gotten the water to a perfect state, we just couldn’t resist any longer; we just had to get in, despite the fact that the water temperature was just 16C, where 26-28C would be ideal for swimming.

We dipped in and then quickly came out again. It was, let’s say invigorating, but mostly just very cold. Funny thing, once out of the water, the rest wasn’t so cold anymore.

Things started to fail

First the Nespresso coffeemaker failed. Luckily, we had another one. Then, that failed as well and we started looking for a replacement for both. We had filtered coffee that morning and spent time scouring the internet for alternatives. Before retiring the Nespresso machines permanently, I decided to try and open one up to see if I could detect and fix the problem. Turns out, these machines are really hard to open. So, after a while I gave up and put all the screws I had managed to take out back in and decided to give it one more try. And it worked! Not sure what caused the problem to be resolved, but we had a working machine again. Yay!

Then the spin cycle of the washing machine seemed not to kick in. Twice in as many weeks. I tried different options on the machine, which took forever and without much luck. Then I decided to shrink the load and that seemed to fix it, at least for now. The next time we used the machine, all worked fine, so I suppose there really wasn’t much wrong with it, but it was just us overloading the thing.

Then the oven went dead. Or I should say the electric oven, because we have two and the other one is a gas oven. But it just went dead one day while using it to bake a home-made tarte flambée. Mirjam finished the dish in the other oven, but why did the electric oven stop all of a sudden? Our strategy was “Try again once it has cooled off.” That turned out to be a good strategy and we now have a rule not to use the electric oven on its highest capacity for a longer time anymore.

Then the washing machine drained all its water on the porch instead of down the drain. It smelled really nice on the porch with all that detergent, but this was not a good situation. So, I needed to go find out what was wrong. It wasn’t the machine itself, it wasn’t the machine’s drainage hose, it wasn’t the part where the drain goes from the porch to the outside, so it had to be somewhere down the drainage pipe. Mark happened to come by and after dealing with what it was he needed from us, I explained to him what I had been able to determine that the blockage was outside, somewhere between the house and the end of the pipe. “Oh, he did that to me once and I made two holes in the drainage pipe,” he said and proceeded to show me where the holes were. I set out to dig up the pipe at the first hole, which I quickly found, opened it up and stuck a hose in it, hoping to flush out whatever was blocking it. That worked on the second try. Problem resolved.

Then our power drill died. It didn’t want to charge anymore and just stopped working altogether. The remedy: buy a new one, which we did on our next shopping trip.

It was like we were cursed; everything seemed to fail on us at once, including the weather. But looking back, these were just minor things and the drill was the only one that cost any money.

Getting vaccinated against Covid-19 One day, I read in a local newspaper that there are many Brits in Spain who are wondering if they will get called up to be vaccinated. Spain’s policy has always been to vaccinate the entire population, regardless of nationality or status. It is Spain’s national health system that organizes the vaccination drive, but many expats are using private health insurance because they are not entitled to make use of the national health system. That is also our situation. In the article, there was a link to a Facebook post about this from the UK Embassy. In that post, I found a link to a website where you could download a form with which people like us could register to be called up to be vaccinated. The form needed to be brought to a health center, a list of which was provided on that same website. We downloaded the form, filled it out and the next time we went into town, we went to the health center. Turned out, it wasn’t on the address listed on the website. We were close to the hospital so we drove around for a while to see if we could see a health center and we did. Inside we presented our forms, but a nice lady told us we weren’t at the right health center and to go to the main entrance of the hospital and ask there. Which we did and they told us to go to the health center across from the town hall. We knew where the town hall is, having been there on numerous occasions. We parked close by and walked to the town hall across from which is a derelict and abandoned building, but no health center. We decided to walk around a bit to see if we could find a health center and then we spotted it.

We needed to stand in line for a while and when it was finally our turn, we were told that with the form we also needed to give a copy of our taxID and of our Padron (see earlier post). As our neighbor Mark had warned us for these kinds of surprises, we always have all official documents with us when we venture out and so we were able to present those forms as well. Then she proceeded to work in her computer and after a while, she gave us a copy of the form, complete with a registration number, her signature and a stamp. Two hours after having left the house, we were registered. We consider that a win.

On the town’s Facebook page, we see that last Friday all residents born in 1961 were called up to be vaccinated. We expect to be called up soon too.

Flowers, fruits and nuts Because of all the rain, nature is having a field day. Everything is growing and the entire valley is green, which is lovely. And on our grounds, there are so many different flowers now and all the fruit and nut trees are showing off what they can do.

The flowers at the very front of the property.