I Like The Way You Burke It

After a carb-rich lunch. Siesta!

We are still waiting for Telefonica to come to our house to set up DSL so we are at a bar and Wells is working and I am, well, drinking red wine. Who guessed it?!?! The first first is that today I signed up for my first tennis lesson. It is on the 18th at noon and I am very excited. Another first today is that I made bean soup from scratch for lunch. Now I know this does not sound all that exciting but I had to soak the beans overnight and I don’t even have salt or pepper or anything in our house. There is no pre-packaging here so everything that you cook is from scratch. I was planning to make chicken for dinner but the grocery doesn’t sell chicken so the only meal that I could figure out was bean soup. The only meat the grocery sells is ham (of course) but I have not found the butcher yet. Still working on that one. The soup was awesome if I do say so myself. I cooked it for a million hours.

The other first today was our first load of laundry. We have a front loading washing aching and no dryer. The clothes literally took about 2 hours to wash and then we had to hang them up to dry. I don’t think I have ever hung clothes on a clothesline and I am pretty sure that Wells does not even know where the “on” button is on our own washing machine at home so he sure didn’t have any experience hanging clothes on a line. He came inside and said, “Kate, I feel like this is sort of ghetto,” after he hung our sheet on the line. Very funny.

Our dogs are not quite used to so many cats. There are a lot of cats here, but they are not nasty if that makes sense…just many of them. Anyway, Foxy and Neena start to salivate when they see them.

1. Smoking is alive and well.
2. Carb  eating is alive and well.
3. Smoking WHILE eating carbs, equally alive and well.
4. Spaniards are dead serious about their Siesta – don’t mess with it.
5. Tall, white boots worn over jeans is all the rage. Wells has much to say on this point.

We are all tighter! I can’t tell you how happy I am to have Wells and the dogs here! It was an adventure for sure. So…………………I rented a car (A Blue Euro-Speed Skate)  to drive to Madrid, which is 6 hours north of Nerja. When I got the car I noticed that it was a stick and just started dying laughing. The last time I drove a stick was in college, a la Christy’s beamer for those of you who remember. I can count on one hand the number of times I have driven a stick. Anyway, for the first 45 minutes of the trip it was one small town after another so I kept having to shift in and out of first gear, which gave me hives just about. I was so tense that I actually started counting out loud to relax. I arrived Madrid and had an uneventful evening in hotel and waited for Wells to arrive early the next morning. I was a mess thinking about the girls flying but all arrived unscathed. We drugged the dogs so they were out of it. The car was so small even thought it was the biggest I could rent that the dogs had to sit in our laps for the entire ride back to Nerja. It was snowing and raining and totally awful and we drove 45 minutes out of the way on the Madrid equivalent to 285 until we found our way.

I had been telling Wells how hard the bed was and he didn’t really understand until he experienced it last night. The next thing you know we are purchasing memory foam to put over it – our most expensive purchase by far. Definitely worth it.

The only problem we are having is that there is virtually no grass in Nerja, or any Spanish town for that matter. The dogs just will not ‘go’ on concrete so we are having a bit of an issue. But overall they seem to be adjusted and happy but they slept all over us last night.

Miss you all! I am utterly and completely happy now that we are all “juntos”!