Wednesday 16th December, Marjal and cool is the word.

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Well I guess that sums it up for all the “half empty glass” people. Then again, I'm not one of the “half full” people either, I'll probably just drink it.

Last night or should I say this morning because it's now 7:23 am and I'm up. Well anyway, you know how it is, half way through the night you wake up and usually need a pee, or more usually in my case, a pickled onion. Now don't even think about it, they are thousands of early morning, middle of the night, pickled onion munchers out there, so don't deny it, I know I am so I will not. So this morning or as I thought, middle of the night, I get up and stumble to the kitchen and reach for the pickle onion jar and look at the time on the microwave, it's 7:19 am in the morning! Drawn though I was to that jar, even I resisted the idea of a pickled onion at that time of the morning with the chance, though misty at best, of getting back into the bed with my gorgeous wife. All I actually got was “Don't wake me up!” and “What's that vinegar smell?”

So here I am, two cups of tea to the better, typing this and it's still dark outside.

Yesterday it was decided to walk along the beach for something to do. I did not fancy the walk at first but it was great. Miles of beach front and the sun shining, brilliant! See pics.

I think I mentioned before that it was a Naturalist beech, here's the proof.
Walk actually lasted seven miles and my legs felt like lead. Tricia decided to collect shells, as she always does, “she collects sea shells by the sea shore”, is about as interesting as it gets. I was looking for large diameter bottle tops for obvious reasons. Oh, not so obvious I guess? Well how do I explain this?

When I decided to replace the 30 watt MS lights with half watt LEDs I did not realise that they would protrude into the cavity above them, i.e. into the shelves where we keep the food or clothes or whatever. So, as the wiring/contacts of the LED sticks out about, 10 cm (gone metric there) a suitable bottle top prevents other objects from disconnecting it. By the way, if you can visualise it from that description you should get a job working as an extra on the next Star Trek film.

Last night, while filling up the penguin with boiling water for SWMBO, I decided to spill most of it on my hand, I don't know why, perhaps it was the gallon of Lidl's best inside me or I'm getting the shakes. Anyway, I ended up watching the West Wing, episode seven, disk four, with my hand in a bucket of ice; this morning my fingers are still blistered and I can still not remember if the President went to war with China or not.

Maurice, the guy who went back to the UK recently, read previous post, came back yesterday and brought two large, asked for, but forgotten until now, by me via e-mail, jars of Branston Pickle, SWMBO is in jacket potato heaven and said he's on her Christmas card list.
Today is supposed to be sunny and twenty'ish. Looking out of the window, I think not, so no cycle ride to Rojales any time soon, more like a drive into Alicante and, arghhhhhh!, Christmas shopping. Please come out Mr Sun, pretty please?

What we did however was to go for a drive up to the mountains to see the snow and have a picnic, guess whose idea that was. We did, see the pics. Managed to call into a shopping mall, sorry three shopping malls, on the way back. One of which was an “Outlet” mall. Drove past the outlets, most of which were closed and the others did not seem to advertise what they sold.

“Pull into that one!”

“Why?”

“'Cos it's open!”

“What's on sale, what are they actually selling?”

“I don't know, until I get there, do I?”

“Then why are we stopping at all?”

At this point I remember the definition of thinking like a woman. Take a man, throw away all logic and reasoning, remove responsibility. Replace with deviousness and cunning and an absolute right not to take no for an answer, you now have a women.

Also on the way back we passed the worlds 3rd largest salt mining operation. It is not snow and it's big, that is not a model articulated lorry in the picture and there's lots of them piles. It not exactly mining though. Tide, what little there is, comes into to large flat areas of land. Sea water evaporates leaving the salt, high tech isn't it.

Just put this on a Motorhome forum I'm on. Old Mo is Maurice, a guy who has been around the block a few times.

“Now I've not been doing this travelling about in Spain much and I will also bow to those with much more experienced than me, so....
Going into Marjal, back from a drive out to the mountains with SWMBO and I see Old Mo messing about with his LPG tank on his Motorhome.
"Hi Mo what's up"?
"After being charged so much for my electric I'm fitting this here gas bottle into my gas system. But the bloody spigot is USA and small so the pipe is a bit loose. So I put some PTFE tape round it and it's pretty OK now. Of course I'm fitting it in front of my van gas regulator".
"er..why"
"To reduce the pressure, that's what it's for!" and a withered look.
"But you've already got a regulator stuck on the end of the pipe that fits on the bottle".
"That's not a regulator, it's a switch"
"See that box you've just taken it out of, what does it say?"

"Er......30 mbar, Regu...............don't you dare put that on the forum!"
That was an hour ago”

The 110v cut out a little while ago, it does that when you switch everything on at the same time. So I thought I'd let SWMBO share my vast knowledge on how the various electrical system works on the MS.

OK. “All the lights, except this one, are 12 volt, off the batteries, this one is mains.“(pointing to single overhead mains (240v) ceiling lamp)

“What about the outside lights?”

“What point of “all” did you not understand?”

“OK, OK testy.” “What about the little lights under the bed”

“12 volt”.

“In the kitchen?”

“12 volt”.

“In the bathroom?”

“12 volt”. We could go on but I had now lost the will to live. “The wall lights?” I give up.

I was going to tell her how to re-set the 110 volt cut out and how the transformer was switched for the 240 volt supply, but somehow I thought it wiser to let sleeping dogs lie.

“Under the cooker?”

Roll on Saturday and I can share her with the rest of you back in the UK, there's no where to hide in the Mothership.
p.s. the formatting of the pictures seem to have a will of their own and turn out nowhere near what they look like when I post them?