More flowers well its Spring isn't it

More flowers this time mostly in our garden

Apple blossom just over the road

Strawberries mmm lovely times ahead we have loads of plants this year..just noticed there is an ant on our strawberry plant there are no shortage of ants this year and the kittens are fascinated by them.

We put a couple of tiny slips of broom in when we arrived and in its second summer one is a lovely fountain already

and the other is trying hard

Broccoli looking pretty..surely not oh yes it is lovely shade of yellow

Aquilegia and Californian poppies are just starting

I think I put too much in these pots, the anemones de caen are doing well and fresias will be in another few days.

Apple blossom not over the road this time

There's that pinky purply bush we bought

and another pretty in pink leptowhatsitsname

and the blue stuff with its white friend that looks a bit like stitchwort, my mum seemed to know every plant we ever saw in the wild I don't think i inherited quite such good recall and the common names of plants here are not as evocative as in the UK. maybe that's the kind of clue you get that you really have got to grips with a language - when the plant names and place names start to make sense...just what is the Galician equivalent of Little Piddlington I wonder.

Bottlebrush bush getting ready to be fiery...weird I never noticed before how the e moves along one space to the left from fire to fiery...strange things words are what was wrong with firey; why complicate things by messing with spellings like that I wonder.

And bluebells not the Spanish ones but growing in Spain

so there we are two days of views of flowers and lots more to come, oh blue text aren't I clever matches the bluebells very nicely errr oops how did that happen?

Mixed bag of views mostly at Pantin with flowers

A view of Valdovino from the top of a hill near Campelo.

and Pantin on a hot Sunday; crowded isn't it
The car park is very handy and free although there is only enough room for two or three if you are all friends and there is no room for the third one to turn round so it has to reverse up the steep rough track as I found out a week after this

Very pale but lovely thrift
Pink snapdragon looking things and blue flowers ones too, high on the cliff
Squill lovely to see and smell it here, it also grows on the cliffs around Sennen in Cornwall.

Theres hardy for you, Thrift thriving on nearly nothing

That blue stuff again no idea what it is but it reminds me of a blue from Morocco

An some of those aren't they pretty are they saffron crocuses.
Down there about 3 meters below in very clear and fairly cold water were huge starfish

At low tide the water is knee deep on the sandbank but plunges suddenly into a channel that is perhaps about 10 meters deep where the rip scours the bottom...a rip is a deadly dangerous current or a chair lift to heaven depending on whether you surf or not.

Later in the week the lake was trying out being a mirror so it was a good time for a night adventure in the kayak
The water looked like this from the kayak for a little while
On the other side is another world full of pirates and and an army of monsters apparently, it got very dark then a bit lighter and we paddled home by the light of a silvery moon but forgot to take photos

We got out on the water a bit earlier the next day and landed on a pirate island inhabited by large ducks and little else
We caught a gentle wind and blew our way slowly back to club nautico, we were heading off to the right of the pic with the kayak partially beam on to the wind and fortunately the water was also sloping the right way as you can see..phew its always easier when going home is a downhill run
Back on shore and we met a terrapin / tortuga and did not get bitten, was it a menace should we have captured it, I don't know, it did looking cute so we left it be.

new bomba and thoughts about learning

Well after we destroyed most of the old water pump we found out how it works there are 3 meters of metal tube then 32 meters of hexagonal wooden rods with brass joints every now and then and head on down into the 110 mm wide hole, the rods fit into an alkathene pipe with a non return valve on the bottom and the engine goes round and round and the piston goes up and down and the rods go up and down and water arrives..or not...in this case not; to get the motor and pump to separate from the rest of the gubbins we ended up cutting the main shaft carefully not dropping anything into the hole then hauling it all up into the garden. It was pretty well worn broken and horrid looking and the temporary borrowed smaller pump and shorter bit of pipe didn't work so we spent a week in the UK instead of sorting it out. I cut the down below bits into littler bits when we got back and quite a few people said "You didn't want to do that it could have been repaired, they are great those old pumps" or something like that but actually we did want to do that we were a bit fed up with low pressure and rusty water in the bath. So a long story cut short is that Carlos down the road spent hours trying to find us the best deal on pumps and eventually struck on the chap who drilled the borehole and fitted the original pump. Carlos and I went to the unit on the Rio Pozo industrial estate, had a chat with the boss and someone was to come round in a couple of hours. About 20 mins after I arrived home I looked outside to see a lorry belonging to the firm with a drilling rig and a huge transformer on a trailer parking outside and a man walking into our drive. "The boss says we are to look at the job at your house later after we have set the rig up just up the road and would it be ok if we left the lorry parked here mate ?" Phew no misunderstanding just a coincidence. How did I understand all that I thought.

Anyway today we have water Sondeos Rodriguez www.casaviega.es offer a great price (not cheap not expensive) great service, great pressure, nice and quiet, quick installation and a great chat about history, archeology and learning languages with one of the engineers; its been an odd day for learning there was I faltering over learning Spanish and Galician if anything going backwards over the last few months and suddenly it has all started to fit together not like a jigsaw though. I don't really do jigsaws although they are good for demonstrating some aspects of flow theory you know when it all starts to make sense you get so far in, the goal becomes visible, the challenge surmountable and suddenly the momentum gathers and you are into the groove and you just flow you don't sense time passing, you are focused and wham bam whoosh there is the finished picture, a big smile then a bit of an anticlimax (for a more academic explanation see Csikszentmihalyi. M. (1992). Flow: The psychology of happiness. London: Rider...and...Larson, R. (1988). Flow and writing. In M. Csikszentmihalyi & I. S. Csikszentmihalyi (Eds.) Optimal experience: Psychological studies of flow in consciousness (pp. 150-171). NY: Cambridge University press.)

For me Learning Spanish has suddenly started to hit little flow moments and it is like millions of those little plastic square puzzles with about 16 squares and one blank and using the space place you shuffle the other pieces to make a picture, anyway there is a seamless sea of them in my head and the pictures of words are starting to stabilise, the ones I need are starting to hold steady rather than shuffling around all the time. I realised also that I learned too much complexity in the beginning. Most things I really need to talk about happen now or need to happen soon, I could have cut out most of the past tense at risk of sounding daft but at least meaning works. for example learn - last year, last month, last week, yesterday, use one of them to start a sentence then talk in the present tense. "last year we all go to the beach; what do we do ? We leave the sunscreen at home and we all get burned" That kind of thing works OK in Spanish and you get twice the mileage out of present tense and manage to attenuate the complexity of the learning task. Prioritising the right verbs and questions to learn helps as well, to do, to go, to eat, to have, to make, I want, I need, when, how, who, what, why, where are fairly important ones to know.