Where did the summer go????  Well the new guest lounge was finished in time for my brothers visit and we are pleased with the end result.

After that I carried on freshening up the outside terraces with a new lick of paint and sealed all the joints between the floor tiles outside to try and avoid any leaks when the rains start this year! Hubby has been busy painting the front of the house this month and boy does it look different now it’s all white!  The locals all seem pleased it’s looking nice and fresh now.  Fingers crossed if it doesn’t rain tomorrow then he will get the final coat on and our scaffold will come down.  For the top half we had to borrow some scaffolding from one of the locals as it is 3 floors high and we also needed to fit guttering to stop the rains soaking the walls.  We managed to get all the top half finished in a week as the owner of the scaffolding needed it for another job and we were glad that bit was done.  Our scaffolding is high enough for the rest of the painting and we’ve been doing it in between sat work and the odd day of rain.

We had an upsetting experience in August just before the local fiesta began – Fred, one of our beautiful dogs, became suddenly ill and after taking him straight to the vets we discovered he’d eaten some poison.  He was a the vets all day but that evening when we went to see him (thinking he’d managed to get it out of his system) we discovered he was in a very bad state and had been on various drugs all day and Valium but the poison was taking it’s toll and it was 50/50 he’d survive the night.  We had to make the hard decision to put him out of his misery as we didn’t want him suffering any more than he already had.  It really upset us and Ginger (his sister) was so lost without him.  It’s taken her a while to get her confidence back but now she goes off with one of her “friends” during the mornings and then comes back and spends the rest of the day with us and stays tucked up inside every night.  When she comes for a walk with us she doesn’t stray too far ahead and waits for us.  We just hope the same fate doesn’t befall her, but living in the “campo” we have to accept these things can happen (as it has to many of our Spanish neighbours animals).

Hubby has now acquired a new (well second hand) off road motorbike to go off exploring the miles and miles of tracks around here.  He’d been promising himself one for a long time but wanted to wait until we’d got most of the big work out of the way on the house.   Looks like the mountain bike will continue to gather dust now!!!

Well that’s all for now – next blog will probably be Xmas!!