One beautiful sunny morning in our allotment, Joanne and I got together to enjoy the Summer and do some good old fashioned hard work. We were joined by Peter, who didn't do any work, but took lots of pictures. By a stroke of luck, the sunflower must've known he was coming, as it was in full bloom.

Minature rose and marrow flower.
The benches on the left were built in two days in preparation for Jonathan's birthday party on the 4th of July, which coincides with a special day which is not celebrated in this country.
These two greenhouses were given to us. The one on the right is filled with budding tomato plants, but the one on the left has not been used this year.
One of the five blueberries on our young blueberry bush. The flowers on the right are called Nigela, or 'Love in a mist' and this year have completely covered most of the flower patches in our allotment from just twenty plants planted last year!

So...many of you are wondering if I still exist as Jonney's been the only one posting recently. Yes, I'm still out there...keeping 'the home fires burning' an' all that. I've been able to reduce my work hours and go onto permanent night shifts, so I only work Mon.-Wed. nights now...less stress and my bloodpresure has come down, too! I've also finally got time to sort out messes around the house and rediscover our allotment, which you should be getting pic.'s of very shortly! I've had some interesting night shifts recently....nearly got attacked by a young patient who seemed to have the Jeckel/Hyde syndrom! I do wonder sometimes what would happen if one night we wouldn't be able to restrain a violent patient as we don't really have security guards at the hospital and the police aren't allowed in as it's considered a 'safe haven'....Hmmm. I lost one patient who I'd been caring for for a month...and his family refused the life saving operation, just wanted him to die naturally....then didn't even spend the last hours of his life with him....it amazes me how cold the relationships in some families can be! But the Lord has been good and blessed me with a great team of nurses at work and a full schedule at home while Jonney's away.

I really can't say I'm lonely as the Lord has blessed me with 'others' in the house...I like the hamster I'm able to watch for Hannah(good friend) while she's on holiday. Not so fond of the spiders He has brought along the way: Lets call them Sheila, Stormy and Ugly. Sheila lives in the farthest corner of the bathroom where the toilet cleaner is and as she is yet small and shy, I don't really mind her at all. Stormy also lives in the bathroom...but loves the door frame and it takes a good storm or loud banging to get him to creep back into his hole in the corner of the hallway. Ugly is the newest addition to the Roberts' creepies....though I have suspected him for several months already (female intuition). He lives in the living room underneath the large lamp and is by far the ugliest and largest spider I've seen this year....alive. So, although I detest spiders and really don't mind at all for a knight in shinning armour to come along and free me from this investation of terrors...I am too much a chicken to get rid of them myself (though I used to be able to vacum them up until someone recently insisted they actually live on inside the bag!. Today actually I had a house full of able knights.....but the creepies decided to take the day off and probably had a lazy afternoon outing on our new bench or in my herb garden!

As a side-note,though I'm not particularly lonely, yes, I am missing Jonathan very much....especially when around his brothers, for some strange reason.
Nevermind...only 18 days to go until we meet up in Germany for our friends' wedding near Berlin. I'm trying to arrange a few days in Hamburg after that and then several days with my great uncle by the lake (in the holiday house my great grandfather built, which we stayed in quite often during the interesting days of my youth). Anyway, those are stories for another blogspot....till next time!

I thought I´d give you all an update of my second week here in Salamanca.

On Saturday, we went to Salamanca, and saw inside the cathedral. this is a picture of the inside of the dome, and the ceiling above the altar area.

I also went a bit further to the east of the city and saw a statue of Christopher Colombus, who I believe is connected with the unversity. I also took a few pictures of another church in that area.












Back to La Alberca, where they were in the middle of a bmx competition, which seemed to have been sponsered by Monty... Anyway, I got to try out a Monty unicycle, which was pretty nice and really easy to ride (mmm, aluminium goodness).

We went on to another village, where everyone was asleep (siesta time). I thought the local stonework was interesting.

Note the skull and crossbones at the bottom of the cross.

There was also a Plaza de Toros (bullring) in the village, which looked a bit decrepit, we were imagining some old guy whipping a cow around the pen (I´m not sure if I´d like to be a spectator if there were a real bull there).

Oh yes, and here´s a flower someone found growing on a vine while we were there.

A couple of days ago, while I was teaching a lesson, we noticed that the field behind the school was burning. Apparently a stork landed on the power lines and shorted some of them. We evacuated everyone and the fire was put out fairly quickly, but it did scare some of the kids, who were all asking whether the school was going to burn down. 12 year olds are interesting, you never know when they´re going to act like 6 year olds and when they´ll act like teenagers or older. A case in point is on the way to La Alberca today, I was at the back of the bus when I saw some of the kids slapping and punching one of the boys. I went up to try to sort it out and asked what they were hitting him for. One of the girls answered that he was being really boring, discussing Pythagoras and Newton! I guess there will be a few more surprises coming in the next few days, with the way these kids are...

Here is a guest writer on the blog, one of my students:

Dear Diary,

On Thursday, we went to the swimming pool and Lara wants to kill Julian and Jonathan in the water. I was tired for the night.

On Friday, we had a disco night, and I played poker with other friends, it´s very good. I like it. Before, there was a fire over the school, there were a lot of people scared (girls mostly) said a lot of stupid things (my clothes, my money, my mobile).

On Saturday we got up late, and Lara was more slow than the growth of a cabbage.

Good bye,

Sara

By the way, congratulations to Alastair for passing $50,000 on his blog´s worth rating!

"My Blog" being Alastair´s one, not my own, which is still worthless...

Also in the news, Mark´s blog has slumped to below $1700. Better start writing about China, eh Mark?

I haven´t written for ages, as we´ve been away for most of the time since the start of June, and before that I was in exam time. I managed to get a last minute teaching job in Spain, so here are some of the pictures, taken from our new digi camera. Apologies for the small pictures, this computer takes ages to upload files...












Some pictures of the first few days. We visited the villlage with the kids on Sunday, the group coming out of the library were walking around the main square playing music, and making quite a bit of noise. The view is from the school, it gets pretty hot here, up to around 45 degrees, which is not so pleasant when playing football in the midday heat.



A toga party on the last night of the first camp. Some of the boys decided they were going to be barbarians, such as Enrique here.







The plaza mayor in Salamanca. It´s pretty impressive, there are hundreds of people there every night until after 1am, but it´s surprisingly quiet for anyone who has ever been to any English city centre at 1am. The statue has just been put in, it´s to remember the 11 March bombings in Madrid. All around the plaza there are busts of Spanish greats, including the man himself, Miguel de Cervantes.

There´s just so much culture in Salamanca, and plenty of locals who want to share it with you...

I´ll be in Salamanca for another couple of weeks, then I have another week to get to the south east, where I´ll be involved in a fully Spanish speaking UBM team. Should be fun...