eckinspain

Things are hotting up

2010-07-07T13:08:00.002+02:00

Figuratively speaking it's the semi-final against Germany tonight and meteorologically it's about 36 degrees. The main problem is that the minimum temperatures at night are still quite high so we can't cool down the flat or sleep too well.
Too hot to go cycling in the afternoon between job 1 and job 2 so I'm going to the gym instead - air-conditioned exercise is preferable to sweating in the flat. Today we're going for a swim before watching the game.
Job is quiet and boring and frustrating so I applied for a job as video games tester and they've sent me an e-mail with a linguistics test (English) to check my accuracy. Unfortunately the salary is too low so I won't take it, as fun it sounds. Applied for a Junior Product Manager role too but was rejected as the role was too junior (but a Videogames tester isn't?!). I'll keep checking their site for that elusive Senior Videogames Tester Manager role.

Spain v Chile

2010-06-25T13:32:00.002+02:00

Carlos and Veronica coming round for dinner tonight and to watch the Spain game first. Everyone supremely confident here, but I'm not so sure. I haven't seen Chile play but by all accounts they've been pretty good. Maybe Spain will play better against better opposition!

2010-06-24T12:40:00.003+02:00

Not much riding done in the last week but now that we're on jornada reducida (and yesterday's class was postponed) I found time to go for a quick ride round casa de campo yesterday afternoon. Warm! I had to put in a tube before going out (as the tubeless has given up the ghost) so didn't get out until about 5pm but it was still pretty hot, but it meant it was quiet too - only saw 2 other people in the first hour. Lovely ride but went off a bit quick and so struggles for the last 24km (out of 30!).

Spent our birthday weekend in London, saw Marcina and bump on Saturday and then went to Secret Cinema on Sunday - fantastic event. The film was Bladerunner in the end (I had guessed Total Recall). Everyone was dressed up and the site was amazing - an industrial warehoue/container depot but right next to Canary Wharf - photos don't do it justice.

My photography might get a push in July as Sandra has bought me a photography course from Fotocasion. Assuming they get the minimum people required it's 5 days of classes (4 hours a day) about light. One day is in the studio doing still lifes I think which doesn't interest me much but the course as a awhole looks really good and is 5 minutes from home. The day after it finishes we'll head up to Galicia at about 5 in the morning to start our holiday.

Work, money, holiday

2010-06-02T12:40:00.008+02:00

Work = quiet, verging on dull. It does mean though, that I've managed to get quite a lot of work done on organising the routes for the Madroño trip to Scotland. One big route from Nethy Bridge was worked out on Sunday on the floor of the living room with an OS map (wow!), some mountain bike maps and the laptop. Looks awesome - 55km from Nethy Bridge via Ryvoan Bothy (pic), Loch An Eilein and Inverdruie.

This week at work I've been getting suggestions from Singletrack and copying other people's routes from Nokia Sportstracker (if someone else has done the route we know it's rideable at least). Looks like we have someone to guide us on the first route from Innerleithen too.

Money = IRPF (income tax) done for another year. Slight worry last night when we couldn't remember where our appointment was, but Sandra had cunningly saved it somewhere. I have to pay them more but Sandra gets money back and it evens itself out.

Holiday = tomorrow (Thursday) is Corpus Christi so we get a random day off. Ali is coming over today so we we're going out for dinner tonight with her and Katie and probably going for a ride tomorrow. Then only one full week at work left until jornada reducida and we finish at 3 every day! Really can't wait - feeling exhausted.

and a pack of double deckers arrived in the post yesterday - Good Times!!

Spring into summer

2010-05-21T13:52:00.000+02:00

So, my attempt and keeping this updated regularly is going well then.
TBH things have been a bit busy here: the second job (English classes) has increased to 11 hours a week (a class every night as well as a couple of lunchtimes). The classes themselves are quite enjoyable, and certainly better than the deathly dull dayjob (ooh alliteration) but it is tiring and makes the end of the week a bit of a struggle. It also makes the weekend's main objective recovery and sleep which don't help the attempts at getting out on the bike. The weatherhas been taking care of that too, mind. We've had a few summer false starts though now it looks like the good weather is here to stay (but then it's practically the end of May, so I should bloody well think so). Last weekend's route was in La Cabrera and was quite technical in places and bloody cold - both of which possibly combined to make me feel fairly shattered afterwards (only 40km). So I've been punishing myself in the gym this week.
We did take advantage of one of the summer weekends last month to go riding with a club near Sepulveda. The ride finished with lunch of cordero asado in the town hall of the pueblo - awesome!
The trip to Scotland is getting quite frankly ridiculous - there are 25 of us now. We're renting 3 houses in Innerliethen and we have a bunkhouse that sleeps 67 in Nethy Bridge all to ourselves. On top of that there are 2 separate coach companies involved, 2 bike hire places, Tesco deliveries, route preparation, a distillery visit, activities for the non-riders...might start up a business if this works out!

Catastrophe averted...

2010-03-08T16:52:00.000+01:00

..bread machine fixed. Russel Hobbs were obviously an IT help department in a previous life and basically told me to switch it off and back on again. Despite having done this before (honest) it worked this time. I'm not complaining. Especially as I've found 3 different varieties of cheap tasty bread-machine flour in Lidl to try out - num num bread num num.

Managed to get out on the bike this weekend at last. It's been weeks since we've been out as it's been raining pretty consistently for the past couple of months. Rain was forecast for Sunday morning but it held off until after we'd finished. Started in Casa de Campo and headed out towards TVE and Telemadrid. Not the prettiest route (carparks and sand mostly) but just getting out for 30km was satisfying, especially considering the lack of recent rides and the following...

We're organising a club trip to Scotland in August/September! So far 12 people have confirmed - we've got deposits from them, booked our flights, reserved a big house in Glentress for 3 nights and put together an itinerary that will take us up to Aviemore after Glentress with some riding in the Rothiemurchus Estate, a visit to Loch Ness, Urquhart Castle and ideally we'll be able to leave the rest of the group for a day and visit Mum & Dad - but this may depend on transport options (ie I might have to drive the minibus!). To be honest it's going quite smoothly at the moment so I'm waiting for it all to crumble around our ears but should be good fun. Does mean we need to get pretty fit before we go to make the most of it though.

(photo unashamedly stolen from singletrackworld.com - follow the Glentress link for more info)

bread drought

2010-02-15T17:02:00.000+01:00

We're in danger of suffering a severe bread shortage. We were getting to grips with the new bread machine (despite suffering local ingredient supply issues re yeast and strong flour). The slightly different ingredients meant we were having to play around with quantities and settings but we were (im)proving nicely until disaster struck yesterday - broken bread machine.

Russel Hobbs have been contacted but getting it fixed will probably require us sending the thing back to the UK which is going to be a pain (and expensive).

On the plus side it meant I had to make bread by hand yesterday which was satisfying, though didn't turn out too well as the ingredients and quantities were for the machine. I would love to make fresh bread by hand every day but am somewhat lacking in time.

Bike club

2010-02-12T13:26:00.000+01:00

The first rule of bike club is...you do not talk about bike club
The second rule of bike club is...you always wear lycra and ride around fireroads early on a Saturday morning.

It's the second rule that is giving me issues currently. No, not the lycra bit - I've got used to that now. The "getting-up-on-Saturday-morning-at-the-same-time-as-during-the-week-when-I'm-really-tired-and-just-want-to-stay-in-bed-plus-it's-really-cold" bit. Last weekend we managed to get up in time and go on our first club ride in 2010, and obviously it was really good. It always is when I manage to haul my ass out of bed but it doesn't make it any easier the following week. In the back of my head I know that I can go riding in Casa de Campo whenever I want and so I lack the urgency to get up and go out with the club.

The fireroads issue is possibly trickier. The people in the club (and other riders I see round Casa de Campo) love riding on nice wide fireroads so they can have a chat with their mates; they usually go out of their way to avoid enticing sections of singletrack which should be calling them and beckoning them with open branches but they just don't seem to feel it. I say "usually" though because last weekend's ride in El Pardo was a pleasant surprise: Luis took us through a couple of nice sections of singletrack which I must try to remember. I'm not a regular visitor to El Pardo (one of the reasons we made an effort to go to the ride) and I'd like to get to know it more. It's a huge park to the North of Madrid which used to be Franco's private hunting ground (and the hunters are still there and were very close last week!). I went with fontmoss one freezing cold morning last year but not knowing our way round meant we didn't get the best out of it (though we did get lost and chillblains).

Tomorrow's ride is in El Molar (which has some fantastic restaurants built into caves there) and I'm already convincing myself that it's going to be too cold and I shouldn't go. It depends on Sandra too obviously - she's going to have to work at some point this weekend (1st job) and might come into the office tomorrow morning, leaving me with the option of a) staying at home on my own and trying to go back to sleep after Sandra has left or b) going on the ride, in the (predicted) snow. Decisions....

As for the amount of work Sandra is currently doing...that's worth an extra post all to itself.

I'll just stay put then, shall I?

2009-12-01T20:34:00.000+01:00

So, the 2 other people in my department want to leave and go work in other departments. I suspect mostly because they can't work with the boss.
I'm guessing my proposed shuffle over to the Planning & Buying dept is on hold, right?
However there's no way I'm staying on my own either. Oh well, at least it's kinda sorted now.

Sangria-swilling jessies

2009-11-29T15:56:00.000+01:00

Today's bike route was up in La Sierra (Torrelaguna) which is always a bit colder and wetter than town, but you would think we were in the middle of a hurricane by the reaction of the rest of the club. Okay it was raining and a bit windy but we'd already got all the way up there - surely we could at least try but I don't think they were ever going to be convinced. I nearly did the route on my own but I didn't know where it was so probably wouldn't have been a good idea! Instead I came home, stuck the car in the garage and went straight out to Casa de Campo for a couple of hours. As they say here "I enjoyed myself like a dwarf"! Maybe it's because I've been riding on dry dusty trails for 6 months but the mud and the puddles (including those disguised as sand) just made it all the better. I didn't want to stop but the grinding from the drivetrain told me it was time for a shower.

The situation at work hasn't really changed - I'm still in Client Service and I suspect I'll stay there as my boss won't want me to move to Planning & Buying as originally planned. CS have much more contact with the client and it's a more strategic role so in the long-term it will be better for me to stay. Having said that I don't want to stay at the company long-term but now is not the moment to be leaving and looking for something else. What do I want to do? No idea but certainly something in a smaller company than the current one - large companies seem to be unmanageable (or maybe just this one).

2009-10-14T10:03:00.000+02:00

well the weather got colder and then hotter again (as it always does around the Día de San Miguel) and now seems to be cooling down a bit again.

A re-structure at work has left me feeling in limbo...apparently I'll be staying in Client Services for the time being (though I'll have no work to do and will only be able to be given work by the Account Director). At some vague undetermined time in the future I'll (probably) move to Planning & Buying (of which I know nothing). Despite all the talk of "aligning people's profiles to job functions" there appears to have been a quite determined effort to move people into departments which they dislike intensly, have no knowledge of, or both.

On the plus side, the English classes picked up at the beginning of October and I now have a pretty full week. In fact I'm currently trying to avoid taking on another class at work as I don't have time (and it would be a nightmare class!).

Riding was a bitch on Sunday. We did a red route for the first time (mainly because there was the promise of food afterwards) and we suffered. 47km (we've done longer) but speedier than we usually go and with plenty of hills meant that we were both dying towards the end and I needed to accept the kind offer of a gel from Agus to get me home. Food afterwards was good, although the bar didn't actually have a kitchen so we had to collect the food ourselves from the owner's wife's kitchen up the road!

a cool day

2009-08-25T12:29:00.000+02:00

...temperature-wise. We're having a 24-hour respite from the heat and it's nice but it's going to get hot again tomorrow :-(

Had a nice anniversary weekend away in Guadalajara. The hotel (Posada de los Pantones) was lovely and although it was in a small village it was nice to just sit in the square with a drink watching the locals (who were mostly doing the same).

I tried to get to grips more with my camera while we were away. I had been thinking of doing a photography course (and still haven't completely rejected it) but 600 € for 3 months is quite a lot and most people say you can learn as much by looking at photography sites (and practicing). So I have a better idea about depth of field and capturing movement than before - maybe the course isn't necessary and I can spend 600€ on something else (like a lens!)

Fit

2009-08-20T11:18:00.000+02:00

..or at least we will be soon with last night's purchase of the Wii Fit. The plan was to go to the cinema but that was ditched in favour of a quick Chinese meal in the underground car park and then an hour of Wii Fit (having already spent an hour in the gym!). My yoga programme is off to a good start - let's see if I can keep it up.

It's our anniversary today! We're off to a hotel in Guadalajara for the weekend and I need to book an activity for Saturday. Sailing? Horse-Riding? Nocturnal canoeing? Who knows..

seriously, give me work to do

2009-08-19T12:43:00.000+02:00

it's not something that you will usually hear coming from my lips but this is just silly. It's August in Spain and that means holidays. We've had ours already - Galicia for a wedding then Asturias Cantabria and Bilbao before returning to Madrid via Navarra to see Dave and Carla - but everyone else seems to take about 3 weeks off in August. I don't remember it being this quiet last year but maybe that's because we had some work to do - this week there are 3 of us in the team twiddling our thumbs...no bosses...no clients...no motivation. So I'm writing my blog.

We took our holidays in the last week of July and first week of August to avoid the usual heatwave but it seem's to have waited until we got back! This week is about 37 degrees and it's not cooling down at night which makes it uncomfortable - apparently it will cool down this weekend (when we're going away for our anniversary).

must try to post more regularly

I love food, me

2009-05-30T22:26:00.000+02:00

a whole trolley full of fish and fruit & veg today - I love this time of the year here for the fruit especially - water melon, strawberries, raspberries (a present from the guy at the fruit stall), loads of cherries. the fact that you can't get it all year round makes it special for the couple of months (weeks in the case of the cherries) that you can.

and lunch was a plate of fresh grilled sardines with bread.

brilliant

2009-05-26T10:02:00.000+02:00

the fourth round of the Mountain Bike World Cup was held in Casa de Campo at the weekend so we went along on Sunday to watch the races. We went last year too and I'd forgotten just how exciting it is. We met a couple of friends from the club and rode around the park stopping at various points to watch the action and take (loads of) photos (look over there on the right to see if I've managed to link to flickr or something). They are terrifyingly good. Not even the huge thunderstorm on Friday night which made the course muddy and slippy could stop them getting up La Subida Infernal. The crowd were awesome too - there were hundreds of them cheering the riders up the hill, several wouldn't have made it without the support.

One of the guys from the club also brought along his trailer for me to try on the back of the bike. As we're wanting to do the Camino de Santiago next year we need a way of carting our stuff around. We originally thought we would get panniers but after speaking to Agustin, he recommended a trailer instead and offered to let us try out his. So when we met on Sunday morning I hitched the trailer to the bike (it has its own QR which you put in the rear wheel instead of your usual one). It was GREAT! You obviously notice a bit more weight when carrying the girls' rucksacks up a hill but other than that you hardly know it's there - we did climbs and descents and rocky bits and it handled them all without a grumble. We handed it back at the end of the day but it's definitely the way forward for next year.

just shut up

2009-05-19T22:29:00.000+02:00

I like the Spanish, really i do, but they don't shut up, do they? I'm thinking particularly of meetings and presentations at work - at any one time there are about 4 different conversations going on around the room which makes it much harder for me to understand any of them (and contributes to meetings laster longer than WWII's reparations negotiations.)

ups and downs

2009-05-19T09:04:00.000+02:00

on sunday evening sandra and i popped out to casa de campo for about an hour for a quick ride (we'd done a route on saturday morning so it was really just a quick spin of the legs) and had one of those rides that will be filed under "just-about-perfect". It was a lovely warm spring evening, the trails were dry, we found ourselves in a part of the park i didn't recognise (the first time in many months that that's happened) and the bikes were clearly in a good mood.

not being able to think about anything else subsequently has made work a bit of a slog but then that's why they call it work, i guess

first post

2009-05-18T15:26:00.000+02:00

I guess this is supposed to be some sort of introduction...but all that will have to wait.

First things first - how the hell does this thing work