Thursday 8 January 2009

Cold nights in Spain

Well... I'm beginning to think we might as well be back in the UK.

Ice on car

The weather here in Spain is pretty vile at the moment. Perishing cold, wet, overcast - you name it, it's here. The car was iced over at 21:30 last night - and I was scrambling around in the dark trying to find things to wrap around exposed pipes on my above-ground, 3000 litre, water deposit, (it's there because we suffered the water being cut off so many times when we first arrived).

This morning I purchased pipe lagging and was fitting it in driving, icy, sleet - not very funny!

The problem is, villas over here aren't insulated like houses are in the UK and winter can be damn cold. You can't even get into the roof-space to lay insulation. The floors are either marble or ceramic tiles (the builders think it's summer all year round), so we lay rugs wherever we can.





We have a high efficiency woodburner which helps out - in fact I love it - but it doesn't compensate for the fact that the rest of the rooms are cold. We have central heating, but bottled gas makes it very expensive to run, so we only have them on in the evening.

Weak financially

The Euro is so strong against the pound that it's now one-for-one, which means I've had a 20% cut in finances PLUS the cost of living is up, so I'm effectively 25% to 30% worse off compared to this time last year - so all in all, the UK is looking quite attractive at the moment....


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To Write A Story - 20 Ways To Write A Story Better
How To Describe - Mastering Descriptive Writing
7 Cool Ways To Jump-Start The Story Characters In Your Writing

End of post - Cold nights in Spain

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Author, Neale Donald Walsch, steals writer's work


Conversations With God

Spiritual writer, Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations With God,” posted a Christmas 2008 message on the religious site, Beliefnet.com claiming it concerned his son’s nursery school play.

Whilst watching a dry run, apparantly a group of children spelled out the title of a song, “Christmas Love,” with each youngster holding up a letter. One girl held the “m” upside down, so that it appeared as a “w,” and it read as if the children were spelling “Christ Was Love.”

Uplifting

It was an uplifting Christmas story from a writer celebrated for his religious teachings. The only problem is it never happened to him. It was all lies.

Mr. Walsch’s story is identical to a story from a writer named Candy Chand, originally published 10 years ago in Clarity, a spiritual magazine, and has been circulating on the Web ever since.

Mr. Walsch now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually come from his personal experience.

Mystified

When confronted with the news, he claimed, “All I can say now — because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this — is that someone must have sent it to me over the Internet ten years or so ago. I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of stories to tell that have a message I want to share.”

And all I can say, Mr. Walsch is - bullshit. Go write your own stuff.

Writers have a hard enough time, without people like you stealing their work.



---------------------------------------------------------
To Write A Story - 20 Ways To Write A Story Better
How To Describe - Mastering Descriptive Writing
7 Cool Ways To Jump-Start The Story Characters In Your Writing
End of post - Author, Neale Donald Walsch, steals writer's work