Busy, busy, busy

Friday morning went on helping Helen and Theresa with paperwork, which gave us all chance to catch up on the chatting.

A friend of mine's gone to work on another island. Since she was leaving on the Sunday afternoon ferry, she stayed with us on Saturday night and on Sunday we hosted a small leaving party at lunchtime. Helen and Theresa promised to bake a cake, which they did. Shame they left it at home! But I think everyone was so stuffed with quiche, roast port and salad that nobody would have had much space anyway.

I'm going to miss my friend, but she's not so very far away really. Hopefully she'll be back fairly frequently, and we can go and visit her sometimes, too.

I also started a jumper I'm going to knit for my son with multicoloured wool we bought in El Hierro.

And the last couple of days have been busy with lots of little things. I've posted off the hats to Save the Children (see Little Woolly Hats) , baby clothes to my new great-nephew (see The Things Great Aunties Do) , and a story to Woman's Weekly (fingers crossed!) . I've bought some storage boxes and tidied up the living room, updated the Ruido website, taken my son to the dentist, carried on witht he translation, bought new tyres for the car, and re-written "Agent Hammer".

Whew!

Maybe I'll have time for a little fun tomorrow. I think I should go and see something I can put in the blog about La Palma. Which is going really well, by the way. I'm now up to an average of 60 visitors a day.

Ruido 5

Last night Helen took all her hard work on the layout of Issue 5 of Ruido to the printers, and I went along to translate.

Since this was Helen's first ever magazine layout, she was pretty nervous. She was more than half expecting that she'd forgotten something and would have to make lots of changes.

But the printer's reaction was, "Oh! Oh that's good. Fine. I'll get the proofs done by tomorrow."

I knew she could do it!

And I finally finished reviewing "Interspex", sent off two submissions, and wrote a bit more about the hamster secret agent. Fun!

Making some Noise

Last night I went to the inaugaral party for the island's new cultural magazine, Ruido. My husband had hoped to go, but we couldn't get a babysitter so he stayed home.

I had a good time. There was the inevitable speech to begin with, about the magazine, its aims and the contents of the first issue. I wasn't mentioned, so I assumed I'd been bumped into issue two. Fair enough - they probably have enough egos to deal with. Then someone read some of the contents, and to my surprise, this included my micro fiction, "Dream On" (Sigue Soñando), so I'm in after all. I don't get paid, but I got paid when the English version was published in Chat. It'll be the first time I've been published in Spanish, and it's the first time I've done my own translation. Best of all, people laughed aloud at the end, which felt GREAT!

Then we had music from a funk group. At the interval there was free beer (Thank you Dorada) and exhibitions to look at. I briefly helped out at the desk collecting signatures on a petition for a concert hall. There isn't a single one on an island of 80,000 inhabitants. Can you believe it?

After the interval, we were supposed to see a documentary about local groups, but that was cancelled due to a technical hitch. On the other hand, the best jazz group on the island played for longer than planned to compensate, so we were all happy.

I'm also pleased to say that the concert raised enough money to pay for printing Issue 1. It's early days, but I think this baby is going to survive. And like any baby, who knows what the future holds?