Germany 0 - Spain 1

I went to see the European Championship Final with my friends in Franceses, who have a big projection TV and satellite feed.

So you have to picture three large English ladies and one skinny boy rising off the sofa, punching the air and screaming "YES!" when Fernando Torres scored. And whent he final whistle went, we were all pogo-ing up and down, singing, "Olé, olé-olé-olé!"

Still busy

I feel I'm crawling out from under an avalanche of paperwork.

I've sent off my son's passport application and collected his last Primary school report - and picked up a the official application for him to start High School. Now for the last seventeen years I've had plenty of practice speaking (mostly informal) Spanish, but very little practice writing it. And these forms are formal. My son even has to fill in a legal declaration that he hasn't got a High School place elsewhere. I've got most of the associated bits together, like photos, and proof of bank transfers for insurance and the parents' association, and the form for free textbooks. We've got a doctor's appointment to fill in the form to say he's healthy enough to go to school. I could see the sense in that in the days when TB was rife, but it seems a bit OTT these days. But we have to get one, so we'll go waste the doctor's time on Monday.

We handed in our tax return. I also went along and translated for a friend signing off self-employed teaching work over the summer. And we went to hand the next issue of Ruido at the printers. Only the printer's off sick, so I have to go back on Monday. And I did a pile of updates to the Ruido website.

I've given last year's teacher a copy of all the photos and videos my son took on the school trip.

And in the middle of all that, I had a guiding job. Not take-two-groups-round-a-telescope, but stay-with-the-group-from-11am-to-4pm. The Science Museum in Las Palmas held a competition, and the prize was this trip to the Roque. So I had to stay with the group all day but only do the actual guiding around the Herschel and maybe the MAGIC.

First we went around the MAGIC telescope, then the Herschel. Half way around the Herschel, we were joined by the Vice-Consul for tourism in the Canaries, and her driver. Then we went up to the Roque itself to admire the view (photos on the blog about La Palma).

We had a rather nice lunch. Coffee was rather spoiled by a skinny American woman who kept muttering "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" like she owned the place, and generally acting like we were illegal immigrants because we were talking Spanish. In Spain. I ignored her, rather than make a scene, but I now wish I'd asked her when she bought the observatory, because I hadn't even heard it was up for sale. And then she started telling her companions that she really hoped Spain would lose the football. (They won. Yippee!) Altogether it was the worst display of bad manners that I've seen for about a year.

Then we forgot the silly woman and went up to the Swedish Solar Tower. To my alarm, the guide there didn't speak Spanish, so I had to translate, but it went OK. And we finished up with GranTeCan, which was spectacular as always.

All great fun, and presumably lucratuive, but very tiring.

I've been a Good Girl

Well I feel I've been rather productive today.

• Two loads of laundry


• Handwashing


• Scrubbed the kitchen


• An hour's ironing


• Sorted through my son's T shirts and removed the ones that are too small


• One page of translation


• A ton of email


• Found a couple of new markets


• Finished my son's passport application


• Got a present ready for my son's teacher


• Nagged my son into a thank you note for his teacher. (He's grateful all right, but writing letters or even notes looms large when you're 11.


• And this blog post

The Lover's Leap

I got up at 6 am to photograph the dawn behind this statue of a goatherd, and then the sun came up behind a thick bank of clouds. So this was the best photo I got.

There's a local legend associated with it, which you can read on my blog about La Palma if you're interested.

My story "Agent Hammer: Licensed to Kibble" went down really well at the critters critique group. In fact I got an amazing 28 critiques, all mildly or very positive, and I've just finished writing 28 thank you emails.

And the translation is still chugging along.

Graduation

Well, we haven't got a primary school kid in the house any more. Our son has graduated.

At the end of the school year here, each school has a concert, with the acts mostly being playbacks, performed by the kids. I knew my son had been practising playing the air guitar for his number. But I was a bit taken aback when he came home and announced, "I need to make a pretend guitar for this afternoon."

Eek!

Fortunately we had a large cardboard box I could sacrifice. With more card on top, it came out rather well. And biased though I am, I thought the concert went well too.

And then they had the graduation ceremony for the kids leaving. Boy was I proud.

So in September, out son's off to High School. And it seems like only yesterday that he started infant school, aged three.