The Wedding of the Year

Lourdes (my friend and student) and Luca (my husband's friend and work colleage) got married last night.

I was chief photographer. I'd been rather nervous about it, beause I hadn't done a wedding for about ten years, and this would be the first one with my new digital camera. Worse, the flash gun I'd ordered in May specially for this wedding hadn't arrived until mid July. After using it for only three weeks, I still wasn't 100% confident with it. Now that sort of thing doesn't greatly matter when you can go back and take the photos again, but weddings are special, and I was really keen to do a good job.

It didn't help that I'd used it at the hen party (see Saturday, August 04, 2007) and found the batteries ran down pretty fast. This meant that the flash recharge time went from about 2 seconds to about 20 seconds.

Twenty seconds is a heck of a long time when people are exchanging rings.


My husband, bless him, came up with an external power pack which plugged into the battery compartment without damaging the flash and thus invalidating the guarentee. It meant I had to have a bag over my shoulder the whole time, but the flash recharged faster than the camera could re-focus all night long. I was impressed and very grateful.

I had some minor glitches using the new flash, but it's nothing I can't fix with Photoshop, thank goodness.

Once I relaxed a bit, we had a great time. It was a really nice wedding.

GranTeCan

On Friday I showed another group of tourists around the William Herschel Telescope. Afterwards they were going on to GranTeCan, which is the huge telescope the Spanish are building at the Roque (see Thursday, July 26, 2007). I managed to tag along and finally see inside.

I've seen a lot of telescopes, and I knew it was huge, but I still wasn't prepared for the sheer size of the thing.

This is the dome floor, which is 32 metres (93 ft). You could fit a full sized tennis court in there, and only the corners would be outside the rotating area. The huge red thing is the bottom of the telescope, with the main mirror (10.4 m) just out of the picture to the top.

The telescope isn't finished (one reason why they allow so few visits) and they were working on the azimuth drive - the one that moves the telescope about a vertical axis. It's silent, partly because it's one, huge, linear motor.

I'd have loved to climb up inside the dome, but I was delighted to see this much.

Peas

Although our garden is tiny, our balconies are large, and this year I decided to see if I could grow a little bit of organic veg in containers. For one thing, there'd be no food miles involved.

My friends from Franceses gave me three pea plants. When we went on holiday, they were about a foot high. When we came back they were about four feet high, and caterpillars had chewed all the leaves into lace. I picked off the caterpillars, but it was already too late.

Last night we ate the entire crop - 15 peas each. Theyw ere very nice, but I don't think I'll be getting the Nobel Peas Prize this year.

Hen Party

Last night I went to a hen party - my first in 16 years of living in Spain. It wa great fun of course. Here's the bride-to-be with two of the entertainers. And I'll leave the decoration on the cake to your imagination!

All in all, I'm really not sorry that my tour-guiding job today was cancelled. It meant that I didn't have to go easy on the drink and leave at midnight.

I had a great time, and I got some much-needed parctice with the flash and difuser, but I couldn't do that every week.

Bad news

We've had a heatwave, and I've been busy.

On Monday afternoon as I passed through town with my son, the thermometer outside the port read 40C (104 F). In that sort of heat, you don't feel like doing much, although I did continue my battle against the fleas.

On Tuesday my friends Helen and Theresa finally collected their Spanish number plates, so later that morning I went with Helen to sort out their car insurance. The office had aircon, which was lovely. The girls stayed for lunch, and the day just disappeared, with nobody feeling like making much effort. Meanwhile massive forest fires raged on Tenerife and Gran Canaria. There's a rather spectacular satellite photo here.

On Wednesday it was a little cooler, thank goodness. My friend had to go and deal with a family crisis, so I acquired a temporary daughter. I took her and my son to Franceses to see Helen and Theresa. For once I didn't take any photos because it's all so dried up at present. Their vines look sick, which is probably the heat, but they've been doing wonders in the house.

Today the fires are both out, but the beautiful village of Masca on Tenerife has been burnt, and a missing teenager has been found dead on Tenerife. It seems all the news is bad today.

I'll just have to hope tomorrow is better.