The quietness of our Christmas was emphasized by the noisiness of it the week and a bit before. A band of drummers went round the village every day at 5.00 in the morning. This is a regular thing – however this year they had new drums and, goodness me, it was loud. It starts 10 days before Christmas Eve and represents Mary and Joseph trying to find a room in wherever. The odd thing is – this is not a church thing – it is just a tradition. Even the priest who organizes the band of trumpets and drums the morning after the village fiesta wouldn’t be that cruel! I must admit that after 10 days of being woken up by incredibly loud drums I was of the opinion that there are certain traditions which should be banned. Either that or fit the drums with silencers.
Although it is still very mild, we had some logs delivered and we lit the fire over Christmas – and then promptly nearly expired through heat. Ian spent much of Christmas day mending the flue on the fire so it seemed only proper to light it.
It rained on Sunday and it’s raining today, but obviously not like the rain in the north of England. Annoyingly, we’ve had a very interrupted power supply which, although incredibly annoying, when we think of the flooding, our interrupted power was soon put into perspective. Our power problems were very annoying as it would go off for no more than one second. However that was enough for everything to stop which then had to be restarted, clocks reset etc. It was so intermittent we gave up after a while and left things off rather than keep restarting them. And then yesterday the power went off most of the morning, so hopefully that was someone working on fixing the problem, not of signs to come.
I had my contract with About.com renewed for another year. So I’m in my 9th year there now. I’ve therefore taken the brave decision to stop doing classes in the afternoon so I can spend the time on other projects. This is going to knock a huge chunk out of our income, however now’s a good time to do it because the dollar to euro exchange rate means that my About.com money is worth a lot more to us currently, and while we don’t get much from the flat, the pound to euro makes it a little more at the moment. So my challenge is, in the next six months, to try to generate enough income from other things to compensate for lack of teaching. I’ve said I’ll give classes at the weekend so we’ll still have a bit coming in.