Our (very small) harvest. The fruit volume is actually inflated, looking at it, as Daisy’s luminous ball is in the pic! The success this year (besides apples that were actually bigger than cherries – and the two pomegranates that exploded) were figs. We have two different types – black and white, and both did well. We had enough to make a few meals with, which was nice.
The village had its fiesta last weekend. This was the first for two years as last year’s fiesta didn’t happen because of covid. There were some changes – as far as we heard, there wasn’t the brass band touring the village to wake up the party goers early Sunday morning. And I don’t think there was a procession with the Saint. I could be wrong on the latter point, but we were keeping an eye/ear open, as we’ve got a big for sale sign outside the house, which we hoped would catch the eye of the procession goers who would be pretty much a captive audience 🙂
I know that we didn’t get much interest in the house following the fiesta as I look at the statistics on the house website daily to see what’s happening. I was thinking the other day that who would have thought when I looked at my first set of statistics when working at Imperial Tobacco, that statistics and data would still be with me all these years later. I’ve gone from analysing tobacco advertising, to the sale of bathroom suits at Great Mills (where people used to ring in their data on a Monday morning), to analyzing sales of nuts and bolts (Motorlink), to statistical market research of consumer goods (Topline), school data (William Howard – lots of analysis ranging from forecasting the affect of food & mouth on the catchment area through to analysing school meals – where we discovered that a school of 1000 students sold 11 oranges a day!), through to analysing the data and statistics on our websites today! A life in numbers indeed 🙂
The data we get on our websites is fascinating. A couple of years ago I took Google’s official course in analysing website statistics and that has been extremely useful – and insightful. Of course, the data is a bit flaky now as when people opt out of cookies, it means that their movement on a website isn’t tracked – but for our purposes, with the house site in particular, we can see exactly what people are doing – and importantly, if we are going to pay to advertise, we can see in detail what people are doing. We can also see if people return to the site.
I’m running a couple of ads which we’ll see how they go. One to Spanish market and one to UK market, but I’m not holding out any hope for UK buyers. Brexit means that UK non Spanish residents can only live here for 180 days a year, in 90 day blocks, and I’m not sure our house would be attractive for people for whom that lifestyle would be suitable. I would imagine they’d be looking for smaller easy-to-manage properties which can be shut up for 90 days at a time. But – you never know, so we thought we’d at least run one ad and watch the data to see what happens.
Lava!
I think we may have had a lucky escape with one of the houses that was on our short list on La Palma. This house here was on our long-shortlist (Ian didn’t go to visit it) https://www.katha.es/es/Canarias/Detalles-propiedades/Casa-canaria-con-vistas-al-mar-y-a-la-monta%C3%B1a-KL0676 It didn’t make it to the final shortlist as it was out of our budget – plus, when we looked at it on Google Earth, we could see the property next door was very close, which wasn’t a problem on its own, but the neighbouring property was pretty much an illegal build, and we didn’t know if that would have any long term implications.
We would have had to negotiate to afford it, so that would have included the house next door, perhaps negotiating over the $ of the repairs that were needed etc- but strangely, the fact it was on an apparent lava stream didn’t enter our minds as a negotiation point!
This property would have been evacuated, but I don’t think it would have been destroyed, but it would certainly be very close (it is in the village of Jedey, and they are considering calling the new crater ‘Jedey’) and would be affected by the roads being blocked with lava and power being down.
Visitor
We’ve been having a visitor the last couple of weeks – here he is, a little ginger tom, who we hope will help keep the pigeons at bay! I don’t think he’s a stray, as he looks quite healthy, but he appears to enjoy having a wander. We have a few stray cats who use our back garden as a stopping point in their wanders. By the odd pile of feathers we see, they do seem to help a bit with the pigeons.
Little Big Ears
And here’s a new pic of Percy Big Ears 🙂