Ha – but not for the reasons you might think! Sam gets very fretful when there are loud bangs so, while we can’t protect him from many of the things that scare him, we decided we’d do what we can to stop him getting upset last night. Therefore Ian and Sam hunkered down in what was his old office, and where Ian and Sam used to sleep when Sam first arrived, as this was likely to be the most quiet. Apparently it worked well, although I was at the other end of the house and heard all the bangs, so perhaps next year we’ll all be under the table together.
Actually things weren’t too noisy. There were fireworks for a while around midnight, but then everyone would be heading off for their meals so it quietened down until the party started later. We opted out of the celebrations, celebrating at home with a fondue and special bottle of Extremaduran red wine. Just as well we were early to bed last night, as Ian was out of the house by 7am, taking pictures. I’m not quite sure what of, as it was completely dark. I am sure all will be revealed later.
I’ve been working on some supercomplicated spreadsheets this week, fine tuning and analyzing the key words that we are optimizing our websites on. If you type into google ‘free sewing patterns’ or similar, FreeNeedle will be on the front page of the results. This is good as people are more likely to visit sites on the front page, rather than keep scrolling through the pages. So we want to emulate this with other sites. Therefore I’ve been analyzing search terms and created a list using a number of factors. It’s actually quite interesting and there are numerous ways of cutting and slicing the data, coming up with different configurations of words. I ended up with a rather pretty pink and turquoise spreadsheet.
We’ve also started a small advertising campaign for MakeForBaby and MakeForBusiness. When I say small, I mean small. We’ve got a limit of 3 dollars a day. However I have a theory that growth will be exponential, so we just need to get a few people visiting the sites for word to spread.
It is still raining. We had some proper Spanish rain the other day, when a large puddle arrived inside the back door (the animals were delighted as it saved then having to go outside to drink). The puddle wasn’t due to flooding, but because we had the back door open. It is still warm, however, but no rain is forecast for tomorrow and the temperature is dropping again.
Antonio has finished the doors now, but we are still to decide on the glass we want in the panels above them. Then we will wait for Manuel who is due to come round and tidy up all the odds and ends, the things he couldn’t do until the doors were fitted, like finishing the skirting board tiles. He came in last week to get samples of tiles to buy some new ones, so we know he hasn’t forgotten. We can then check with him about what’s happening with the digging over of the back yard.