Our new home in the Orba Valley, Alicante

Another week has flown by and things are certainly hotting up here in Spain.  Yesterday (Sunday) was an absolute scorcher at around 30 degrees or so which was a bit of a leap up the heat scale! 😳

The headline news is that we have finally moved into our bedroom.  The finer touches for the built in wardrobes and the completion of the ensuite bathroom will be finished off soon (wardrobes) and not quite so soon (bathroom) but the bedroom is looking pretty good although not yet photo ready (next week).  It's cooler than the bedroom we were in and given the sudden rise in temperature lately, we timed it rather well.  The poor dogs got quite anxious though when we took the bed apart to move it especially Alfie whose little face clearly said "but I thought it was quite nice here, could we stay?" - bless them 💕  Anyhow, all of this means that we're getting the final boxes out of the house and moving on to sorting out the garage and the garden.  But these are less time pressured so we feel we can relax and enjoy the house, the area and the summer a bit now.

Today was Ian's birthday and to celebrate went out to eat yesterday and today - well why not 😎 Yesterday we went to Cal Morell which is a wonderful Spanish restaurant here and where we have been twice before - once last August when we came over to explore the area, and once in early December when we came over to view the house we now live in - to eat a glorious Spanish menu del dia in beautiful surroundings.  It's definitely our special occasion place.  Mind you it was so hot I drank a litre of water with the meal as we sat under a pergola with views like this:

And today we had a great meal with friends at another Spanish restaurant to celebrate.  We ate a lot and drank a lot and had coffee and it came to 22€ each including a tip 👌  You can't say fairer than that!!

On Wednesday I started my oil painting course.  Absolutely brilliant and the time just flew.  We have finished the underpainting (the basic picture on which to properly oil paint- who knew?!) and so this Wednesday will see the end product.  I truly have the drawing/painting bug and am planning on attending more sessions as well as getting myself the necessary things to continue at home.  In the meantime I'm learning in this fabulous and creative place:

And it's a small world......the art teacher is originally from the same town as us in the UK.

The hot weather here has seen us venture into the pool on several occasions this week and how lovely it is to cool off in it 😎 and I have an addiction to netting bits of leaves and insects out of the pool.  It's like a giant game of hook a duck 😂  It really is therapeutic walking round getting it clean but sadly this week I fished out a little gecko and a very tiny baby bird.  I get how a baby gecko might get into trouble in a pool but have no idea how a newly hatched bird might do so.  Anyhow, I fervently hope that's the end of dead livestock in our pool for the time being!

Now that the worst of our house reform is over for a while we're looking forward to exploring the area over the summer as there is so much to see.  I'm especially looking forward to going up into the mountains and also to the caves in Benidoleig.  If - and it's a big if - some family members can visit us from the UK at some point this summer we really do need to have some ideas of places for them to visit and right now we can only point them in the direction of builders merchants and secondhand emporiums which isn't really what the average person wants to do on a holiday in the sun 😂

Finally, we're still waiting for our Covid jabs 🙄 I saw somewhere that they're starting my age group here starting from today but I think Ian has missed the big window of opportunity for his age bracket getting the Astra Zeneca at a mass vaccination centre in Denia and will have to wait to get his at the local health centre.  And there they're only finishing off those in the decade above at the moment so I think his could be some while yet.  It seems we moved from the Balearics (where the vaccination programme is many weeks ahead of the Valencian region) at just the wrong time but hey ho.  The number of cases in this area is pretty much nil as far as I can gather so there's no real concern as such, but it would be nice to get that needle in the arm and feel officially 'safe' so to speak.  

Stay safe and hasta la próxima semana!