caracolia 2025

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Sadly it looks like I won’t be making it to this year’s Caracolia festival, one of the three annual outdoor food festivals I mentioned here the other day. Turns out two of the three days I have sherry tastings booked at midday (yay! work!) but this also means I will be too exhausted to go out again in the evening.

These days I can usually only manage to get out once a day, and it’s usually in the early afternoon. After that I just run out of steam. It’s just too physically hard and painful to drag myself around on the crutches for any extended time. Which makes me feel a bit nervous about my Málaga-Marbella trip next week but at least I’ll have friends helping.

I really miss my old life, when I could go out any old time. And you know… WALK. Also this is the first time I’ll be missing one of the Festivales Gastronómicos since they began three years ago. Dammit.

down… again

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So just a couple of weeks after the gran apagón large swathes of Spain lost their internet connection. The 5G still worked (at least here), but no WiFi. Apparently Movistar/Telefónica had updated blah-blah on their whatever and blam! All shut down. It wasn’t as serious as the apagón but certain emergency services were out of service for a while. About 18 hours after it began things were back to normal. But once again people were left feeling vulnerable, realising how dependent we’ve become on these services. Which clearly can just be removed at any time. Hmmm.

relatively speaking…

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Okay, so maybe not the best image since I AM GOING BALD and would never tear my hair out on purpose… but I mean fuck. No wonder it’s falling out on its own. Remember when I had it all worked out to finally take care of business and find out – in person – why I have been waiting SEVEN MONTHS to see the knee surgeon? And so on my way to my mammogram on Friday, at a new place way out in the middle of nowhere (sorry El Juncal, but you kind of are), I got off the bus and stopped in at the scene of the crime – Fleming Clinic – which was sorta kinda of on the way.

I was directed to the department I should be taking this up, and so that’s what I did. But after a few minutes of looking stuff up on the computer screen the woman at the desk told me… “all I can say is that the appointments being seen to now in the department are from requests made LAST JULY”.

My request was made in October.

And when the woman saw the look on my face she said… “well you know, relatively speaking, it shouldn’t be that far off now”.

I didn’t even know what to say. I asked if this meant I would have to wait another three months and she said “not necessarily”, which could mean anything. Maybe not three months, maybe longer. Remember, this is just to see the surgeon. Who will have to sign off on the surgery. And then I will go on ANOTHER WAITING LIST. Unless the surgeon doesn’t sign off on it and then I am completely fucked. So far I have been finding it very difficult to have doctors take me seriously about this and so it’s hard to hope.