The thermometer in our car hovered between minus one and minus three as we made our way back to San Francisco last night. Luckily the car has central heating. Unfortunately the house does not. What our house does have is the most ridiculous system of roller blinds ever imagined; the mechanism is installed by taking a great chunk out of the wall, and then vaguely covering it with a wooden box, qua;
As is instantly observable, daylight, accompanied by corresponding fresh air enters through the gap between same box and the wall. The above is the office, repeat same in Joni’s room;
plus dining room and spare room. The one in our bedroom is the worst;
The change of light in the middle third is outside as viewed from inside, as it were. Minus three without, equals something pretty similar within. We’re looking forward to a couple of weeks of gently damp European summer.
As all the above demonstrates, we made it back from Carlos Paz. Although we may not have fully answered the question posed on the previous blog entry, it was definitely good to catch up with folk. Maybe we should just stop being so western and decide that we don’t need a programme in order to justify having fellowship. The fellowship was good, and having birthdays to celebrate on two out of four days meant that cake was a high feature, always a good unifying factor;
For me the most exciting thing was the bird I spotted in the scrub on the way here. That’s not entirely to denigrate the rest of the event, just that I find birds exciting and this one in particular. Called a Chuña, it’s a greyish wader with long red legs, dishevelled ruff and a purple eye patch. They’re not normally found in our province and I hadn’t seen one before. So I drew it, in lieu of one of the other probably-more spiritual exercises that I couldn’t manage to get my head round;
And now it’s ten o’clock at night again, and the temperature’s dropping like a rock again, so I’m about to partake of a drop of red, as an alternative form of heating you understand.