1st August FONTE DOS CLERIGOS

Hoorah, WE HAVE INTERNET BACK ON OUR KINDLES!!!!!! Now we’ve got to learn to ration it; we’ve got to use it a 1/3 less (as we didn’t have it for 11 days). I still can’t understand how we both ran out at the same time; Brett uses his far less than me, but Amazon assures us that it’s not a joint account, we get separate usage for each Kindle– I still don’t believe them, it’s too much of a coincidence. We went to bed, we both had usage; I woke up, turned on my Kindle to check emails and got a message saying I’d used up my 50mbs for the month; I turned on Brett’s Kindle to check emails and the same message came up – explain that Amazon!

The birds woke me at 6.00 a.m. so I now have more pictures of sky!! Stephanie says they could be spotless starling; the description sounds right, but these definitely have yellow under their wings (maybe I’ve discovered a new species, ‘Sandra’s starlings’?); Brett says I’m getting a bit obsessive about them, every time I hear them I leap up and grab my camera.

It was cold this morning (low 20s), I had to have a cooked breakfast (scrambled egg) to warm me up – we must be getting acclimatized, back in Wales I’d have been saying “let’s go to the seaside”!.

Ha Ha, Amazon phoned back and did manage to explain how our Kindle’s internet access had both been turned off at the same time; apparently it isn’t monitored daily and when they checked it twelve days ago, after we went to bed, Brett had used 61mbs and I had used 133mbs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (So I got my money’s worth). So now I’m really going to have to ration it. Unfortunately there’s no way to keep a check on usage through the month, until it’s turned off.

We had one of those days today that you don’t enjoy at the time but get a feeling of satisfaction once it’s done; we cleared out the studio and gym sheds. First we took out a truckful of old bits of wood (now neatly stacked on our wood piles). Then we gathered together another truckful of rubbish to take to the skips. And after lunch we swept the gym (it already has a concrete floor), ½ a wheel barrowful of dirt and dust. Then finally we broke up (well Brett broke it up) and removed a skim (1” -  4” at it’s thickest, but it was blown, so no good) of concrete from 1/3 of the studio floor (the rest is dirt and animal matter, tomorrow’s job is digging it out). It was very dirty work; we wore masks but still managed to breathe a lot of dust in.

We found a field of sunflowers outside the studio/gym (poor things have survived without any water)