Monthly Archives: January 2024

January ’24

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We started the year with Ana’s family visiting us. Juanjo put a very nice impression on how 2024 started for us on his YouTube channel. A few days later we had a visit from Marco and his family, which was fun. We went to Guayadeque for a small walk and some food in one of the caves. Afterwards we visited our home and has a stroll in the Doramas park, where I learned the magical words to get a nice picture with the kids: ‘Backs strait!’.

I, once again, paid Apple 99 euro to be able to develop iOS apps for another year, but my first app is still not done, even after being in the pipeline for over a year. I will see how it goes. Maybe this year I will find some time.

Casa de los Enigmas!Our apartment entrance is right next to an escape room. It started a couple of years ago, and now we see big crowds standing in front of their door every now and then. This month it was finally our turn to try and escape. Well, we did it, with only seconds on the clock we managed to escape the room within the hour. It was a fun adventure, something different to the things we normally do. The kids told us they had fun, although I did notice some agitation during the game, probably caused by the stress about wanting to escape as fast as possible.

Agenda

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Agenda?!Keeping an agenda is a very simple and effective way to keep track of things you need to do. You make plans, and you write them down on the date for which they are meant to be finished. This way you can select any day and see what needs to be done on that day, because all the plans you made in the past are written down of the day the plan was for. Logical.

Well, it seems that the logical way of using an agenda is not so logical after all. Our kids are learning something different on their school. All their tasks and appointments are written down on the day they initiated, with an indication for what day they are for. For example, the entry for today could be: ‘Tomorrow read biology page 64’, ‘Next week, on Wednesday, exam language’. The result is an, as I see it, useless agenda. Every day you need to look back for one or two weeks to see if there are any tasks for tomorrow. A terrible way of using an agenda, and a terrible thing to teach the kids.

Insufficient funds

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Money gone!Friday, after work I pass by the supermarket near my office. I go to this supermarket a lot, so I work my standard route and get everything we need. I stand in line to pay and take everything home. That was the idea, buy paying was not so easy. Payment declined. Insufficient funds. Another card did work, so I loaded everything into the car. After loading everything I decided to check the bank app to see why I could not pay, and I got quite a scare. There was nothing left on our account. Everything was spend in Marceille, in France. Our entire account, with nearly 1500 euro was all spend in a single day.

We quickly went through all the steps. Notify the bank, block all cards, change all codes and passwords. Make a declaration and file a report at the police station, and now all we can do it hope we will see some of our money back.

The thieves did make an error. They made a purchase that makes them identifiable. Using 100 of our euros the thief booked a hotel room in booking. Maybe he felt like going on a city trip and just enjoy life a bit. The weird thing is that booking knows all their data. The thief connected my bank card with his booking account to rent a hotel on his/her name. This should make it easy to find the thief. Still, I am afraid nobody will make the effort to find the perpetrator. Booking will never reveal any identifiable data to me, the police will probably do nothing, and just file our report, and the bank will probably make a calculation. Doing an expensive investigation for 1500 euros, with a low probability of doing anything with the thief, and a very low probability for getting the money back is not going to be justifiable expense. To bad, but it seems the thief will get to keep their stuff, paid with our money, and will not face justice any time soon.

Shrimptank – Roodpoot

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Our shrimp community is already a couple of years old. The shrimp are thriving, and they look happy in their habitat. They have lots of decoration they can play with. Huge shells we found at the ‘la Laja’ beach, nice stone pillars we found during a track we did in the center of gran canaria. Together with lots of plants and pump with some light. To top it all off there are lots of little plants floating on the top of the aquarium. We found these in the ‘Jardin Canario’.

To sustain a bigger community of shrimp I feed them a little every now and then, but when we leave our home they are perfectly adopted and will survive for months at a time easily. The problem with leaving them for a few months is that there is a lot of water vaporizing, which leaves the tank halve empty/halve full.

We started out with a couple of colored shrimp. Some were blue, some red, and two yellow ones. Over the years the colors have mixed, and it is now like a living genetic experiment. Some shrimp are pitch black, lots are semi transparent, en some are multicolored. The latest generation of shrimp has one very noticeable shrimp. A transparent shrimp, with a white spot on its back, and very red legs. A beautiful shrimp we named ‘Roodpoot’.