Well I could have a great big pre amble before getting to the point or I could just spill the news ...
The other day we were off to the shops and the lovely wife suggested we go and check our mail box, as it's the wrong way for the shops and the village being about 500m further down the rambler with our neighbours box we perhaps only go once a week unless we're expecting something.
The box ended up on our neighbours post as all the new boxes allocated by correos and installed in the village were taken, there was a mis count by some one and the village went about 20% short ?
Common opinion was that the postie didn't like to stop very often and if I was to put another post in at the end of our drive for our box they might not notice it, it's been a very long time since mail was delivered to our place as it's been a holiday home for 20 plus years. The plan is to migrate our box to the end of our drive after the works done and the lorries have finished turning in.
So, the reason for the interest in the post box is it's the lovely wife's birthday soon and although she do'st protest too much when it's mentioned I think if we all did as were told and ignored it then the tremors would be felt as far as Madrid. I've tried to explain that 50 is nothing and it's not half over there's half left but to be fair I'm too old for the beatings any more , being fifty myself.
It's also our wedding anniversary of 31 years so that may be of some interest as well, in the box was a fist full of cards for the lovely wife and a few for us ! And the water bill , so in the glove box and off we go to the shops.
Whilst I was waiting for the lovely wife in mucky donna's car park I thought I'd scan through the cards and the water bill , well tucked in the middle was a note for a recorded delivery letter 4 days old !
Next stop was the correos office and we collected a 3 page letter from town hall, it had to be about our licences but the formal language was mainly beyond our understanding the word piscina was only used twice in the whole letter and there were a lot of legal documents sighted and quoted we just couldn't tell if it was good or bad news.
As it was a Saturday lunch time our options for a quick translate were limited so the lovely wife came up with a plan, in the ferreteria theres a young man who always serves us in English as he says he needs to practice, to be fair he's very good and it's us that should be practising, any way the lovely wife popped in and behind the plumbing section she got him to read our letter and tell her the basics and get me a new SDS chisel.
When she came back to the car she had two things to say , firstly the chisels were cheaper than on line and that we had the go ahead for ALL our works, most of the three pages were conditions about dumping waste in the rambler and not building within 5 m of our boundary, well there's no fear of that as I don't want to walk 90m to the pool.
So the builder is starting next week on the bathrooms and we might just have a kitchen back by Christmas or at least by the time my dad visits in January , then they can start outside and we should have a pool before spring .
Let the chaos begin.