Christmas Cava Cheer

Cava gets a bad name in the UK, usually the cheap fizz trotted out at promotional events is immediately accused of being Cava and gets poured into the nearest pot plant.  I want to spread a bit of Cava (pronounced ca-ba - soft b) love this Christmas by pointing you all in the direction of some truly decent bottles of Cava that are well worth gracing your posh flutes this Yuletide.  Cava is made in the exact same traditional method as Champagne and has been aged for at least 9 months, and considering a fabulous bottle of Cava costs much the same as a run of the mill bottle of Champagne, it's a must for your Christmas shopping trolley.

Predicting The Future

2011 is just a stone's throw away; a new year to ponder what surprises are in store for us.  Well there must be something in the air in our little village amongst the muddied rice fields (aside from chicken shit), because dear reader, the donkey has gone all mystic and has come up with some predictions for the coming year.

La Casa Very Bored

T'husband will remain unable to locate the bathroom cleaning products.

I will have beaten both Joseph's and t'husband's score at Frisbee Dog on the Wii by May.

There will have been at least 4 plumbing failures by September.

No-one will win the lottery.

Some kind company will take pity on me and sponsor me to attend CyberMummy11  (yeah, yeah - cheap shot...).

Bleeting and Braying

The shy and retiring lady from Baltimore has been bleeting - this apparently is a cross between blogging and tweeting, a thought that is too long for a tweet but too short for a blog.  She has tagged me to come up with some bleets of my own, but as everyone knows donkeys don't bleat they bray, still any excuse for a rant or two eh. I'm narky and bad tempered this Monday morn due to staying up late Dirty Dancing, the watching thereof not the partaking in, good Lord, I'd slip a disk a something, so it feels apt to relieve myself of some bile and bray like the knackered, bad tempered mule that I am.

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A Little Something for the Weekend

A short history film for those, who like me, are often found at the mercy of a certain Irishman and his flying machines.

The Donkey Does the Round Robin

Well dear reader, it's that time of year where I like to bore remind you of all the wonderfully exciting things that have happened to us over here in sunny Catalunya.

It's been a turbulent year of twists and changes, ash clouds and floods, yo-yo diets and much ranting.  I rather suspect that 2011 will hold much of the same, hopefully without the ash cloud.

Way back in January, a good place to start the year I feel, I decided to change my blog name, out went the Very Bored Housewife and in came Very Bored in Catalunya, there were two reasons for this, firstly I wanted my blog title to reflect where I was in the world - task accomplished, and secondly to dispel the myth that I was some kind of soft porn site - this task was not accomplished but, being thought of as a red hot porn star did give me some good blog fodder; never look a gift horse in the mouth!  A brand and a donkey were born and the housewife never looked back.  January also saw me dust of my poetry hat and lament about good old blighty and all the things I missed.

Elsewhere in the real world John Terry was shagging his best mate's missus and I was musing over a hen-do invite in Birmingham, wondering if I'd reached the stage in life where I start to look like Liz MacDonald, and Joseph was refusing to do number twos on the loo. Only one of those things has changed!

February inevitably came and with it a bit of Spanish winter sun, this prompted an unseasonal bout of sunburn and a run in with the local mad grannies. A quiet month with me refusing to buy into Valentine's Day and t'husband finally returning to work after the closed fishing season, those two things were very probably related.

March saw the world go Glee mad, not me though and my controversial post saying as much split the blogging world in two. Once I'd recovered from the death threats I found solace in allies of a different kind - the don't bother much down there kind, as many a kindred spirit admitted to their pubic failings. The month however ended much as it had started; with a war.  This time it was the ever-raging Marmite versus Vegemite feud that just keeps on going.


That big volcano that no-one can pronounce or spell decided to spill it's guts in April wreaking havoc on the world, and for a short while making the Very Boreds rather concerned for our financial future. It wasn't a good month for us as we had flooding issues as well to deal with.  I nervously declared my need to cull and was met with much surprise approval.

May saw me culling again, not blogs in my reader though - clothes! A quiet month for my blog as I was back in the UK for a fortnight, but I was finally signed off from the doctors following my Partial Molar Pregnancy so I pondered the issues of trying to conceive again after multiple miscarriages.

World Cup Fever was upon us in June and a heartfelt plea from me fell on deaf and stupid and shit ears (not bitter), still every cloud has a silver lining eh, and what better place to watch Spain win the world cup than deepest, darkest Catalonia.  Ah right, that would be anywhere then!  Catalonia was busy making the news elsewhere being one of the first places in Europe to ban the Burqa and producing phalluses at every turn.

It was Fiesta time in our village in July and trust me that is not always a good thing. The person behind the donkey decided to reveal herself and everyone was talking bull as our region was the first in Spain to ban Bullfighting. The now world famous parenting guide was written and I proclaimed that I don't blog to make money, a good job really seeing as I've made diddly squat.

The stifling heat of August saw the family Very Bored hot tail it back to Yorkshire for some much needed cold and rain.  A night out in Leeds provided some bizarre blog fuel and an incident at our local swimming pool had me squirming and blessing my foreignness. Vegemite Vix dreamt up the Tribal Wives series and I pitched in with my Catalan version.

September and I had ears on my mind, mine were growing!  My porn star status was making me giggle, TV adverts were making me rant, Joseph's car thief track-suit was making me very confused and an imminent visit from the in-laws was making me unusually house-proud.

October saw the donkey get serious and declare herself a shit mum, back the No-Nestlé campaign and highlight ways to be more socially aware about your shopping.  Normal service was resumed when much to the horror of other bloggers I decided to out some of our female lies, luckily very few menfolk read this blog so I may just have got away with it. I also shared Joseph's new found fondness of the word Testicles. You'll be pleased to know that we've moved on from that and t'husband has (for some unknown reason) taught him the phrase 'purple helmet', just in time for our trip back to the UK at Christmas.  God love him!

November saw us leave for the Florida Keys and Orlando so the blog was taken over by some wonderful guest bloggers, placenta burial parties and lubricants featured heavily. I was roasted one Sunday and gallantly rescued one Thursday, a very eventful month.

What will the rest of December bring?  Who knows... and as for 2011, hopefully more fun and frivolity and maybe, fingers crossed, a successful pregnancy.

How was your year?

Top 100 Books - Which Have You Read?

Over at 'Cross the Pond a list has been compiled of the Top 100 Favourite Books as voted by BBC viewers in 2003, I did have a go at highlighting ones that I'd read but I felt the list was somewhat lacking - there was no Shakespeare for a start and very few more recent classics, so I dug around and found an alternative list from The Telegraph in 2007.  I was sadden that D H Lawrence didn't make either list and both lists are very Dickins heavy - an author I have never had any desire to read.  Anyway,  I'm going to follow the same instructions but just apply them to the more recent list.  


For Instructions: 

• Copy this list.

• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

• Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

• Underline the ones you really want to read

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8= Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

8= His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Not sure what this says about my literary prowess, clearly I am not as well read as I thought I was!  Why don't you have a go?

 

The Donkey Goes Stateside - Part 2.

After our week spent fishing (boys) and loafing around (girls) we took the long road trip north up to Orlando. A six hour journey stopping off at Miami airport to drop off our friends who'd only come along for the fishing part of the holiday.  After much debate and consultation of guide books, we decided that we would go to Disney's Magic Kingdom, Disney's Animal Kingdom and SeaWorld, with a day's shopping thrown in for good measure.   We pulled up at our rented house after dark and were amazed by it's size.  A large house with 4 bedrooms each with their own en suite, a small private swimming pool and much to Joseph & t'husband's delight a table tennis table and pool table in the adjoining garage.

First up of the theme parks was SeaWorld, we arrived with perfect timing for the sea lion show but were left a little bit cold with the pantomime performance that barely featured the sea lions at all.  Likewise The Shamu Show with the killer whales wasn't quite as good as we'd expected.  We did wonder if the show had been tamed down after the recent death of one of the trainers following an attack from a killer whale, which is perfectly understandable.  The highlight of the whole SeaWorld experience were the dolphins, an amazing show featuring up to 12 dolphins along with trapeze artist and parrots, worth the entrance fee on it's own.  The lowlight for me was being made to go on a roller-coaster, something I have never had the nerve to do before.  With much industrial language muttered along with a new found curiosity in religion; I clamped my eyes shut and feared for my life in an upside-down carriage on a monstrosity called the Manta.

The Manta at SeaWorld

The next day it was the turn of Disney to lighten our wallets.  We made the decision to hit Magic Kingdom after lunch figuring that we could keep Joseph interested enough until the firework display at the end.  Again the adults were underwhelmed.  We all thought that it would be much bigger than it was, also some of the characters that were dotted around the park for the kids to have their photo taken with were quite lame, their costumes looking like they could have come from any backstreet fancy dress shop.  We also didn't see Mickey & Minnie, I'm sure that they take pride of place in the parades but it would have been nice to see them elsewhere in the park.  Some parts of the park looked very old and outdated, none more so than Tomorrowland.  T'husband remarked that it looked very 80's, I felt he was being kind, as to me it looked like the volcano film set in the Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967)! Admittedly it did look marginally better once it was dark and all lit up.

A family ride on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad proved Joseph to be as lily-livered as his mother but he thoroughly enjoyed all the tamer kiddy rides and with it being the middle of November there was hardly anyone there, so very little in the way of waiting times for all rides, including (sadly for me) the white knuckled ones.

Come six o'clock Joseph's boredom threshold had been crossed so we didn't hang around for the parade and the subsequent firework display, which was a shame as I'm sure they would have been quite spectacular.

All in all it was a great family day out, but I felt it was more suited to little girls than boys (although there is a Pirates of the Caribbean and a Buzz Lightyear attraction), with pretty princess dresses everywhere and scores of very young girls who looked quite frightening in orange make-up and scraped back hair.  Was it worth the entrance fee?  Not for us, we'd have been better off taking Joseph to a kiddy funfair but I'm sure other families would get more out of it.  It was nice to see the park decorated for Christmas, although listening to the same loop of 20 old fashioned Christmas songs all day was both bizarre in the Florida sunshine and jarring by the 10th time White Christmas had been belted out.

Day 3 we gave ourselves a day off from the sugar-coated theme parks and t'husband and I hit the outlet mall.  Now this was more like it!  I managed to bag myself two pairs of Levi's, a pair of Converse, some sunglasses, Uggs and a top for my birthday (which is today incidentally), and even the usually reluctant shopper that is t'husband got into the bargain buying and scored himself a new outfit.

Animal Kingdom was the final destination on our hit list and by this time we were all a little bit jaded by the saccharin sweetness of the theme park employee.  I wondered if Disney staff needed some entry level shrillness to their voice, or if there was a course they go on to learn to talk in such a high pitched manner?  Maybe they carried some portable cannister of helium around with them to get it just right? Whatever, it was seriously beginning to grate.  Once again we were left feeling a little bit short-changed, Animal Kingdom had been billed as the biggest of all Disney's theme parks, but we felt it was actually quite small.  The highlight of the park was the first thing we went to see which was a short 3-D animation film about bugs!  The rest of the day was spent pottering around looking at strategically placed animals ,of which I felt there were surprisingly few of, and going on the expensively produced but thrill-lacking rides.  The best animal entertainment came from the tigers and gorillas.  The tigers because of the one that stared right back at everyone with her nose pressed up against the glass, and the gorillas because one of them sat alone sulking, looking for all the world like he'd been put on the 'naughty spot'.  Did Animal Kingdom offer anything a zoo doesn't? Well yes, but if you've been to any Safari park in the UK or Europe then it falls behind in comparison.

Who are you looking at?

So the magic question: Would I go back to Orlando?  Yes, but in a few years time when Joseph was old enough to do justice to the Universal side of things.  Would I do Disney again?  No, I don't think the Very Bored family are cut out for Disney.  However we did score lucky with our timing, the warm but not hot days were the perfect temperature for wondering around in, and hitting Orlando the week before Thanksgiving ensured us of small crowds and minimal waiting times and queues.

With a bit of time to kill before our flight back to Gatwick we stopped off at Boggy Creek for a paddle boat ride through the Everglades, we were treated to a sighting of a baby alligator and t'husband and Joseph got to hold another baby one.  A fabulous ending to a our holiday.