Wednesday, September 30th - Salou, Spain

I slept in today because it was so dark outside there was nothing to wake me up except for my alarm, which I did have set for 9:30 just to make sure I got up, stripped the bed and had my shower before 10 a.m., which is the designated time to have our laundry bag of sheets and towels out at the door for pick up each Wednesday.  

It was cloudy and cool and windy all day, and spitting rain most of the time and threatening to do more including a possible thunder storm.  As a result I stayed in doors most of the day.  My only venture outside was to walk two blocks to the local grocery store to pick up some supplies.  That took maybe 20 minutes, but I did stop down at the office just to confirm my next week's accommodation.  All is well in that regard.  As long as I keep paying the money I think they'll let me stay.  

I did get rained on both going to the store and coming back but it was a pretty light rain, almost like a drizzle, and you never really got wet from it.  However, I think I did get chilled at some point over the last few days, either that or I'm coming down with something because I was feeling very cold.  I actually got my winter fleece out and wore it for the last half of the day.  I haven't needed it since sleeping in the yurt in Kyrgyzstan when it was almost freezing up in the mountains.  Oh well, I got warm and that's all that matters.

It is interesting that it is September 30th today.  This is the official end of the tourist season here in Salou and neighbouring places.  Some restaurants and pubs, especially those down near the beach, have already started closing up for the season.  The big clothing store across from me is packing everything up and their mannequins are now standing naked in the windows.  I guess some of the regular retail stores are only seasonal too.  Hopefully a few things stay open for another week or so or it might be very quiet around here.  

Aside from my one excursion outdoors and several other small breaks to eat meals or check on the weather or stretch, I sat at the table most of the day trying to do the blogs for the two days in Lisbon from our bus tour.  It is so hard to sit now and try to remember what we did.  I can read my few cryptic notes and look back over my pictures if they will load from Google Drive for me.  The pictures are grouped by day / city but they are not labelled individually so I don't remember what most of the stuff is.  Sometimes I think I know so then I google it and see if what comes up online is anything like my pictures.  If it is then I know what to write about.  If not, I keep guessing.  It's an amazingly slow process to begin with and definitely not helped by the speed of the internet here and the fact that as soon as I leave Google Drive to write something in my blog, Google drive shuts down and goes back to the "home" position again so I have to go back through the folders and reload all the pictures again and figure out where I left off.  There has to be a better way but of course that would be not to fall behind with your blogs.  Since that isn't the case, I just have to keep blundering through - unless someone out there can come up with a better solution that would work on an iPad.

The iPad is also not the greatest for ergonomics.  I can try and sit properly (although everyone knows I never sit properly) at the kitchen table here.  The table is a bit too high so I have to keep my arms and shoulders up to keep typing.  And then the screen on the iPad is small and way down low on the table so I have to keep my head bent down and forward to see the screen.  All of that means that by the time I had spent almost an entire day working at the computer my neck and shoulders and eyes hurt and I had an incredible headache.  Luckily I had some tylenol with me so I took a couple and went to bed in hopes that all would be better in the morning.

Oh I should mention that I did finally realize that I could separate my keyboard from my iPad so I tried propping the iPad up farther away from me and higher.  That was a bit better however, sometimes you just have to touch the iPad to move between screens or fix mistakes or whatever, and my arms weren't long enough for that.  So what I did was just keep typing and then after I was done with a section I would grab the iPad and fix and errors that were underlined.  I'm still not proofing much of these because of time constraints so if the program doesn't underline an error, I'm probably not catching it.  Sorry, but what you get is what you get.