24.04.23 – Que pasa?
Well it’s been a minute hasn’t it! July last year was the last update, there’s been so much going on that I totally forgot to update my blog!
So here we are, still in Spain and things are ok.
We’ve had a few issues, the main one is that when our house was re-measured for the land registry, the town hall registered the paperwork back in the old owners name and details (even though we bought the house in 2019) so we are having to pay a solicitor 300 euros that we don’t have to sort out a mistake that wasn’t our fault! We’ve also been told that the process could take up to a year. A YEAR! Why on earth would it take so long to change some paperwork back into our name, we have all the legal ownership documents.
That is one of the frustrating things here, how long things take and for no apparent reason.
So we aren’t going anywhere for a while as we apparently don’t have a house to sell!
What I will say is that the national health care here is really good. I have a genetic kidney disease and they’ve been monitoring me closely. I unfortunately got to the stage that I needed to start dialysis and I chose Peritoneal Dialysis so that I can do it myself at home each night.
I have a dedicated team of nurses and consultants at the hospital in Malaga which is about an hour away. I had to go there for 2 weeks of training on how to do the dialysis, and I’m not set up at home with all the equipment (that Baxters provides) and doing dialysis 5 nights a week.
The weather has been amazing so far this year, a really short winter of about 6 weeks and then it’s just been hotting up. It’s due to be in the 30’s this week, which is pretty hot for April. We didn’t get these temperatures last year until about the second week of May so it’s getting hotter earlier.
There are a couple of downsides though, mainly the lack of rain and the reservoir at a dangerously low level. Unfortunately the local council don’t seem to have much forward thinking, they’ve still been allowing lots of the land to be turned into mango farms. Mango’s need a huge amount of water, and all this agriculture of changing the olives, almonds and grapes (which don’t need anywhere near as much water) to the mangos has had a real effect on the area and it’s not good.
I’m not sure what they are planning on doing about it – we’ll see whether the reservoir disappears completely! Then we will need to invest in a huge water deposito and pay to get water delivered.
The self employed system has recently changed (autonomo) and they are basing the contribution amount on your earnings. But as always in Spain it’s not straightforward, most people don’t know what’s going on and it will probably mean I’ll end up paying even more. Probably around 300-350 euros a month. Add the tax on top and it really is quite expensive to be autonomo here as I may have mentioned before.
The area I live in, the campo in the mountains, is getting busier all the time. It is illegal to build here, but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone! There are new terraces being cut into the mountain, new caravans appearing everywhere. It seems people are desperate to leave the cities and come and live up in the countryside.
When we first moved here there were only a handful of people living up here full time, a few weekends and a few empty houses. Now the majority of people live here full time.
Since my last post my mum has visited me a couple of times which has been lovely, and she’s recently invested in a small caravan that’s on our land that she can stay in. We needed to use the room that she had been staying in as a storage room for all my dialysis supplies (there are lots of boxes!) and so she needed somewhere to stay.
We are just getting it plumbed into our mains water, and we need to run an extension cable so she has electrics and then it’s all ready. She’s coming again on Wednesday (2 days time) so we’d better get it sorted by then!!
Work is going well, I’ve got a nice client base (but I’m always looking for more of course) and I’m also going to be looking to work with an associate who I can train up on all the work for when I do finally get on the kidney transplant list. Because once I’m on the list I could get the call at any time so I need to be ready so that my clients don’t notice a difference and they are being looked after by someone I’ve trained on all their accounts.
I think that will do for now and I promise to update this more regularly! I will leave you with a lovely photo of the reservoir – looking very empty!
