Farewell August

It seems like just yesterday we were saying Hello August! Now it is time to say Farewell August! The month flew by just like all the previous months. Yesterday we enjoyed the beach but the rain moved in overnight and made today feel more like Autumn. We had an incredible storm overnight which woke us up (thankfully so we could jump up and close the windows). A couple of hours later the thunder and lightning jolted us awake. A couple minutes later a lightning strike that sounded extremely close flashed across the sky as our power went out. Nothing we could do so we went back to sleep. I woke up at 7am and the power was still out. Oh well.

I had my writer’s group this morning so we needed to get ourselves ready and out the door. We checked the water in our downstairs bathroom and there wasn’t much pressure so we figured there was no point taking showers (luckily we took showers late yesterday afternoon after returning from the beach). A sponge bath would have to do. We got dressed and headed upstairs for breakfast. Bob ran the faucet in the kitchen and the flow seemed stronger so I checked it again downstairs. It was normal. So into the shower I jumped (stepped carefully) and thankful for my hair style that I didn’t need to rely on the hairdryer. Dressed and back upstairs to now have breakfast we headed outside to the garden.

We heard the vineyard staff that are reconstructing a building next to us into a new home start a power saw. I commented that although yesterday they were helping the rest of the staff pick grapes it seemed that perhaps it was too wet to do that so they were back working on the house. We enjoyed our breakfast outside while listening to them work. When we finished Bob said, “how do they have power to run the saw?” (okay we were a bit slow) So, he walked out of our gate to go have a look and saw that they were indeed plugged into the regular power source not a generator. Hmmmmmm.

He came inside and checked our breaker box and sure enough it had tripped. WHAT?! He flipped the switches back to the up position and voila we had power. Although Bob was beating himself up for not checking that before we reminded each other that we have lived in many, many places and through many power outages due to thunderstorms and hurricanes. We have never checked the fuse box when we lost power during a storm. Okay, it is difficult for us to look out any of our windows to see if the rest of the village is without power but still…it was not something we even considered. So, remember this if you lose power during a storm to make sure it wasn’t just a power surge affecting your main breaker.

Off to pick up Mark and head to Sitges for our writer’s group. Bob dropped us off and headed off to park the car and run some errands. It was definitely a stormy day at the seafront with whitecaps on the water. Still absolutely gorgeous though! After the group finished Mark, Bob and I enjoyed lunch at Montroig and then stopped to do a bit of shopping before taking Mark home.

Back home to the vineyard and it certainly looked and felt like Autumn. Again, still gorgeous.

Yesterday they were busy picking grapes.

I’m not sure if they picked any grapes today since we were gone the whole day. It is not good at this point of the growing process to have rain especially this much rain as they don’t want the grapes to get moldy on the vines. I took some photos of the stormy looking clouds and the vineyard.

On the horizon…blue sky and September. I’m looking forward to more harvest photos, more beach time, friends visiting from America and Bob and I celebrating our birthdays all month long.

Thanks for the memories August. Bring it on September.