Journal: Week 40, 2026

I woke up at 07:30, just before my alarm went off, which always feels like a small victory. I got up straight away and had a shower before taking my morning medication: my Sintrom (the anticoagulant), my blood pressure tablet, my omeprazole (which keeps my acid reflux under control) and the pills that help with my hip pain. Once I had done the Wordle puzzle, I set off on my scooter for a 09:30 appointment at the bank.

The bank turned out to be quite a productive visit. I was given a phone number to ring to make an insurance claim for my noisy toilet flush, which has been annoying me for a while. Apparently, my home insurance covers me for three call-outs a year, with up to an hour's labour each time, so I will be making that call. While I was there, I also ordered some US dollars for my upcoming cruise on the NCL Epic, which made it feel a bit closer. The woman who helps me with my account is as beautiful as she is helpful, and she asked me to call her if I needed any more help. I may well take her up on that.

From the bank, I rode to the Deportivo to check the opening times and costs for the swimming pool. It was quite cheap, and I can go whenever I want, so there are no excuses now. I then went to the CocoLomo café bar, which is part of the sports centre, and had a tostada with tomato and tuna and two coffees. It was expensive compared to Buena Vista and, in my opinion, not as good, so I won't be rushing back.

Next stop was Euronics, where I bought a new stick blender to blend my homemade soups. I couldn't wait to try it, so as soon as I got home I used it on the soup I had made yesterday, which was still sitting in my slow cooker. It tasted fantastic without any extra milk or cream. I ate one large portion straight away and put four more in the freezer, which means I have my next few lunches sorted.

The postman called back to give me my package, and I have to say I have a great postman. Whenever he sees me, he shakes my hand in the old-fashioned fist-grab way. I think he is nicer to me because I am home a lot and can let him into the apartment block to deliver letters and parcels. It is charming to be a familiar face to someone.

At 13:00, I met Martin for a couple of beers at Pizzeria La Sombre. I sat talking to him, his dad Dave, and his sister Lel (short for Lesley). I left around 13:30 and went home for the leftover roast chicken and potatoes from yesterday, which tasted just as good the second time around.

Later on, I saw a message from Porschas bar saying they would be opening at 16:00 for the Belgium v France game. That made my mind up for the evening because I went out to support France. I have good memories of past visits to friends in France, where I watched France games with the locals in a pub in Villefranche-Du-Périgord, in the Dordogne, southern France. So, it seemed only right to back them from a bar in Spain. I walked to the bar and sat there all night, chatting with Gary, John, Janine and all the other customers. The game didn't start until 20:45, so there was a lot of time to fill, and after drinking all night I was quite inebriated when I left and walked home. As soon as I got back to my apartment, I went straight to bed.

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I woke up late this morning and got up late too, which tells you what sort of day it was going to be. I made a coffee and did the Wordle puzzle. I got it right and extended my streak, so the day started well.

After last night's over-indulgence in beer, I didn't feel like doing anything, and luckily, I had nothing planned, so I didn't have to. I spent the day playing Whiskerwood instead, which is a computer game, in case anyone is worried. I was building up my island and learning how to play, but I kept killing off my mice because I hadn't grown or stored enough food for them. I seem to be trying to grow too quickly, and I need to slow down.

Much like in my real life, I am impatient and need to slow down. I would like to emphasise that no real mice were harmed in the playing of this game, although the virtual ones may have a different opinion of my farming skills. Luckily, there is nobody I can report myself to.

I completely lost track of time. I only realised how late it was when I went to get some water to drink and saw that it had gone midnight, so I went straight to bed.

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I woke up at 08:25, five minutes before my alarm, had a shower and watched the news. Then Jim picked me up and took me to Number 16 Kitchen for breakfast. It was an excellent breakfast, although the flies were terrible and seemed to think they had been invited too.

Afterwards, I did a small shop at Aldi and bought fish for my tea, some rolls, and toothpaste. When Jim dropped me off at home, he came in to see my new kitchen, which had been installed since he was last in Spain. Once he had gone, I made some hibiscus tea and put it in the fridge.

I did the Wordle puzzle and then spent most of the afternoon playing Whiskerwood. My Amazon deliveries were very late again, but I know why. Amazon uses contract drivers from other companies in Los Alcázares, and they don't get here until later in the afternoon. I also put together my new pot stands and put my plants in them, which has made the place look a bit smarter.

Later on, I looked into why my website had become incredibly slow, and it turned out to be web bots. These are automated programs that visit websites without a person behind them. Some are useful, like the ones search engines use to find and list pages, but others are built to collect text and images in bulk or to poke around for weaknesses. They don't browse like a person does. They work through every link on a site as fast as they can. My photo section seems to be what they were hammering, which makes sense because it is packed with pages and image files, and every one of those is a request my server has to answer. When enough of those requests arrive at once, real visitors are left waiting for pages to load. I learnt how to block them. I also discovered that the navigation I've built works well, but Joomla doesn't count it as the menu that registers everything. I found out why and began renewing everything, and I didn't finish until about 01:00.

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I was up at 05:30 this morning, which is early even for me, and I got straight to work on my website. I started redesigning it, working on a new structure, navigation and modules, and I also began tracing the log files that have been slowing the server down. Log files are the records a server keeps of every visit to a website, so they are the best place to find out who or what has been hammering it.

I took a break to head out on my disability scooter, calling at the bin on the way to drop off the smelly rubbish, which was overdue and needed doing before it became a problem. From there, I carried on to EconomyCash for some shopping. When I got home, I put it all away and had lunch, which was pork fillet rolls.

I also filtered the hibiscus tea I made yesterday and poured it into the old water dispenser in my fridge, so now I have something to drink that isn't just water.

Then it was back to the website. I tried using Copilot AI to help me, but it turned out my copilot was more of a passenger. It didn't help, and I spent hours looking for a fix myself. In the end, I had to contact CloudAccess, my hosting company, to see if they could help. I went to bed at around 23:00.

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I was up at 05:00 this morning. I made a coffee, did the Wordle puzzle and completed it quickly, and then I got straight to work on my website.

The weather was nice this morning, so at 10:30 I walked to Buena Vista to have a break from the computer. I had a coffee and a tostada with tomato and tuna, and I sat and read on my Kindle, continuing with my latest book, which was a very pleasant way to spend a break. When I left, I walked back along the promenade and saw my neighbour Rick outside his apartment block. We spoke briefly before I carried on home.

Then it was back to the website. CloudAccess made a few changes to the server and updated PHP to the latest version. PHP is the programming language that Joomla runs on, so keeping it up to date should make the site faster and safer. It still didn't seem to be right, though, and when I checked, I had somehow lost a lot of my work. I didn't know whether I had deleted it or whether the support people at CloudAccess had. It was probably my error, but why blame yourself when there is another option? I contacted CloudAccess again and asked them to reinstall Tuesday's backup and then redo the PHP fix for me.

The nice weather didn't last. In the afternoon, considerable storms came over, and both the town hall and my bank sent me weather warnings, which made it clear this was not an ordinary rain shower. I made videos of the rain, the black clouds, the thunder, and the lightning, and I posted them on my Facebook page. It was quite a contrast to the morning, when I had been sitting reading in the sunshine.

I spent the night playing Whiskerwood. I got my mice to mine hard, farm hard and then starve quickly. The game kept pinging to tell me more mice had died. It was annoying because it meant I had to build more mouse graves, so their little bodies didn't block the streets and upset the residents of my mouse city. In the end, I went to bed at about 23:00 so as not to kill off any more of them.

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I woke up at about 07:00, which isn't as early as I have been getting up for the last few days, so it felt almost like a lie-in. I made a coffee, and when I looked outside, it was still dark, but the rain and storm hadn't restarted. The square outside my apartment had dried off after Friday's storms. I walked along to Buena Vista for breakfast, having my usual large coffee and a tostada with tomato and tuna. When I finished, I walked back along the promenade to my apartment.

When I got back at 11:00, I remembered that I had promised to help George with some printing and translation. As it turned out, he had been round while I was out and missed me, so he called me, and then he came back and showed me the documents he needed scanning, translating and printing. Unfortunately, my laptop had lost the scanner software for some reason. Rather than have George wait around, I asked him to go home and said I would bring the documents back to him translated into Spanish and printed.

After he left, I searched the internet for a fix. The task was difficult because Canon no longer supports my printer, which I wouldn't mind if it weren't only a few years old. Eventually, I got everything downloaded, installed on my laptop and working correctly. I did the job for George and then messaged him to say that I would take it to his home on Sunday.

It was a good day for jobs indoors, so I stripped my bed, put my bed linen in the washing machine and tidied up my kitchen. I then tried to work on my website, but until CloudAccess reinstated the version from Tuesday, there was nothing I could do. So I did what any sensible person would do and played Whiskerwood for a few hours.

That is how I came to miss the start of the Croatia v England match, which was a Nations League game played in Rijeka. Harry Kane put England ahead in the 8th minute after a pass from Jude Bellingham, and Bellingham scored the second himself in the 21st minute, and I missed both of them because I was playing the game. I then missed the next two because I was in the bathroom. Anthony Gordon headed in the third in the 39th minute, and Bukayo Saka made it four just before half-time after Bellingham set him up. So by the time I sat down, England were already 4-0 up, and I hadn't seen any of it. That is a lot of goals to miss, even by my standards.

I did see the last three. Kane scored his second from an Elliot Anderson cross in the 53rd minute, Saka scored his second after a mistake by the Croatian defender Josip Stanišić, and substitute Morgan Rogers scored the seventh near the end, set up by Bellingham. The trouble was that my eyes were so sore from looking at a computer screen all week that the picture looked blurred, and I couldn't really see or appreciate the goals. I might as well have been watching a painting of a football match.

England won 7-0, the heaviest defeat in Croatia's history, and I saw three of the goals, badly. As a Gooner, I was pleased that Arsenal had four players in the England squad. Bukayo Saka and Ezri Konsa started, and Eberechi Eze and Myles Lewis-Skelly both came on late in the second half. Saka scored twice, so it was a good night for the Arsenal contingent. It still wasn't my finest effort as a football fan, though. I went to bed as soon as the game finished.

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I woke at around 7:25 this morning, five minutes before my alarm. It happens every time, whatever time I set it for. There's probably a reason: my body clock starts raising my body temperature and cortisol in the hour before I expect to get up, which makes my sleep lighter, and my brain seems to learn the alarm as a deadline and keeps watch for it. I weighed myself first thing and my weight had gone down again, another 0.6 kg lost. Then I got a coffee, sat down and did the Wordle puzzle.

Then the rain started, very heavy again. I had George's paperwork to take to him, but I won't be able to if it doesn't stop. George called to tell me not to go out in the rain and to see what it was like on Monday. Sensible advice.

The bigger news of the day was that CloudAccess messaged to say they had restored my website to Tuesday's version. That meant a lot of work, but I had learnt a little about hidden navigation menus and modules along the way, and I hoped to use that as I rebuilt the missing website structure.

I carried on after I made breakfast. I used a couple of slices of bread and spread tuna over them. It wasn't as good as Buena Vista's tostadas, but it filled a hole.

By the afternoon I had all the blogs up and running again. The photo section is another story. It still won't work, and I can see no reason for it. I've contacted Ignite Gallery, who make the photo gallery extension, to see if they can offer any help or suggestions.

I had a late lunch at around 15:30: two fillets of Ocean Perch with a mixed salad. I do like Ocean Perch. It's my new favourite fish fillet, thick, firm and tasty.

After lunch, I carried on with the website using a new AI package called Claude. It seems better than CoPilot, but the free version has limits and after using it all afternoon I ran out of free access. It did at least tell me this, and when I can start using it again. Tomorrow I'll use it to finish this week's journal entry and keep testing other functionality, and if I like it, I will buy the annual subscription.

I also spent the day using Obsidian to take notes. It seems to be just what I needed for writing notes to paste into Claude, to help correct mistakes and suggest changes.

This evening I cleaned the kitchen again, so the fish smell wouldn't take over my apartment, then sat watching TV and listening to the gentle patter of the rain until I went to bed around 23:00.

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