strathspey@strathspey.org:45629

GOSS9@telefonica.net

Re: The 'Castle'

June 22, 2006, 12:23 a.m. (Message 45629, in reply to message 45625)

There is a Scottish joke that comes to mind, I remember it being told 
by the late Bill Ireland in one of those late night sessions at 
University hall, where the perspiration of the beer cans matched that 
on the walls.

It seems that a Hebridean and a Mexican were comparing their 
respective vocabularies, one would give his word, and then the other 
his and they would have a linguistic discussion.
Finally the Mexican said "mañana" (BTW your spelling would be fine in 
Catalunya where we have no "Ñ", except that our word is "matí".).
The Hebridean, repeated the word several times and then asked what it 
means.
The Mexican said well it means tomorrow, in the morning, later, soon, 
in a few days, later, whenever.
The Hebridean answere, "no we do not have any words as urgent as 
that."

While the building process can be a bit frustrating, but the style is 
quite different here in that I have a "mestre d´obres" who drops by 
every day and organizes, but my actuall workers vary from zero to 8 
depending on what is being done, the usual is 0 to 2. This is because 
their company is actually building 20 houses at the same time, and 
weather is a factor (inside for hot, cold, or rain, outside other 
weather. Actually the work week is 5.5 days starting at 06:00 and 
ending at 19:00, siesta in the middle. The job would move much faster 
if I was building a new house, but as mine is a listed building (UK 
term) the standards are much higher, and more things must be done in 
stone which is cut to fit on site (which explains 5 years of dust in my 
hair, food, bed, bath). A related problem is that the Mallorquí never 
heard of Euclid, so there are no right angles in the house. So, after 
putting in new plumbing, I had to make a decision about the floor 
tiles. If I aligned them with an almost straight wall, this means that 
the other 3 walls would have tiles shaped like triangles, If I aligned 
the tiles with the front door, they would not match any of the walls in 
any room. Ultimately, as my house has 6 cross walls, each with a door 
except for the last, I aligned the first tile with the 3rd doorway, and 
then created a straight line from there to the front door, and extended 
it to the back of the house and worked out from there. OK so I still 
have triangles, but they will end up behind furniture, at least one 
looking in the front door will not get a headache trying to follow the 
lines. To give an example of how bad it is, I wanted a large shelf 
headboad for the bed in the master bedroom, so measured the wall from 
one side of the room to the window, this would allow a night stand at 
one end then the bed, then the window (which in a meter thick wall has 
two shelves below it anyway. When the bed was installed, everything fit 
perfectly, except where I expected the space on the night stand side to 
be the width of the night stand, at the foot of the bed, it is only 8 
inches. - makes it a bit hard to make hospital corners.