As many of you know… OK, scratch that. Maybe some of you know that the Condor is a huge vulture that can only be found in the New World, mostly in the Andes and a species in California. Well, I think it is now safe to say that the long extinct Vultur gryphus ssp. europeensis is back!! Ornithologists across the world had lost hope of seeing this marvellous vulture fly over Northern Europe again, but we now have the proof that our very own European Condor is back. This photograph was sent this morning to the RSPB by an anonymous bird enthusiast. We don’t know when this photo was taken, nor where exactly. The identity of the sender couldn’t be retrieved from the reflection in the photo. We don’t know the reasons why the sender wants to be anonymous. Given the importance of the discovery, the photo and the email message are now being analysed by a team of IT experts. We will keep you posted on any updates on this remarkable discovery.
A sunny rain shower: perfect light
Maybe I should sort my photo galleries by season and track down climate changes in the Cotswolds.
It was very amusing to watch journalists spread across the country, having to report on drought warnings… under the rain! This week has been one of the wettest since Winter, yet until 10 days ago we were prepared for the worst drought in years.
Oh well, I guess we’d better get ready for the good ol’ rainy British Summer now 
The wacky temporary pot is actually the cover of a stack of empty DVD
I’ve been living in Cirencester for about 18 months now, but I have just recently moved into town. I used to live just outside town, close to the college where I work but pretty much in the middle of nowhere, a.k.a. the lovely British countryside
This morning I went for a walk in town and bought a few things. I was also looking for some very small pebbles for the mini-cacti I put on my TV at home.
I used to have a very big collection of cacti in Pisa. They grow quite well over there, even though the climatic zone is not ideal.
However, in the UK I haven’t had any indoor plants so far, just the jungle of tomatoes I grew last summer. The window of my bedroom in the new house in town is very nice and brings in a lot of light all day long. The TV is right below it, so I thought some cacti would go well there.
St Michael's Park and Holy Trinity Church
On my way back, I stopped in St. Michael’s Park. This park is just about 500 meters from my house and it has tennis courts, children games and also a sort of free BBQ pits area with benches and tables. The town centre has the very typical Cotswolds style, but just minutes away from it one can find beautiful parks and very nice Victorian cottages.
If only it stopped raining, we could try to have a BBQ in the park this weekend. Not a very promising June so far 
The church in the background is Holy Trinity Church. Apparently, it was built by Lord Bathurst. Not very surprising, as he is a recurring name in the history of Cirencester. I shall carry out a little investigation
I recently moved house, so now I’m in the process of changing my address on various documents. One is the Car Registration / Ownership Certificate of my mighty Welsh Nissan with a Scandinavian name.
I remembered that when I bought the car last year it took about 6 weeks to get the certificate with my name and address, so I figured I would start the procedure as soon as possible this time. So last week, the same week I moved house basically, I filled out the old certificate with the new details and I mailed it to the appropriate DVLA office in Swansea. Yesterday I received a letter in the mail with my new certificate.
One week.
It took just about one week, possibly even less, if you take off the mailing times and the weekend.
I am speechless.
There is hope. Sometimes bureaucracy works! Well, they also tell you that if you don’t change the address on the certificate you are breaking the law and you could be given a £1,000 fine. Has anyone ever got fined for that? Really? Strange British laws.
My morning coffee mug and some Italian kitchen essentials
A few days ago, my friend Anna stumbled upon a very interesting blog, the Grounded Traveler. We have so much in common with some of the stories this guy posts on his blog: the highs and lows of expat life, the joys of travelling and the downsides of not having steady roots in any country in particular, yet still feeling some kind of national identity.
Anna is from Spain, has lived in Italy and is currently residing in Norway. The Errant Spaniard.
I am Italian, I’ve lived in Africa and Latin America for some time and I am now working in the United Kingdom. The Errant Tuscan.
Errant.
Anna came up with this word and I agree, it sums up perfectly our lives so far. We will keep writing about our experiences, sharing thoughts and photos from our errant lives. Anna is a very talented designer and photographer and you can visit her newly refurbished blog here.
So much to write, so little time! I really enjoyed my trip to Sweden. I’m still sorting some of the photos and I will update the photo gallery here, but I think I will probably write a post on my Swedish blog too. I need to keep practicing the language, ya know…
April passed by so fast, May is basically half gone already. And I haven’t posted much lately. Well, cut me some slack. I do have a demanding PhD project to carry out, presentations to put together, conference papers and posters to prepare… Plus, in June I’m moving into town: a more convenient location, although I guess I’ll miss having a big backyard in the outskirts of Cirencester.
I’m getting ready to fly to Stockholm on Friday. A week in Stockholm and Uppsala, mainly for work, but also to visit the town. In May the weather is lovely and I’m sure I’ll enjoy the place and get another chance to put my Swedish to test, haha! Wish me luck… 
So… I don’t think I will blog in the next 10 days or so, but I shall catch up by posting nice photos of my trip afterwards!
Vi ses
It’s never funny to keep track of bills and expenses in general, so even though I don’t have a luxurious monthly budget, I like to keep track of my savings and where exactly my money goes every month. Online banking has made this a lot easier. You just log into your bank account and if you use your debit/credit card(s) for most of your expenses, you can easily track them down.
However, I noticed that it can be useful to have a simple spreadsheet where you can instantly see how much money you have left every month, how much you can transfer into your savings account and so on.
Then I decided to upgrade my initially very simple monthly budget spreadsheet. I made a yearly version with 12 sheets, 1 for each month, and 1 extra sheet with the explanation for the formulas I have used. I decided to used allocated budgets sections, such as:-
- bills: rent, phone and so on
- food: groceries, eating out
- transportation: fuel, public transportation, car insurance, road tax and so on
- extra: clothes, books, DVDs, anything goes…
- savings: no description needed here
This template is a rather basic file, but it is fully customisable. For instance, I pay my car insurance, road tax etc… annually, so they will show up in 1 month only. Also, you can decide where to put things like house cleaning products and such. In my budget they usually fall into the “food” category if I shop at a supermarket (I’m not going to dissect each receipt!) or in “extra” if that time I bought all non-food items.
I used “cell references” in all of my formulas, instead of the bare figures, so that when you type in your initial figures (i.e.: income and allocated budgets for bills, food, transportation etc.) or insert a row because you have more than one expense that day, all the rest smoothly follows.
Click on the links below to download the file.
Available versions:
Excel for Windows - Monthly Budget Template.xls
Numbers for Mac – Monthly Budget Template.zip
(the file is in a .zip folder because apparently WordPress will not upload .numbers files “for security reasons”)
Please, if you download the files and decide to use them, leave some feedback here. The formulas are pretty basic and I’m sure they could be improved or customised, but comments are much appreciated. Thank you! 
Or maybe “up in the air”
I’m on my way to Denmark and Sweden. I’ll take tons of photos, I’m sure. For now just a little snapshot of Heathrow check-in area
Keys to...
Spring has ‘sort of’ arrived to the UK. It is a bit warmer, but not always sunnier. Aside from some minor Spring cleaning, I’ve been crazy busy with work, so today I took the day off. I can still catch up during the weekend, before I head to another crazy week. I’m really looking forward to the trip to Denmark: 10 days without work. Well, almost without work. I’ll be visiting 2 professors and another PhD student at the University of South Denmark. I’m sure it will be very interesting and I can’t wait.
Then, time for catching up with the blog now. I haven’t really followed the “post-a-week-2011″ challenge started by WordPress. I post whenever I have time, which is usually during weekends. But some days I just don’t feel like posting anything. Forcing myself to write something new every week is not reflecting what my life is: highs and lows, busy times, lazy times, and so on. When I first read about the WordPress challenge I thought: wow! 1 post a day? I’ll never have time for that. One post a week definitely seemed more reasonable. I wonder what people really do all day. Where do they find the time for blogging every single day. Imagine you have a job, or even if you don’t, you might have family and kids to take care of, food to buy, bills to pay… Do you do all this online? How much time do we spend on the computer?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a very ‘techy’ person, a bit of a nerd. But no computer screen will ever replace the company of people in flesh and blood. Blogging is nice, I enjoy it. But no one is paying me to blog on daily basis. I’m a very practical person. So what can daily blogging bring into my life? I read people saying “I want to be a better blogger” and in some instances it really sounded a bit like “I want to be a better person”. Was I reading comments from Born Again Bloggers?
If you have time left every day for blogging, why not. But I don’t think that blogging should come first, carefully planning your blog posts as if you were working on the new breakthrough novel of the century. People in flesh and blood should come first.
After all, for most people on the internet, blogging is a hobby, a pastime, something we do for fun whenever we can or when we want to share something funny, serious or we believe is important to share. I like blogging and I met some nice people on blogs. I read some interesting opinions and comments on the most various subjects. In fact, we can exchange a huge deal of information through the internet and blogs have become one of many ways to do it. But I think it would be better if we, the perfect nobodies of the blogosphere, would just stick to the “blog when you have time” rule
This being said, my time is up. I may go out now and have a somewhat productive day off work. Have a nice Friday, everyone!
