Friday Night: Today has been the coldest day we have ever had since we came to Spain, we didn't get above 3C despit it being clear and sunny all day......

The Bernia this morning......

The motor I have been waiting for finally arrived today after a month and I have been able to complete the Hughes 500E electric helicopter Chrissie bought me for Christmas. When I finished it I took it down to the Plaza and flew it... The mechanics are the T RexV2, so I had already test flown and set that part up with the other motor, the body is fibreglass and you have to fit the mechanics inside it.... Which is easier said than done I may add...... but we got there in the end....

It certainly "grows" in size somewhat compared to a T Rex when it's fitted together and the flight characteristics with all the extra bulk make it very stable.....  I've been looking forward to this having one.....

Wednesday Night: Another day in Valencia, it was a shit day today, we got there really early, we had an early appointment and got the paperwork in on time, yet despite a 1-15 appointment, (which meant we were due to finish at 3-30pm), it was gone 4pm again before poor Beccie got in.... There is nothing to do but sit, wait and get very wound up...... it's frustrating not being able to comunicate because you can't ask why it's taking so long....

The rest of the week has been a bit better, mostly good weather and I still did some flying.... But the little red micro helicopter I like so much has gone "west" after just 30 flights. That's pissed me off a bit.... I've never crashed it, but a servo, which is part of the main board, has developed a fault and suddenly screws itself all the way down casing a nose dive.....

I miss flying it and they are out of stock so I can't even  just replace it, instead I have ordered a new main board with the servo's built in. The first of these models was crap from the start though and continues to be very difficult to fly where as the second one was amazing so I flew it every day.... just the luck of the draw I guess, some people say they have been flying them for months, but with a new main board it should be Ok - however it's from Hong Kong, which is still in holiday mode, so it could be a long while to wait........

UPDATE tonight I decided to have another look at the micro heli's main board, so I wiggled a few components to make sure they were bonding properly, I also "wiggled the core of the servo pot and re-centred the servo arm, I have since flown three full packs, doing "nose in hovering" in perfect control in the lounge.... I hope this was just a "glitch" and I it's fixed itself so I can continue to enjoy flying the thing!

Thursday Morning: Apart from yesterday being a bit cloudy at times, the rest of the last week has been calm, clear and sunny. The blossom has started to appear on the Almond trees and today there is a haze in the air, but the colours are vivd and really pretty.....

I had to go to Senica last week, we used to stay there for our holidays before we moved here, I took this shop.....

Yesterday was "Valencia Day" but Antony drove Chrissie and Beccie to the hospital in the early morning and I picked them up late in the evening. Angela came along with me to see how to get there, to be honest I would probably still need the sat nav even now!

Looking West out of Valencia from the hotel window at dawn, 17 floors up a few weeks ago.....

I have had a couple of afternoons working on the Spanish Street, it's taking so incredibaly long to make, but everything has to be specially made. This week I made the windows for the Artists shop, the room box for the town hall and the worked on the top faceia for the Bar..... The woodworks nearly done though, the biggest job still to do are the doors and windows for the town hall, which will be much more complex and elegant than the artists's ones...... I also spent an afternoon fixing Jacksons frontage after the cats dropped it on the floor.

Thursday Evening: Today was clear and sunny.....

Lovely still sunny morning, great for a quick 5 minutes with my HK190 micro Helicopter - I had the crazy idea of taking a picture of it myself whilst flying it at the same time... not easy, but then I got this shot!

Wednesday Night: Today was "Valencia day" and we had to be there by 8am, which meant we had to be up by 5am,. Of course when you have to get up that early and you are not used to it, you don't sleep at all so we were all up well before the alarms went off.

Call it anticipation, last week it was horrible, so why would this week be any different? .... The weather for the last few days has been horrible, dark, very wet and cold, it poured with rain all night and was still raining hard when we left at 6-30am this morning  I had looked at the weather site the previous night and could see that we would very soon find clearing weather as we headed north.....

We found our parking space, (again amazingly, you have no idea how difficult this is here....yet.....well.)  anyway the first wait today was only for 45 minutes, so much earlier than last week and with four whole hours to kill we headed for the park of science and technology. First we sat in the car in the early morning sunshine, but as it rose higher and the day began to warm up we walked into the park to a cafe we knew from before.....

I think this is the planetarium, whatever it is, it's a beautiful and interesting building in a fabulous setting... I would call it "futuristic", (but then this is the "future" isn't it....)

There are always so many interesting and different photographic opportunities here, these are just three of a dozen or more I shot today.....

The "business end" of the day was a shortened 3 1/2 hour session, so we were all home by 8-30pm .... It wasn't such a bad day after all... 

Friday Night: Wow dates don't come much scarier than this do they! Yet all in all it wasn't too bad a day. Beccie is feeling very tired and has ulcers in her mouth so it's very uncomfortable to eat.... but she has a ravernous appitite. She had just had a fried egg sandwitch for breakfast when Maria (of Maria's restaruant) turned up at the door with a pot full of her favourtie lamb dish that she always orders at the restaruant.

I thought how wonderful a gesture it was and it made us all feel we are part of the community here, which in it's self is lovely. She had no hesitaion in tucking in to the "codero" immeadiatly (roast lamb chops Maria's style) ...

In the mean time I am quietly pleased with myself, because having recently undertaken a "new" hobby (the electric helicopters), I have had to learn and understand how "helicopter" are done in the computer age.... The radio itself does most of the hard work, but it has to be programmed in the first place and that's where the challenge is.

I watched hours of videos on the subject on Youtube, from how to build the helicopter, to how to set up the radio and the gyro. I bought special tools to set the pitch and balance the blades, God knows I would never have done it without the tutorials! The first Helicopter sufferd a few set backs due to impatience and stupidity, but I have learnt how to do it now and with the new one I took all the proper steps this time.

To be fair, the pushrods supplied in this kit were pretty much spot on the right length, there was only one I had to really adjust, so with the servo centering function on the radio, I was able to get it to pretty much a text book set up. I worked out how to use the pitch gauge properly and the tracking was perfect.

I know what you're thinking..... then I went and crashed it.... Well actually it flew perfectly, in fact it's really nice and even better tp fly than the "Pro",  it's  so smooth.... It was a little bit windy today and probably turbulent in the Plaza, but it's so positive on it's pitch, the flight charactersitics made ie  stable, very positive and very controlable... I love it!

I am going to use the "mechancis "in the Hughes body Chrissie got me for my birthday, but I have another two of these kits, so I  am definitly going to put another one together to fly in it's T Rex form, after all I have got all the bits I need.....!

Both T Rex Pro (red) and T Rex V2

Tuesday Afternoon: Cooler, 11C cloudy. yesterday was mostly clear and sunny, Saturday and Sunday were also clear and warm, 20C. I went to town this morning to et the shopping and it took me 2 1/2 hours......

It was a pretty normal sort of weekend, Beccie wasn't feeling too bad considering, she's just really tired, but she was able to join us most of the time and watched the TV until late. She has been very tired since though, we sat in the naya yesterday afternoon and the walk up there wiped her out. We have to go to Valencia next for the second treatment of Chemo..........

I only had one flight with Lady B each day over the weekend, but the T Rex Pro helicopter is flying properly at last, so I have been hovering that in the Plaza as well I have been flying the little Solo Pro 180 that came via NZ.

The mystery of how to set up the Solo Pro 180 has also been solved and it does fly very well, but it is plauged by regular break downs during almost every flight! The tail drive gear has come unstuck twice now, which is relativly easy to fix albeit requiring a strip down, the main drive gave up a couple of times, then last night a swashplate servo went "clockwork" on it and they are really expensive to replace compared to what I usually expect to pay for a servo. I managed to find one on ebay for half the European price from Hong Kong, but it was still over ten quid and I will probably have to wait up to three weeks for it to arrive, so now the Solo Pro 180 is out of action yet again!

My Birthday present turned Thursday, it's a Hughes 500E body for the T rex mechanics, it's really nice amd I am looking forward to completing it now, but my Christmas present still hasn't arrived so I still can't make the second T Rex which is for the body as essential parts are still not here despite them all being ordered back last Novemebr! Strangely every other order I made last year has arrived, even the ones I made since Christmas, so I have an array of spare parts for both the T Rex models, even though they have barely been flown yet.

Last night the parts for Antony's helicopter had arrived so we sorted that out, but it still won't fly and the battery goes flat in about 4 minutes.... I can't get it to take off, let alone hover, it seems gutless. We watched a review of it on the internet and the conclusion was that it is a waste of money, so don't buy one! We had already reached that conclusion, but what do you do when you have bought one already! 

Friday Afternoon: Today is sunny and it's 20C but has been very windy, yesterday was dead still and we reached 23C, I drove up to Valencia in the afternoon to collect both Chrissie and Beccie from the hospital, so Beccie is now home and in bed, also Antony is here with her.......

We have a few days before we have to go back to Valencia, for a day of treatment.....

My Hughes 500 body turned up, but still no ESC of mechanics, be at least Tuesday.....

Chrissie, she is in Valencia tonight with Beccie who has had her first chemo today, I wasn't allowed in the unit and Chrissie isn't alowed out, so I came home. The rest of the week we have been there, we stayed in a hotel and Chrisse was with her all day. It's going to be a long haul to cure it, but it is curable and hasn't spread, so horrible as it is now she will recover.

We have to take her to Valencia once a week for the next three months for chemo, then radiation. she has to be in a sterile inviroment at first, even here, so we are in quarantine, no going anywhere. She has had symtoms for a while, but because the bloods were all clear (because it hasn't spread) they were barking up the wrong tree. The her face swelled up, her veins were protruding everywhere and it ended as an emergeny on the 20th December.

She was admitted to a private hospital in Denia because they thought it was her thyroid, but in the night she had severe chest pains and they took her for a scan because they feared it was her heart. They discovered an 8CM (grapefruit) in her chest pressing on her heart lungs and spine, they thought it was a cyst, but she was sent to Alicante for a biopsy last Tuesday which confirmed the cancer and we found that out Wednesday. They can't operate, but can cure her with the horrible drugs.

Friday morning they went to the Denia hospital which is Spanish NHS, She was rushed to Valencia by ambulance on Friday because she has a blood clot in a vein and it was stopping her blood flow, they are treating this with a daily injection which she will need for six months until she can have any sort of operation. They say that as soon as the chemo kicks in it will kill the tumor and it will imeadiatly shrink and relieve all her symptoms. Then it's just a long haul to recovery. Please feel free to forward this to the other members, we'll keep you up to date.

My thoughts are that it's just not fair, she just found a really nice guy and they just got engaged, so for weeks Chrissie had been really excited about that, then this happened.......

Monday Night: Valencia. What a shit day, in fact what a shit week! Beccie had to go to Alicante for a biopsy on Tuesday and her tumor was diagnosed as cancer.

Wednesday they went to a hospital in Valencia for a second opinion and told she would need Chemo and radio therarapy as there is no operation possible....... She then had to make the choise between "private or state" hospital.....

Thursday Chrissie went with her and Antony to Alicante to see the specialist.... beccie decided to go with the Spanish state system as it is the best in Europe......
 
Friday first thing she went to the ER in Denia and was immeaditaly rushed to another hospital in Valencia by ambulance.

We drove up Friday Night and stayed until late, then we drove up again on Saturday, but first we had to go to the other way 60 miles to Alicante to take Daniel to the Airport. On the way from the airport we had been asked to go to the first hospital in Alicantre to pick up the biopsy for the new hospital to do more tests on, but they wouldn't let us have it and told us to come back Monday morning, but they would call us when it was ready.

Today to save time we decided to go to Alicante early as it is an hours drive away, we arrived in the morning only to be told we had to wait until 5pm..... So we had to spent the whole day just waiting. We went to find a restaurant, in fact we drove along the beach front for 5 miles, but every bar was closed! Eventually we decided the best thing to do was to go to a "real" Spanish town and not the tourist bits, so we drove out of Alicante to a town called El Altet, which is near the airport. This little town had 10 bars to choose from in one small street, we had a good feed for just 6 euro's each. At least the sample was ready just before 5pm......

The drive from Alicante to Valencia is 2 hours on the motorway, but then Daffnee (the sat nav) got us totally lost in Valencia taking us to some random location miles from the hospital. I don't know how that happened and I don't know the place at all as every large avenue looks the same as the next, especially in the dark. The traffic lights go red for ever and cars and people dive in front of you........ So it took ages to get to the hospital. (At least I have wi-fi here).......