Goodbye to Hector

This week I received my second set of royalties for my book – “What about your saucepans?”. They come quarterly in arrears and the first amount I had was for the first quarter of the year, which was actually only March as the book was launched on February 27. Imagine my delight to find out I had sold 226 books in March. I knew they would drop a little after the first month but unfortunately for the second quarter I only sold 122 books over 3 months – only 40 a month. As the royalties are needed to supplement our income, this meant that we knew we had to make some savings.

It is not easy here to try and save money as most things are on an 18 month contract – such as television, phone and internet. If you decide to cut back or get rid, you have to pay off the contract so at a time when you want to save money, you end up having to spend a large lump sum. It is the same with people. Knowing that we had to make savings, although I am sorry for those of you who enjoyed looking at pictures of him , we decided that Hector had to go. We had to pay him what is known as liquidation – redundancy money, which is so much for pay in lieu of notice, an amount depending on the time he has worked and a percentage of his Christmas bonus (one months salary). Hector was very happy to receive a nice payment before Christmas and it will save us money going forwards.

In the meantime, (here comes the cheeky advertisement) I hope to sell more books as the royalties really do make a difference, so any of you who have not bought it, please do (!) and those that have, please consider buying some for Christmas presents. It is available through Amazon in both paperback and kindle versions and on Apple iBooks and Kobo.

Work on the barbecue has continued apace. The cement was poured in the top and the two bleach bottles were to make the holes for metal grills so that we can control the amount of air coming through.

Chivirico also came for the weekend and helped with the barbecue.

He and Danilo started to build the side pieces to balance the grill on and stop the charcoal or wood falling off.

And Chivirico mixed up the cement.

We ran out of cement and apparently we need to build a table next to it – out of concrete too, so that is the next step.

With no Hector, Chivirico decided to weed the garden and get it ready for the next, hopefully more successful, lot of planting. He decided that the carrots which have been in the ground for 9 months were unlikely to get any bigger so checked in his Winnie the Pooh recipe book and found a recipe for carrot cake. It needed 250 grams of carrots and despite him finding 11 or 12 I was not sure they would be big enough as the average size was half an inch long.

He then became fascinated by the basic kitchen scale and turned the calibrating knob around on the back – until the scale broke. No scale, no carrot cake. Danilo was called in and the pair of them dismantled the scale using the all important kitchen knife and tried to fix it.

No joy. There was a spring which had become detached but luckily  Dominican brains prevailed and the scale was sawed in half to be able to get at the spring.

I was sent to fetch the taypee and hey presto a kitchen scale that works again. The only problem is I have no idea how accurate it is, but we bought some shop carrots to supplement the garden ones and an hour later had a beautiful and edible carrot cake.

And here is Guerrero the handsome chap posing with new designer taypeed scale!