Another fabulous day here on the Costa Blanca. The skies are blue and the definition of the mountain looks wonderful. It was nice aqnd bright when I got up but the clocks had offered us another hour of sleep. This was denied to me because the dogs were howling in the night. It is rather eerie when it happens. It´s almost as if a message is being passed around the doggie fraternity. Obviously, it is always wise to check for intruders but everything seemed normal apart from the dogs. It could possibly be an animal thing. Maybe there are wild boar about and they set the dogs howling. Perhaps it is the scent of a new animal at nearby Terra Natura. I do know, for example, that the dogs howled all night when the wolves were introduced into the park. Something was going on and I suspect it was more than an odd hedgehog on the prowl. En passant I will also add that I haven´t seen a hedgehog for ages. Let´s see how long this good weather will last.
| Sunday | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday |
 25° C | 14° C
|
 24° C | 14° C
|
24° C | 13° C
|
24° C | 13° C
|
25° C | 13° C
|
| Clear | Scattered Clouds | Clear | Clear | Clear |
My friend, the rebel doctor, has a very powerful piece for us to read. It is on the subject of mishandled drug allocation and he is right to point out that in this age of computers we cannot afford the luxury of doctorsm who cannot write legibly. This will make you think……Deadly mistakes plague hospitals
The American healthcare system is starting to resemble a game of Russian roulette, right down to the stakes: your life. The National Academies’ Institute of Medicine estimates that there are 400,000 preventable drug-related injuries every year. Another study found a 1-in-30 chance that your prescription will be filled out wrong. And those aren’t even the most appalling numbers. I nearly fell out of my chair when I read “Dead by Mistake,” an investigation by Hearst newspaper and TV reporters that found some 200,000 preventable deaths caused by medical injuries and accidents each year. It’s nearly 10 percent of our deaths overall. That’s more people than are killed by diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, influenza and pneumonia combined.
In one tragic and inexcusable case, two pregnant women in a Florida hospital were accidentally given drugs designed to force dead fetuses out of the body. One of the women was pregnant with twins, and lost both babies. The other gave premature birth to a girl who suffered severe brain damage. The hospital blamed poor handwriting on the doctor’s prescription, which led to a mix-up in the drugs. Enough’s enough. I’m tired of all the stupid jokes about doctors and their terrible handwriting. Until doctors learn to write legibly, they have no business prescribing drugs.
Computerized systems, where doctors can order meds by typing rather than scribbling, can help prevent these mistakes, but most hospitals are still in the digital Stone Age. A paltry 10 percent of them have these systems in place. That’s outrageous and unacceptable. Fast-food restaurants are more technologically advanced than our hospitals. This is just one more reason you should hammer your doctors and nurses with questions, especially when they give you meds — and don’t swallow anything until you’re satisfied with the answers.
Ask what you’re being given, what it does and if there are any side effects (you can bet your bottom that there will be). Then ask to see the label. It’s your right, and if they can’t or won’t show it to you, refuse to take it. And if you’re not in any condition to check up on these things yourself, have someone with you who can. It’s inexcusable that it has to be that way. But the alternative is that deadly game you can’t afford to play.
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Torpe tor’-peh (adjective)
clumsy, awkward; slow-minded, dim
EXAMPLES
Soy muy torpe; siempre me tropezo. – I’m so clumsy; I am always tripping over myself.
Es un poco torpe para las matemáticas. – He’s not very good at math.
IDIOMS
De manera torpe – Clumsily
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Important news via Spanish Vida
Spain’s Rental Market Sees Sharp Increase In Tenant Defaults
The number of tenant defaults continues to rise in Spain, and many expat landlords are ill-prepared to deal with the legal and financial ramifications of eviction, or the loss of rental income. Expat landlords can reduce their financial exposure and risks by investing in rent protection and legal expense warranties, and utilizing the arbitration system for facilitating dispute resolution. For more on this, see the following article from Property Wire.
Valencia, SpainProperty owners in Spain who are renting out their properties because they cannot sell them due to the country’s depressed real estate market are increasingly experiencing problems with bad tenants hit by the economic downturn.
The number of defaulting tenants and evictions have tripled in the past two years, it is claimed.
Many of them who are having problems are expats who moved to Spain for a better lifestyle and then became reluctant landlords because of the credit crisis, according to Paragon Advance España, part of the Paragon Advance group of companies offering tenant referencing and rent warranty in Spain.
Bryn Cole, Managing Director of Paragon Advance España who have offices just outside Marbella, the Costa del Sol and Madrid said that many of these reluctant landlords have moved back to the UK and rented out their properties as they cannot sell them in the current real estate climate.
‘They have been forced into letting out their homes in order to be able to pay the mortgage and, for those investors who jumped on the Spanish property market, buying off plan, only to see it go into freefall before they could offload their investment, they have had their fingers burned and are having to let long term and ride it out,’ he explained.
His company’s research has found that the number of tenants who default on their monthly payments is increasing at alarming rates with tenants also being affected by the economic crisis and unemployment in Spain.
Many expat landlords are unaware of the different mechanisms in place to secure rental income and often fail to implement them in their rental agreements which can leave them unprotected if the tenant does not, or cannot, pay the rent.
In order to assist ex pat landlords, Paragon Advance España offer a rent protection and legal expenses warranty which offers a standard loss of rent cover for up to €2000 per month for up to six months cover, although rents of over €2000 can also be covered, and legal expenses cover up to €15,000.
By using the route of arbitration, the timescales involved are dramatically reduced said Javier Iscar de Hoyos, General Secretary of the European Association of Arbitration (AEADE) ‘It can take around 18 months through the usual law system and, in the meantime, the landlord still has to pay the mortgage, utility bills and has no redress over the defaulting tenant during this time. If the landlord should refuse to pay and, for instance, the electricity is cut off, the tenant can prosecute the landlord,’ he explained.
‘We have invested time and effort in ensuring that a more specialized system of arbitration takes root in society, providing fluidity, security and trust in contractual relationships between landlords and tenants,’ he added.
More than 80% of proceedings dealt with in 2008 were from the property sector in which the number of arbitration cases rose by 83%.
During this time, the average dispute resolution took less than four months. With the system created by AEADE to facilitate disputes in that sector, the time frame was limited to an average of 25 days, with more complex cases being resolved within six months, added de Hoyos.
This article has been republished from Property Wire. You can also view this article at Property Wire, an international real estate news site.
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Dressed Alike
I come from a large family, five sisters and three brothers. My sisters and I were looking through the family photo album
one day. Picture after picture, we were all dressed in matching clothes. I asked my mother why she dressed us all
alike, right down to the baby.
She explained, “When we had just four children, I dressed you alike so we wouldn’t lose any of you. Then,” she added,
looking at the pictures in the album, “when the other five came along, I started dressing you alike so we won’t pick up
any that don’t belong to us.”
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Extinct
Brenda’s six-year-old daughter was explaining to the other kids what “extinct” meant:
“Well,” she said in all seriousness, “it means that the dinosaurs are all dead and have been dead so long they don’t
stink anymore. That’s why they call them exstinked.”
