A very social week, another voice from the past, more news from Andy and Spring is in the air!

Eladio having breakfast outside on 2nd March!
Hi again,

I can’t complain about life. It’s so busy at the moment with lots of social events and also lots of things to look forward to as you will see from my next post.

This week I had lunch with Javier García and Juan Carlos Fernández Galindo, whom I call "Pin and Pon" for many reasons. They are my counterparts at Telefónica, Spain’s number one company. Javier could have been my boss and never was and certainly won’t be now as he is going to live and work in the Big Apple. Hopefully, we will be able to visit him there.

Javier and I at Aspen

Juan Carlos and Javier
I also had lunch with José Luis Pérez, an ex Motorolan who is now the Country Manager of Nokia Siemens Networks. He gave me some amazing Rioja wine, one of the bottles being from 1977!!!! Life is full of coincidences because at the same restaurant we bumped into the old Chairman of Motorola, Ignacio Camarero who looked the same age as ever!!!

There was also time this week for lunch with Susana and Juan at a place called The Fish Club, great food, not so great place. They were doing fine.

Midweek there was my company party to celebrate our number of customers. I organised it and wish to thank Quinta Esencia for a great job in making it happen. We did it at Moma, a super discotheque in Madrid. The evening was great as it wasn’t just food, drink and music but a whole load of simple fun fair attractions with great little prizes which made the whole party huge fun.

Midweek the voice from the past came from Keith Johnson, once the Marketing Director for Europe with Motorola and my boss. It’s funny how much Motorola has been in my life again this week. Well, after all, I did dedicate nearly 9 years of my life to that company in the 90’s. It’s sad to hear they may well be selling their infrastructure and mobile phone divisions when they were once number 2 and number 1 in the world respectively. Keith was a great boss and today is working freelance, I think. He keeps in touch just occasionally. Cheers Keith!

Since hearing from Andy (Andrew Dale) we are now corresponding regularly and funnily enough, thanks to my example, he has set up a blog for his wife Alexandra!! Andy sent me some scanned photos of my family during our Callosa days back in the late 70’s. They were quite a shock to see but very much appreciated.

Me aged about 20 in Callosa with Izzy
The best thing about this week, though, has been the change in the weather. Definitely Spring is in the air to judge by our garden and all the blossom on the trees. Also we have had lunch outside for the first time and made use of our super new table. You can see Eladio above having breakfast on it this morning with our usual selection of newspapers (El Mundo, Público and The Sunday Telegraph).

Me and the new table
And that’s all for the moment.
Cheers everyone
Masha