Patricia Yurena Rodriguez Alonjo, also known as Miss Spain was born and bred on Tenerife. Betting odds for her to win the Miss World competition this weekend are in the single digits (8 to 1 at the time of posting).

She lives in Madrid now but no doubt the fresh island air had much to do with her good looks. One thing is for sure, Tenerfenos love when one of their own win so you can bet that there will be a lot of excited horn tooting (of car horns, that is) if the island’s own gets through to the finale.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96AaewgABOM&hl=en&fs=1]

The online Tenerife News reports the latest statistics on family income for the Canary Islands.

In total 707,824 households were included in the survey and of these 59,588 homes stated that their monthly income was less than 500 euros. Apparently Tenerife has the highest number of these low income households with 24,800 families earning less than €500 per month.

Quite honestly I am shocked by that number. What is even more surprising is that only 32% of those in this low income bracket said that they had difficulty making ends meet. We certainly don’t live high on the hog but I can’t see my family making it through a month for €500.

In the high end bracket, Tenerife had the most families earning more than €3,500 per month which represents 42%. Interesting divide, don’t you think?

Because my phone number is given on eTenerife.com on the off-chance that some mad person wants to call me to arrange some internet advertising I get quite a lot of phone calls from people thinking they are calling a particular hotel, restaurant or travel shop.

For some reason Directory Enquiries in the UK seem to give out my number for any query related to Tenerife. As an example I recently had a conversation with Dave who thought he’d got through to a certain restaurant.

Unfortunately Dave happened to call at a bad time for me – I always enjoy these phone calls and am happy to help if I can but at kid’s bedtime …uh… what? With one ear out for bathtime mischief and the other for the kids killing each other I am not the best one to take a message. Dave asked me to help him out with an alternative restaurant recommendation for Christmas Day and I scribbled down the email address he gave me whilst aware of a rising level of squabbling coming from down the hall.

Now I’ve got a couple of alternatives for Dave, I can’t read the damn email address. So sincere apologies to Dave in the UK. I would have recommended the Moroccan Paris Marrakech restaurant for a fab night out.

Just this morning I had a call from a Russian travel agent. Apparently she has a group due over to Tenerife soon and she needs to find a rock climbing instructor for them. Again she found me because of the phone number on the footer of the rock climbing in Tenerife page. I seem to get quite a few enquiries via that page and have had my eye out for supplemental informative links for a long time. For ages the best I could do was the UK Climbing forum and a couple of Spanish language sites (which given that most visitors to eTenerife are from the UK is helpful but not ideal) but lo and behold as I was fiddling about in Google while talking to the Russian woman, I came up with some new sources.

For absolutely anything to do with outdoor activity and adventure check out Tenerife Outdoor and for those looking specifically for rock climbing in Tenerife visit Roxtar.

I asked a couple of the kids in my daughter’s class what they were wanting for Christmas this year and amongst the Barbie this and the Hulk that were a couple of ‘cachorros’. Puppies!

I wonder how people who work at the animal shelters feel about Christmas. With the pens heaving and not a square inch to squeeze in one more four legged soul it must be very tempting to wave a few fur babies off as Christmas presents. But the animal rescue volunteers know very well that many a Christmas morning’s furry bundle turns into Easter’s mangy stray dog or street cat.

What they want to see is not the temporary respite of a little more space in the shelter but the dogs and cats in their care going to forever homes where they will never be abandoned or neglected again.

I have mentioned Sharon Haslam from Happy Tails who visits me regularly to help me keep Tito under some semblance of control. Sharon also works with K9 Tenerife to ensure that the dogs who are rehomed from there settle in and is available for further support if needed by the new owners.

If you are considering getting your kids a pet for Christmas, I’d suggest holding off until the festive season is well by. That puppy or kitten that stole everyones’ heart on Christmas morning will have peed on the floor once too often or clawed the new speakers to bits by Valentine’s Day. The luckiest of them will find their way to a shelter while the rest will swell the ranks of abandoned animals on the streets of Tenerife.

You’ll have your pick of great companions and instead of paying a fortune to the breeder you can give a welcome donation to the shelter and put some money towards Sharon’s excellent dog training services.

What is on this weekend in Tenerife? Well heaven only knows if you wanted to know what was going on locally in Arona the last place you should go is the ayuntamiento website. Take the Feria de Artesania in Las Galletas on 6th and 7th of December. There’s lots of other information on the Arona website including the Christmas and New Year celebration schedules for 2008 (though I defy you to find it) and a teasingly thorough description of all the things you probably missed in 2007 but the only reference I can find to the Feria de Artesania is from 2006.

Well, take my word for it. There is an exhibition of local handicrafts along La Rambla in Las Galletas on Saturday 6th and Sunday 7th of December. If you have any crafty folk in your family circle this might be just the place to pick up some Christmas goodies.

Have you lost your hare? Apparently according to Google, a hare in Tenerife is a kind of sea slug but I am talking about the four legged, floppy eared variety. You see there was one in front of my house yesterday. He seemed long in the face to be a rabbit and was quite obviously off his beaten track and way out of his depth considering the bit of green in front of my house has more dogs per square inch than it has blades of grass.

My kids were out playing in front when my daughter started yelling about a rabbit. I thought she was pulling my leg but no, there it was, sitting out there looking cute. And vulnerable. Expecting my son to flank the wee thing and send it back towards me was a bit ambitious as he immediately ran towards it waving a stick and it, not surprisingly, took to its heels.

Thinking that was the last we’d see of Brer Rabbit I went back to what I was doing but the kids soon ran to tell me he was back. This time Mega, the black lab had chased it under a plant pot. And Mega’s owner was calling for her away on the other side of the park. Great. I know you can’t sugar coat life for ever but this was not the day I wanted my kids to learn about the internal workings of all creatures great and small.

Mega gave up when I started to show some interest and went off in search of something to play with that wouldn’t sit quivering under a pot and I was able to just pick up the little guy. I couldn’t leave it there because with all the dogs and cats around he wouldn’t last half an hour. I couldn’t take him home because with all the kids, dogs and the cat in my house, he would die of nervous exhaustion in an hour.

I decided to take the rabbit to a fenced off area where I knew there was long lush grass and a lot of possible hiding places and let him go there. I’ve no idea if that was the right thing to do but I do know he wouldn’t have survived long where he was. It was only later on at night that I couldn’t sleep and I started to wonder. He was brown-grey like a wild rabbit but he was so tame…

I had the horrible thought that maybe he actually was a pet rabbit that had got out of a pen in one of the nearby gardens and I had just thrown him out to fend for himself.

Gulp.

That’s when I started looking up Google for Tenerife rabbits and hares and found out that he was a rabbit after all and that in Tenerife a hare is actually a sea slug.