Friday Smiles 202 # Week 28

It has been another very warm week and last weekend the excessive heat brought a surprise we hadn't anticipated at all. Apparently a colony of honey bees has been happily living in his church roof and on Friday they started to come out of their overheated home. At first we thought they would swarm but an expert told us they were 'bearding'. According to Google, this is when some of the bees leave the colony and cluster around the entrance in the shape of a beard, to help regulate the temperature and improve ventilation. It is normal bee behaviour and ususally caused by very high temperatures. He confirmed they were honey bees.

After some searchying we found the entrance very high up around an old slightly loose brick, so some bees were flying around that. 

But many others had found a way out, indoors. Two windows, very high up in the church were covered in bees frantically running around and flapping their wings in an attempt to cool down. Sadly quite a few died, either from natural old age or from heat exhaustion, and the aisles and pews were collecting them.

Being an old building in the style of old churches, the roof is almost unreachable as were the two windows, so there was little we could do. Having sought expert advice, it was decided to leave them in peace and let nature take it course, with a warning to everyone attending services to take care, not intentionally touch the fallen ones, and to make sure they carried their epi-pen if they were allergic to stings.

They will have to be rehomed as their honey could potentially damage the roof structure, but it will need scaffold to reach them, and experts to handle them. In the meantime we are hoping the slightly cooler weather may calm dowwn their activity. Jim made a poster to warn folk as they entered and used a pitcure of this little crocheted bee to catch people's attention.

We look on them as welcome visitors in the short term, after all "All God;s creatures are welcome in His house"!

And while on the subject of insects, here is such a pretty moth that I spotted in the garden yesterday. 

I looked it up and discovered it is a Jersey Tiger Moth. Here is a Google photo of what it looks like with its wings open. It was the flash of bright red as it flew passed me that caught my eye, So I followed it until it settled but it didn't open its wings again until it flew away.

On Tuesday I decided I needed to stretch my legs so I walked to Meyow Road Park. I found it on google maps but didn't know what to expect. It turned out to be a lovely area, with wide expanses of grass where dogs romped together and chased balls etc, lots of different trees providing shade and well layed out foot paths. The air was filled with screeches that I knew came from parakeets, but I never spotted one resting to take a photo. They were however, flying between the trees and flashes of green were everywhere.

I was amused to find that as well as a children;s play area, there were well-used tennis coutrs, and  croquet lawn. The croquet club members were busy setting up the hoops. I associate croquet with "Alice in Wonderland" and had no idea it was still a popular pass-time.

In an open area I saw this tree skeleton. It is sad when a tree dies but I guess it leaves space for the others to grow. I just loved the shape the dead branches make and took this photo of it. When  I am back on my computer I will convert it into a line drawing and make an svg of it. Then I can use it as the background on a scrapbook page etc.

On a differnt note, yesterday I spent the morning in the kitchen making a family-size lasangne. Normally this would have been portioned up and frozen for future meals, but there are eight of us living here so it was all gone by bedtime.

So now I will link with Annie's Friday Smiles and hopefully visit you all tomorrow. But next week I will not be posting as we are returning to Oswestry to have another look around the house we hope buy, and have a quick word with the man who is doing the structural survey on Friday. I will not have my tablet with me as we are travelling 'light', but I will still try to visit you all.

Friday Smiles 2025 # Week 27

This week I am starting with the best news, we have found a house in Oswestry and our offer has been accepted. Of course there is a long way to go but we have engaged a solicitor for the conveyancing and booked a survey for later this month. So this week has involved a lot of time spent on the telephone, plus quite a bit of time sitting indoors or under the gazeebo feeling just too hot to do anything more energetic. I am sure most of you have shared at least part of the heat-wave. Here in London it has been stifling. But I am glad I am not still in Spain where they have temperatures soaring into the 40's.

But back to the house. Our choice may surprise some of you as it is a mid-terrace Victorian house with three floors plus a cellar!. However the stairs are fairly gentle with a good strong hand rail, and it won't do us any harm to go up and down them a few times each day. The sitting room and main bedroom are lovely and both have views over the back of the beautiful town park. The third room will probably be my craft room and I can see me shutting myself away up there some days. We are going to change the bath for a walk-in shower, and have a new kitchen installed, so plenty to keep us busy. And I will have  a garden. At present it is rockery styled with paving slabs and gravel beds, and the plants are very overgrown, so it need a bit of TLC, but that is something we can take our time over. It is all very exciting, but we will just have to patient while the legal wheels tick over at their own pace.

I shall enjoy watching the colours change with the seasons in all those trees.

Here is a picture I took on our travels last weekend. This is Ozzy the bull and he lives in Birmingham New Street station. Every half hour or so he starts to swish his tail, his head turns from side to side and his eyes light up purple and slowly blink. Almost menacing but I thought he was rather magnificent.

As I haven't got much news or pictures I thought I would give you a quick catch-up on my crafts. I have three projects on the go but the cross-stitch hedgehog is making slow progress as I don't work on it when it is so hot because I don't want to dirty it with sticky hands.

While I was still in Spain, I asked my son to buy a kit for a wall hanging before they ran out of stock. I was happy when I opened the box and saw all these lovely coloured yarns. I quickly labelled them for easy identification. 

The first bit of the project was to make 60 of these little triangles. Each one uses two different colours and there is a chart to tell you which two to use. When made you have to fix a small numbered tag to it to help place it on the final layout. 

I have completed all 60 of the triangles so the next part is to make 24 of these squares.

And my third project is to make a thick winter jacket. This one is done with a mixed yarn that changes colours randomly as you work. I needed to make 66m of these tiny squares which were quite quick to do. You can see the variety of colours that these have worked up as. They are actually darker green than they appear here.

Next I need thirty bigger squares and I have done the first two.

I am not good at sitting waiting patiently, so these are keeping me busy.

And now it is time to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and publish this in the morning. I apologise if I missed anyone last week or was very late visiting. It was another very busy weekend!