Rocking Your World 2015; Week 35

I am trying to write a quick post this afternoon as I am going out for a while this evening. The reason? Our son Tom arrived in the early hours of this morning. So another little holiday time has begun. A swim and a beer for this afternoon, and that´s a good enough reason for me to be smiling.

In preparation for Tom´s arrival, I was determined to finish my wall clock that I previewed a couple of week ago, so when the frames were delivered last weekend, I set to and printed out the photos I had prepared. All our sons, grand-children, and great-grand-children are there. The frames are light weight, so, for now, they are just attached with blu-tak, which makes it very easy to change and update the photos.

Then I measured the available space more carefully and adjusted the cutting file I had made for the script. I cut it from vinyl, and attached it straight onto the wall. This is a trial run so I could see whether the vinyl would stick well to our painted wall, and more importantly, whether it would stay stuck! So far so good. The second, (lower) section of the script is not quite straight. It was very difficult to tell when I was working close up to the wall. But we are hoping to decorate this room in the Autumn, so I will be re-doing it then, and I will have to be even more careful when I position it. But I am really pleased with the end result. It is how I had imagined it would be.

The whole clock, including the photos, is about 80 cm in diameter.

We also tried to get the front garden tidied up this week, so we cut a lot of untidy branches from the shrubs, and emptied the pots of dead pansies etc. Then we went to the garden centre and bought some petunias, Bizzy-Lizzies and verbenas to put in their place.

They make a nice patch of colour on the front step.

We also bought a red ´crown of thorns´and two geraniums for our tall stand by the front door. Hopefully these will keep giving us some flowers until it is time to replace them with poinsettias for Christmas!

Back at the beginning of June I showed you a baby tree in a pot that I had bought at the market. I was sad to see that it was not flourishing. It dried out very quickly, and even watering it most days did not stop it dying off. However I trimmed the dead branches off, and a few weeks ago, Chris managed to dig a small hole in our hard ground to plant it in. It immediately picked up and now it is a healthy little shrub. It has grown a lot since we planted it, and hopefully it will now go on to be the tree we wanted.

And one last gardening photo - our stephanotis on the back fence, has been lovely this year. It flowers quite early on, and then has a rest. But now it has lots of flowers again. They are stiff, waxy flowers and their scent is heavenly. As you can see, new buds are still forming, so we will have flowers for some time to come.

When Tom was in the pool just now, I sat on the edge with my legs dangling in the water to cool my feet down. Our cat Paco came and rubbed around me, then he held on to the side and started lapping the water. I have seen him do this before. I am not sure clorinated water is very good for him, but it doesn´t seem to have harmed him so far. Goodness knows why he choses to drink it when he has bowls of clean tap water all over the house, but that´s cats for you. So I´ll leave you with this photo of his little pink tongue lapping twenty to the dozen, and I´ll be back next week.

I am linking this up to Rocking your World over at Celtic House, and Annie´s Friday Smiles.