Rocking Your World 2020: Week 16

Hi again. I am a bit late posting today. Let's just say I am easily distracted. But today I was partly distracted by a video call with my sister so that was a happy distraction.

Anyway I am starting this week with a photo that made me smile.

This is my youngest son Ben. When he lost his partner suddenly in a traffic accident last summer, he found the house very empty and quiet. I suggested he adopt an animal so there was someone to greet him when he got home from work, and as his landlord was not keen on him having a dog, he went to the cat rescue centre and came home with Bobby. He was a sad cat whose elderly owner had died. Ben sometimes says "I don't know which one of us rescued who", and as you can see Ben and Bobby have become best friends and are inseparable whenever Ben is not at work.

I have spent time in the kitchen again this week and again made bread. The big loaf is a half and half loaf. One end is white bread for Chris and the other half is  a wholemeal and oatmeal mix for me. There are also three rolls of each from the spare dough. Then I made muffins, chocolate chip for Chris and sticky date for me. We just can't help liking different things!

There is not a lot of other news this week, but although the days continue to be grey and cloudy with short bursts of sunshine, it has been warm, at least outside, and the garden is embracing all the extra rain. I had a wander round to look at the plants the other day and I found this beautiful rose, with several more buds almost ready to open.

My hydrangeas are all looking very healthy. Of course they are really water plants so they love the rain. On every branch there is a crown of new leaves with little heads of flower buds forming in the centre of each one.

In the middle of May last year, Chris and I visited a cacti garden near Nijar, and one of the plants I bought was a sort of succulent ground cover plant that has small mauve daisy flowers all over it, rather like a common michaelmas daisy. Here is the one I brought home.

The man at the garden told me one pot would be enough and it would cover a square meter in a year. Well I put it in a big pot on our front step and here is it is now.

It has certainly spread, and soon I will be taking some of the trailing parts off to root elsewhere. It is just starting to flower. The flowers are small but I think the plant would prefer a sunnier position so I will have to think about moving it.

In this close up you can see that it is covered in buds, so I am hoping for lots of flowers soon. They are much more mauve than they look in this photo. I have discovered that the flowers 'go to sleep' whenever the sun moves off them, and there haven't been many moments when the sun is on this step for me to take the picture!

I also came across a little visitor in the garden. This handsome caterpillar was heading up the back wall. The markings on it are amazing.

It wasn't really in the best place so I moved it gently onto a plant, well away from my nosey cats. And I took another photo before I set it free again so I had some clear images to help me identify it.

With the help of Google, I now know it is the caterpillar of Spanish Festoon butterfly, which looks like this (google photo).

Isn't it lovely? So I hope it found somewhere safe to make its cocoon.

And here is a lovely piece of crochet work, not done by me, but by my daughter-in-law. She only learned to crochet a couple of years ago, and she made this following charts and videos in the internet. She made it to give to her husband (my eldest son Jim, the vicar), because he was sad that he could not do the traditional Easter services at his new church. She thought it might cheer him up. I think he liked it. It was displayed at the front of his altar set up in their garden for his on-line Easter Sunday service. I think she did really well too.

As it is getting late I will quickly link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World, and then I must go and feed the animals. I'll be back later to see what has made everyone else smile this week.