Rocking Your World 2021: Week 5

I am feeling quite upbeat today, maybe because the sun is shining. Our outside thermometers are showing 22º in the shade and a whopping 34º in the sun! I have just hung out a long line of washing which I am sure will be dry in an hour or so. Sorry if I am making my UK friends jealous, but this post is about what we are grateful for, and I sure am grateful for warm sunny days in January. Although we moved out here in October  2008, it is now exactly twelve years since we got the keys to our little villa in Los Gallardos, and our first few days here, we had very similar weather.

Sunday was quite bright with a mixture of sun and cloud, so I decided to walk the perimeter of our village, which is as far as we are allowed to go right now. According to my fitbit it took approximately 4,000 steps and was just under 4Km, so that is the extent of our confinement. As I have been a bit of a couch potato while it was so cold and windy, it was far enough for me this time. I was on the lookout for some signs of spring, but everything is only just waking up. The one thing I did see was the acid  yellow flowers of oxalis which grows in profusion over any open ground.

The bees were happy to see it. Several were hovering around this patch and burrowing into the flowers for their nectar.

The winds had settled down a bit which is good as they can be quite cold even when the sun is out, but they were still blowing hard higher up and they brought in this amazing cloud formation over the Cabrera mountains. It looks almost like a big black bird swooping in over up, but I prefer to think of it as angel wings.

On Monday a friend, who has supplied me with bitter oranges from her tree for the last few years, to make my marmalade, rang me to say that they had pruned their tree hard this year so only had about a dozen fruit but I was welcome to them if I wanted them. I still have quite a lot of last year's marmalade on my shelves as most of my sales outlets have dried up, and I have only sold a few jars to friends, but a dozen oranges is just enough to make one batch so I said "Yes please". They dropped them off at our gate on the way to the shops, and I set to and made a dozen jars of marmalade.

It looks so lovely when it is first made, so bright and clear. As it ages it gets much darker and the flavour matures. I actually like it like that, but as a diabetic I have to limit how often I eat it, otherwise it would be on my morning toast every day.

My last visit to the bigger supermarkets was over a fortnight ago, before this hard lock-down was announced. In Lidls I bought myself a little pot of three hyacinth bulbs. They take me back to childhood. My sister and I almost always had a bulb sitting on a glass support full of water so we could watch its roots grow, and I have planted a few most years since then. Here they are not a local plant and Lidls is the only place I have seen them. They do not do well in the garden, but if I do manage to get a pot, I always plant them out after they have flowered in the hope they may come up the next year. When I bought them this year, they were three bulbs in a very small pot, and they were just beginning to show a tight bud from each one. Within days they had stretched their stems and started to open.

I put a small stake in the centre as I thought they would soon become top-heavy, and even so I have trouble keeping them upright. They started off very, very pale pink, almost white, but they have gradually got darker.

This week I found that all three were producing a second head of flowers, hidden deep inside the leaves. I don't think I have ever had that before.

The first heads are fully open now and they are so pretty. I have them in the kitchen as that is where I spend more time, and I don't think they would like having the fire on each evening in the sitting room. When I get up each day, the kitchen is full of their scent. I know they won't last for very long, but when I have to cut them off I will have a second round of flowers to look forward to, so they will have given me pleasure for quite a few weeks.

So the rest of the week has ticked by. Several days we have been able to eat our lunch out on the porch, enjoying this lovely sunshine, and usually ending up snoozing out there before the evening chill creeps in!

I have chatted to some of the boys, read another book and made two more squares for my blanket. As all the squares are the same pattern, just different colours, I thought it would be nice to have a second project running alongside it. So today I have ordered some rather special yarn to make myself a cardigan. Online buying from UK, which has been my usual route, has become too expensive and a bit uncertain until all the new rules about taxes and custom duties is sorted out, so I spent a long time browsing the net until I found a Spanish shop stocking the yarn I wanted. So I am hoping I don't have to wait too long for delivery.

Last night there was a big full moon. I didn't get out with my camera until it was getting quite low in the sky with a few wisps of cloud crossing it, but I took these two photos, one straight after the other, just using slightly different settings on the camera.

And finally I have, of course, a few sky photos to show you. They are all so lovely, so even if they are similar, I have to keep taking pictures of them. The last one was quite different but very beautiful. I may have to make it my header for a while.

Now I will link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World, and then I must go and finish making our lunch so we can eat it outside before we lose the sun.