Rocking Your World 2021: Week23

Another week has flown by so what were the bright moments this week. I have spent a few happy hours pottering in the garden. I do this in the morning before it gets too hot. First of all we worked together to pot up the climbing rose and Mandevilla flower that I showed last week. They are both happily attaching themselves to the climbing tower my friend gave me, and within minutes of us finishing it, a Spanish neighbour walked passed and commented on how good it was. (They don't miss a thing!). They do like their plants and not many houses in the village have gardens as colourful as ours.

Another happy follow-on from last week is our silk tree which has now had several flowers on it. I think they are really pretty, but sadly they only last for a few days, but there are plenty more coming to take their place.

The bees like them too!

I also planted up two lavender plants for round by the back railings. We like to sit there in the early morning for our first cup of tea. It is the coolest place for a short while, and lavender is sold to ward off flies and mosquitoes, so it is a good place for them. It is actually too hot to sit there from lunch time onwards, and is the last area to lose the sun, so the plants dry out very quickly and I have to be very vigilant about watering them.

On Tuesday we woke up to black skies, thunder and lightening and then heavy rain, so the animals were not very happy again. It lasted until just after lunch and then the sun came out and it was one of our hottest afternoons so far this year. You really can't guess what each day is going to be like.

As it happened I used the last of our bread on Monday, intending to go to the bakers on Tuesday morning after the market. But the weather being such as it was, the market was of course cancelled and I forgot about the baker. So at tea-time we had a treat - I made pancakes, with fresh juice from lemons just picked off our tree, and they went down very nicely!

It has been grey most mornings but not always raining, and even on those days it remains quite warm. Often the sun has returned for the afternoon and I have spent every afternoon this week sitting on the porch working on a small piece of counted cross-stitch. It is making a nice change. I have several big cross-stitch pictures on my walls, worked many years ago, but I wasn't sure my hands or eyes would be up to doing it now. However I am getting on with it quite well. There have been a few dropped needles, and some frustration with threading them, and a few times when some stitches have had to be undone because I realise I have 'missed the hole' in the aida fabric. But I am enjoying doing something different. I'll show a picture when it is done.

To help my hands, and use different muscles, I change back to crocheting in the evenings, and most nights I have sat out on the porch working on it until midnight. The sun goes by around 9.30, but we have fairly good lighting outside, so here is my usual late night set-up. Crochet on my knee of course, and on the table, a brandy for a night-cap, my bottle of water to wash the brandy down!, a citronella candle to keep the flies away, a fly swat for the ones who have got used to the citronella,  scissors and another hook because I need to change size halfway through, and usually a cat , (Tango or Tolly).

And this week I have another addition, this pretty bottle. It is an old lemon-cello bottle that one of my visitors bought a good few years back. The contents were way too sweet for us to drink and eventually I tipped it away but I kept the bottle because I liked the shape. I came across it again this week when I was having a clear out, so I gave it a really good clean and bought a couple of sets of these 'bottle lights'. They are USB rechargeable with the battery and on-off switch built into the cork. The lights are quite bright and look really pretty after dark.Now I must look out for two more interesting bottles for the other two sets of lights. (They came in a pack of three.)

Wednesday was another very hot day but Thursday through Saturday are forecast as being grey and possibly wet again, so I took the opportunity to get two loads of washing out on the line. All was dry and folded and put away by tea-time. But it was no surprise to see little puffy clouds forming on the horizon by sun-down. But instead of joining together for more storm clouds, they blew in still as little puffs. Although it wasn't a dramatic sky, it was still very pretty.

As I watched they started to get a touch of pink on them, so I was hoping for a bright sunset, but actually it never came. The light just faded and the clouds merged into the dark sky.

I like this one because you can see a few of the little birds hurrying home to their roosts for the night. The sky is full of birds right now, particularly sparrows constantly feeding their young under the eaves of the house next door, and swifts, swallows and house martins swooping about and calling to one another in a last feeding frenzy of all the little bugs that rise from the green zone at dusk. Then suddenly they all head for the trees or their nests and all is quiet again. They put on quite a show.

And finally, another photo of Tolly. (He seems to be getting more than his share of photo shots just now). He just amuses me so much. Now he is allowed the freedom to come and go at night like all the other cats, I think he does a fair bit of playing and roaming around because he seems to sleep nearly all day (when he isn't eating that is!). There are several cat beds around the house, as well as dog beds out on the porch, and every chair in the house is available for him to sleep on, but where does he chose? This tiny square of mud outside the back door. Admittedly it is shaded by an old discarded garden chair, but it is rough and filled with a dead tree stump, scratchy dead leaves, weeds, rocks and mud, and can't be the most comfortable spot, but that is where I can usually find him. There is no accounting for taste!

And that is just about it for this week. I had a video chat with my sister for some advice about the cross-stitch, a little chat with my son in Denmark, and my usual weekly chat with youngest son, Ben, which lasted for over two hours. Thank goodness for Messenger and WhatsApp. 

This week the new shop opened just a few doors up from us, promoting the new fibre internet, so Chris went in and signed up for it. We saw the men laying the cables all through the village, ready for it, a month or so ago, so we were pleased their shop is now open. The men came and installed the new router on Wednesday. There have been a few teething problems, but Chris is quite 'tech-savvy' and I think it is all sorted now. If it proves successful, and an improvement on what we have now, we will probably change our mobiles over to them soon too.

So I am off now to link up with Rocking Your World and Annie's Friday Smiles.