Fridy Smiles 2022: Week 11

This has been a strange, strange week, but it has still tripped along very quickly. Saturday I knew I needed to go to our local baker's as I was out of bread. The shop is only a five minute walk from here, but as it was such a lovely day I decided to walk around the edge of the village to get to it. On my way I saw an area of scrubland that was covered in wild crysanthemums, so I picked a little bunch to go in a posy vase on the kitchen table. They are so pretty, and as I was able to use the stage of their centres to pick the freshly opened ones, they are still looking as lovely as they did when I brought them home.

I was glad I had the walk and found the flowers because the weather took a drastic turn for the worse the next day. On Monday we were expecting rain but we noticed the sky was turning a rather ominous yellow so we expected a storm was brewing. I said to Chris that when the rain came it was probably going to drop some dessert sand on us. However, no rain came. Instead the sky got more and more yellow, then turned to orange and by tea-time it was a bright red! The weather man called it a 'meteorological phenomenon', and apparently it hasn't been seen here in decades. It started as Storm Celia which whipped up sand from the Sahara Dessert and carried it over to us.

We still expected rain in the night but we woke up on Tuesday to find we had only had 'dry rain', or 'mud rain' as they sometimes call it. Everything had a thick layer of red dust on it. I wrote our initials on the black glass table in our porch to show how much had come down. It is very fine dust so it fell through the fly netting.

The trees and flowers were dull and dusty, the cat and dog drinking bowls had to be washed out and refilled, and there was an almost eerie silence on the street. By Wednesday the rain started to fall but it was not too heavy so it turned the dust to mud but didn't wash it away. This is the table by my outside sink. The blue-grey in the top left corner is my mop which lives there. It is going to need a good wash itself before it will be any use washing my floors. 

One of the cats came indoors and sat on my kitchen stool. I suppose that was better than on the settee! But the dogs, cats and ourselves have all managed to tread some around as it is inescapable. Even indoors the dust has blown in through windows and doors. So once it has settled down I will be having a major clean up inside, and Chris will set the power washer to work outside.

On Tuesday our air quality was described as 'very unhealthy' and we were advised to stay inside if possible, but now it has rained all day today (Thursday), the sky is back to a more normal grey, and the crisis is over, though we are now forecast rain for another full week. Our village carnival was arranged for this Saturday but has been postponed until next week in the hope of better weather by then.

We saw on the news last night that a little of the sand has even reached as far as the South of England. The one positive from all that is that apparently the sand is very fertile and rich in minerals, so this being an area that relies on agriculture, the land workers should be very happy.

I have little other news except that I have finished my Christmas shawl project. This was made with one ball of colour changing yarn in a limited edition colour that was released only for this project. It is called Evergreen. This being St.Patrick's day it seems very apporpriate to be showing off a green shawl. 

It is a lovely light weight shawl that will be useful on Spring evenings.  And I modelled it for you so you can see it is a good size too.

Other than that, despite the sand, we managed to get Kim to the vet for his blood test, and I have now had mine, so hopefully we will have some results soon.

I have had several chats with our youngest son Ben who spent all week finishing packing up his belongings and desposing of unwanted furniture, as today is his last day in his house. Tomorrow he starts a new chapter of his life a bit further north from Birmingham.

And that is about it for this week. We are anxiously watching the charts as Covid numbers in UK are rising steadily, and are hoping they don't get to a level where I need to reconsider my planned visit over there at the end of the month!

So for now I am keeping positive, continuing to pray for a de-escalation of the war in Ukraine, and just hoping that the world returns to some sort of normality soon. Now I am linking up with Annie's Friday Smiles.