Friday Smiles 2022: Week 24

Well I am writing this on Thursday and it's a tad warm today! My family in UK have been posting that it is hot there today but I don't think they have reached anywhere near this.

Admittedly this sign is on our Farmacia store in the sun and I saw it when I walked up to the post office at midday. But when I got home, our own thermometer in our shady porch was showing 36º. These are temperatures we expect on occasional days in July and August but this is only mid-June! It is definitely a day for staying indoors or finding the shadows, and needless to say I am staying in here with my floor fan upped a speed, but now the evening is approaching I shall be having a dip in the pool. It will probably feel like a warm bath.

I have got myself a little problem as I have lost (misplaced) my driving license, which means I am reliant on Chris driving me anywhere I want to go, until I have got a replacement. It was sheer chance I missed it as it is not something I need to look at very often, so I have no idea when or where it went astray. I have made some enquiries and apparently the first step I needed to take was to take out a 'denuncia' which is the Spanish name for any reported crime or incident. So yesterday we made the trip into Garrucha and sat in this waiting room for what seemed like a long time, but eventually the officer who had taken my details, came out with a form which I had to sign. This is my 'denuncia' and now I have taken it to our local gestoria who will do all the rest for me. We could have done it ourselves, downloaded the forms to fill in and then travelled to the Trafíco office in Almeria city to hand them over and hopefully get a temporary license in return. But we really didn't want that journey in this heat so it is worth paying our legal friend to do it all for us.

Chris has managed to complete one more project in the garden; he has cleaned and serviced our 'Susan' and she is now working properly again. We inherited Susan with the house, and perioodically she has worked - she has two water spouts, one from a little tap beside her, and one from her bowl she is holding- but the small trough was constantly filled with dead leaves, and we often forgot to plug the pump in, so they rotted and blocked the tubes. She now has a solar pump with a separate panel that we have fixed to the top of the wall which has sun for most of the day, so there is no need to switch her on and off now. Also we have moved her from the back garden to the front, and she is sitting on a small raised wall next to the jasmine. I have no idea how I came to refer to her as Susan, but I have always liked her. 

She has a lovely serene face. So I am happy to see her working again.

On Tuesday I had a hospital appointment for a follow up on the biopsy test I had done just before I went away. I was happy to hear it came back as negative and there is absolutely nothing to worry about, so that was very reassuring, and was what I was hoping to hear. They will do one further test in a year's time and then if everything is still fine they will sign me off.

We have had a couple of interesting bugs in the garden this week. (Apologies to those of you who don't share my interest in all the creepie crawlies). This first one was in our pool. He was struggling feebly but when I fished him out and layed on the side, I knew he was not going to make it. Lots of bugs come to the pool for a drink and end up drowning. I recognised his markings and knew he was a mammoth wasp. These are quite big compared to their more familiar cousins, his body was about 1½cm, but they are totally non agressive and harmless, and of course they are important member of the pollinators. So I was sad I didn't find him in time to save him.

The second visitor was this little fellow which some of you may recognise as a glow-worm. It was hurrying across my kitchen floor so probably came in on one of the cats. Again I recognised it from previous finds, but they often have much brighter stripes of pink along their sides. They are interesting little creatures and I learned a new fact this week, that they are actually the same species as fireflies, which are adult males. (I thought they were two completely different things). The glow-worm is the larvae stage and females never move on from that, They are the ones that glow on the ground, while the males turn into true brown beetles and fly around looking for a glowing female to mate with. They can of course also glow, hence their name of fireflies. I think mine was an adult female as June and July is the time they are most active, and once she has mated and laid her eggs (which can also glow), she will die. Anyway I relocated her into the grass next door.

Last night around mid-night I went out the back by the kitchen door, where it is very dark, to see if I could spot any glowing glow-worms but there was not a light to be seen.

However I did stop to photograph the almost full moon. I played around with different settings on my camera and chose these two pictures to keep. The one at the bottom was taken on full zoom. I am always amazed that I can get a picture like that on just a phone camera. The top one was taken on the night setting. I couldn't see that dark circle with a naked eye, but apparently the camera could.

And that's about it for this week. So I shall put this away and maybe go for that swim, and I will be ready to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles in the morning.