Friday Smiles 2023# Week 30

I won't bore you with yet another photo of our thermometer, but suffice to say the blue line has not moved up and down much at all this week, and we are all still melting. The last couple of days have been a tiny bit cooler, but I still can only sit on the porch if our big fan is going round at top speed.

So not surprisingly, I don't have a lot of news this week, so I will share my son's news instead. (apologies to those who have seen this on facebook already. Our second son Mike celebrated his 50th birthday on Monday. (Well he celebrated it on Saturday really, and kept the fun going until his actual birthday on Monday!). 

On Saturday evening he had a party in a horse field belonging to a good friend. (We have had a few good 'bashes' there before). Fortunately there was a big barn with hay bales for seating, as it was a rather wet affair, but they didn't let that dampen their fun. Several of his friends had set up tents to sleep in, but I suspect most of them camped in the barn instead.

Of course Arsenal was involved as all his own family, and his brothers and dad are all ardent fans, so here he is with his daughter and two of his sons, and his new Arsenal shirt with his nick-name on it, which he is obviously very pleased with.

Mike has worn his hair long for most of his life, and it is thick and wavy, but once every ten years he shaves it all off, for a charity. So the first "Big cut" was on his 30th birthday, when his older brother did the same thing. He did it again whe he was forty, so of course, this week was "The Big Cut 3". His partner, his brothers and his children all had a go at cutting it; first the pig-tails it had been tied in were cut off with scissors, then with an electric shaver, and then twice with 'suds and bic razors' according to his brother, so in the end they did a fairly good job of it.  This is the before and after shots.

His carefully tied pig-tails were donated to The Little Princess Trust who make wigs for children with cancer, so it was all in a good cause. But I am very glad that it will grow again.

I made him a fun card with a concertina of fifty candles. Somehow I failed to take a picture before sending it to him, so here is the one from the cutting file I used in my silhouette, to make it. It was a bit of a  fiddle but he loved it and that is what matters. 

This is the cutting file for the back panel as well.

Our son Tom is still here with us of course. He is now officially on holiday but so far he has spent most of his time jumping in and out of the pool, and spending a lot of time watching videos etc on his laptop. He enjoys discussing new ideas in computer programming etc with Chris, but they may as well be talking a foreign language as far as I am concerned. But it is nice for Chris to have someone who shares the same interests as him, to talk to.

It is also good to have a young strong man around to do some of the things we find difficult now. So he has been up ladders to change our lights in the long passageway through the house. They are high, and very tricky to do so we put it off until the whole passage is in darkness, but now we have light again. He has also helped Chris to clean the pool thoroughly and replace some missing tiles, and between us we have had a general clean up in the yards so it all looks good again now.

One day Tom came to tell me we had a large moth drowned in the pool so I went to investigate, and found this beauty. 

When we tried to fish it out, it flapped its wings feebly and we realised it was still alive, so I carefully carried it round the back and left it on a sunny bunch of oleander flowers, and hoped it would dry out. 

It is part of the swallow-tail butterfly family. The usual one, with four clearly defined wings, is quite common here for a short while, but this is the Eastern Tiger Swallow-tail, and it is much rarer, so it was a nice one to find. They only live for a few days, but I hope it survived long enough to lay some eggs in the green zone.

One thing that makes me very happy is that a Spanish friend of ours, who is an electrician, is coming tonight to install a new air-con unit in our bedroom. He will also be returning when Chris gets home from UK, to fit one in the sitting room. Our existing ones have been here since the house was built as far as we know, and neither of them are very efficient now, so I am looking forward to nice cool bedroom tonight.

I will publish this tomorrow on Annie's Friday Smiles blog, but I don't know whether I will be posting next week. We arrive at our son Jim's house in London on Thursday night, so I may not have anything ready for the next day. But I will try to visit you all anyway.