Friday Smiles 2023 # Week 31

I  am starting writing this early this week as we fly out on Thursday and I may be able to publish on Friday from my tablet if I prepare it now. It is another scorching day with the temperature around 40º so the men are settled in the sitting room with the aircon on, and I am down in my room with my fan as close as it can be to me.

I have spent most afternoons sitting outside, but the fan we use in the porch is so powerful that it limits what you can do with it on. So I have been reading a lot. In fact I have read most of the books that I put on my Kindle for my holiday, so I have just had to upload some more. But in the mornings I like to sit in my room and 'play' with various programmes on my computer. 

One morning I designed a Christmas card in my Silhouette software, and then I cut it out twice and assembled two cards. I used a printed image that I purchased in with a bundle of Christmas files, an aperture from a file of nesties in my library, and a holly frame file purchased from the silhouette store and cut from vinyl. It takes a bit of fiddling around to get everything sized, and then positioned right, but once it is done, you can save the new complete file to use as many times as you want to.

I have also been playing with some new tabs that I have recently discovered in my Adobe Photoshop. I don't know whether they are new additions or just new to me but I had fun using them. So Chris gave me a very tiny, damaged photo of himself at around nine years old, and asked me to try and remove the brown spot under his eye. I did this, and then I smoothed it out and aded a little colour. Chris was pleased and used it for his Facebook profile. Here are the before and after photos.

The next one he gave me was a bit more of a problem. We reckoned it to be taken around 1950, and it shows Chris with his dad and his older sister Pat at Northolt airport. As well as being very dark, it had been folded up and had bad crease lines that went through Chris' face.

But I played around for a while and did manage to get an end result where the people are at least recognisable.

I don't have many very old photos but I must try a few more before I forget how to do it!

Tom has been enjoying the heat, and he dips in and out of the pool several times a day. Then when it cools down a little around tea-time, he goes down to the beach for an hour or two, before coming home to spend the evening outside with us. Before he gets into the pool each time, he checks for any 'visitors' and today he called me to see another little soul he had rescued from drowning. This is what I know as a red darter, but it is actually an orange-winged dropwing, and is, of course, a type of small dragonfly. Two of these visit the pool regularly and they are quite friendly, not flying off when we swim up to them resting on the edge. But this one had fallen in and soaked its wings, so it couldn't take off again. So Tom lifted it out on a pool noodle, and when I had taken a few photos, I carefully encouraged it to walk off my finger onto the side of the fountain in the shady corner, and when it had dried out, it flew away.

We have had a slightly larger blue one by the pool a couple of times this week, but it is more shy and flies away when we approach it.

This morning I needed to go to a shop at the top of the village, so while I was up there I went to the new library next to the Town Hall, to see the display of nursery characters that a lady from the village had made. (She also made the Christmas and Easter displays that I have shown in earlier posts). This one was lovely. It covered a huge area and some large jelly fish were suspended above it. I selected a couple of groups to show close ups but I am sure you will recognise many of the characters from the first photo. It was nice to see a couple of families coming to see and their children were having fun identifying each group. So much work from one lady, and maybe her friends, and it is giving pleasure to many families.

It is plain to see that children in Spain enjoy the same stories as English children do. Most of the little characters were familiar to me.

Update.  We are now safely in UK, where it is pleasantly cooler but at least it is not raining. There was a lovely sunset seen from our train on the way to London Bridge last night.

I am not sure how to link this with Annie's blog, but I will give it a try.