Friday Smiles 2024 # Week 28

Progress has been made this week. I am happy to report that my hand is well on the way to being healed. I had the huge dressing removed on Monday and 25 stitches removed. Now I have one corner covered with a small dressing for a few more days more as a precaution than anything else and everything seems to be functioning well. Unfortunately the graft site on my shoulder is not doing quite so well. It was infected and the centre section has opened up, but the rest is fine. They took some of the stitches out and the rest will be gone in the middle of next week. I am taking antibiotics so I am hoping the infection will be gone by then. I am so grateful to the hospital staff who have done a great job on my hand. They will call me back when they have the results of the biopsy on the part they removed.

This week our son Tom finished his train journey across Europe and arrived here on Tuesday evening on a bus from Murcia to Vera. Now he is settled in his 'office' on our sitting room table, where he works all morning and part of the afternoon, and then relaxes for the rest of the day. Although he loves his life in Denmark it is a tad chilly there so some Spanish sunshine makes a nice change for him.

Vera has a small bus station separated from the main road by a long flower bed. While we sat waiting for Tom's bus to arrive  I  just had to take a photo of this beautiful hibiscus shrub. It was covered in huge pink flowers all seemingly at their best at trhe same time.

The cats are struggling with the heat (So am I!), and spend a lot of time sprawled out on the stone floor in front of one of our fans, or in a shady corner they have found, but Leo still manages to make time to play for an hour after breakfast. He is a born hunter and this week I found him lying in our passage watching this baby bird he had brought in. It was a bit shocked but unharmed, so I gently carried it outside and as it looked almost fledged I risked gently throwing it up into the air. Sure enough it managed to flutter its way to a nearby tree, so I hope its mother found it. Leo was too hot to bother following to see where it went!

I wasn't able to do much while I had the huge dressing on my hand, but I did have another session with my laser cutter. I have mentioned before that my sewing group put together bags of small gifts at Christmas for each child who's family use the food bank, based at the English church where we meet. There are around 100 children with ages ranging from a few months to older teenage, so it is quite a challenge and we work on gifts throughout the year. We like to include small toys such as minicars, spinning tops, bubbles etc so I decided to make five sets of Tic-tac-toe games or Tres en raya, Three in a row, as the spanish children call it. My first set used tiny dinosaurs as the counters, and I thought they were so cute, that I made two more sets. 

Then I did a set of smiley and cheeky faces, and one of very decorated O's and X's. Of course I also made the bases with the grid engraved on them. I am hoping one of the ladies in the group will make little drawstring bags to put them in. Here are all my pieces. I have just varnished them lightly to protect them from sticky fingers, and am waiting for them to dry.

This week is Fiesta week in the village so the men have been busy putting up lights and bunting everywhere, and the car park is busy with the building of a roller coaster, bumper cars and other rides. It all kicks off tonight, but the main and final day is next Tuesday. So we are in for a few noisy days and nights, but I am sure we will survive. It is such an important occasion for the villagers, and the atmosphere is happy and full of fun. It is so hot so I don't see us going over to the plaza very often, but I am sure we will be going over for a while in the evenings.

A funny story to end with. I bought two oil dispensers from Amazon a while back, one for olive oil and one for sunflower oil. They pour but I also wanted them for the spray for when I want to lightly oil something for the air fryer. When they came I was diappointed to find one of them wouldn't spray. The other was fine and I didn't get around to returning the faulty one, which was my fault. Anyway this week I decided to try again and ordered a third one. The parcel arrived this morning looking a bit squashed and what was inside made me laugh so much. This what it should look like.

This what was in my parcel!

It looked as though it had been left somewhere excessively hot and had just shrivelled up. This time we did tell Amazon and they said they would refund the money but we didn't need to send it back. So as the top was unaffected, I tried it out on the base of the faulty one and it works just fine, so I have my second oil spray with no further cost. Win , win for me.

And with that I will link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and I'll see you in the morning.