Friday Smiles 2025 # Week 31

I did miss posting last week although I was not anywhere that it was possible to do so. However we had a good visit back to Oswestry where we were able to take our time going around the house, measuring spaces and marking all the sockets on our floor plan etc, so we can start planning what we want to do.  The surveyor has given us a verbal report which was positive, though we won't have the official one until the middle of next week. Here is a photo of the front of the house that I took from the park across the road. It is a mid-terrace house which has the advantage of keeping it warmer in the winter. As you can see, the garden is in need of a little TLC but I will get it sorted by next spring.

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So what else have we been up to in the past couple of weeks. Well we had a visit to Greenwich market which is one of my favourite haunts in London. It was busy of course, as the tourist season is now in full swing, but I bought some lovely water glasses, and strong fabric shoulder bag. 

I love the way much of London is full of flowers. So many bars and shops have hanging baskets and troughs just spilling over with flowers.

We returned home via the water taxi down the Thames, and then the underground train.

I was even brave enough to return there on my own to pick up a few more things. I haven't done much travelling on my own since we got here and the underground is quite different from when we left with new lines, and changed names, but there are still some of the old trains running too. I am not a fan of the long downwards escalators, (I don't mind the ones going up), but the different lines are all on different levels, so sometimes the escalators are a better option to long flights of stone steps!

Another night our son and DIL took us to ABBA Voyage, and it was an amazing show. It took place in a purpose built arena by Stratford, which was mostly made of wood bolted together so that it can be taken down and moved to a new location next year. But of now it is still attracting huge crowds every night. 

I loved the ceiling of the foyer with all its coloured lights. 

This is where there was a selection of bars, cloakrooms, and merchandise shops. Jo and I couldn't resist the capes, so she she bought the blue one and I the red one, and we had a picture taken under the ABBA sign.

Then someone in the queue offered to take one of our 'other halves' as well, and for once we are all smiling.

The ranks of seats soon filled up as did the triangle in the centre for dancers, and I managed a quick photo before we were all asked to put out phones away.

There was a small band and four backing singers, but the main screens were taken up by avatars of Abba back in the day, and they were so realistic it was hard to convince ourselves that they weren't really there on the stage. They sang all their most well-known songs as well as a couple I didn't recognise, and throughout the whole show, there were moving lights coming down from above, and chasing round the outer wall. It was a lot to take in, and all in all it was a fantastic show. And you didn't need to be a huge ABBA fan to enjoy it.

This week Chris and I went back to the Outernet at Tottenham Court Road, and although the display I wanted to see wasn't showing that day, there were still some fantastic light displays to enjoy. Here are a couple of the photos I took though I couldn't catch all the sparkle. These were on the roof above us.

I took this one to show my daughter-in-law as all her family love pink flamingos!

This one was an animated under-water scene and little shoals of fish swam in and out of the reeds. I caught two little 'Nemos' I thought were cute.

We sat on a sunny plaza outside for a while and I indulged on a treat I find it hard to resisit - a frozen yoghurt bought from this bright red bus!

Here's someone else cute. This little fellow regularly visits the garden, and is not a bit shy. If we are sitting quietly he will come almost up to us.

This afternoon, for something different, I did some baking. So I made a batch of sweet potato, oats and almond flour cookies, and some Welsh cakes. In wasn't sure how well these would work as I always cook them on a heavy cast-iron griddle. But today I used Jo's skillet because it was nice and flat, and they came out just fine. So now I will go and butter a few for our tea and I will publish this in the morning and link it to Annie's Friday Smiles.

 

Friday Smiles 202 # Week 28

It has been another very warm week and last weekend the excessive heat brought a surprise we hadn't anticipated at all. Apparently a colony of honey bees has been happily living in his church roof and on Friday they started to come out of their overheated home. At first we thought they would swarm but an expert told us they were 'bearding'. According to Google, this is when some of the bees leave the colony and cluster around the entrance in the shape of a beard, to help regulate the temperature and improve ventilation. It is normal bee behaviour and ususally caused by very high temperatures. He confirmed they were honey bees.

After some searchying we found the entrance very high up around an old slightly loose brick, so some bees were flying around that. 

But many others had found a way out, indoors. Two windows, very high up in the church were covered in bees frantically running around and flapping their wings in an attempt to cool down. Sadly quite a few died, either from natural old age or from heat exhaustion, and the aisles and pews were collecting them.

Being an old building in the style of old churches, the roof is almost unreachable as were the two windows, so there was little we could do. Having sought expert advice, it was decided to leave them in peace and let nature take it course, with a warning to everyone attending services to take care, not intentionally touch the fallen ones, and to make sure they carried their epi-pen if they were allergic to stings.

They will have to be rehomed as their honey could potentially damage the roof structure, but it will need scaffold to reach them, and experts to handle them. In the meantime we are hoping the slightly cooler weather may calm dowwn their activity. Jim made a poster to warn folk as they entered and used a pitcure of this little crocheted bee to catch people's attention.

We look on them as welcome visitors in the short term, after all "All God;s creatures are welcome in His house"!

And while on the subject of insects, here is such a pretty moth that I spotted in the garden yesterday. 

I looked it up and discovered it is a Jersey Tiger Moth. Here is a Google photo of what it looks like with its wings open. It was the flash of bright red as it flew passed me that caught my eye, So I followed it until it settled but it didn't open its wings again until it flew away.

On Tuesday I decided I needed to stretch my legs so I walked to Meyow Road Park. I found it on google maps but didn't know what to expect. It turned out to be a lovely area, with wide expanses of grass where dogs romped together and chased balls etc, lots of different trees providing shade and well layed out foot paths. The air was filled with screeches that I knew came from parakeets, but I never spotted one resting to take a photo. They were however, flying between the trees and flashes of green were everywhere.

I was amused to find that as well as a children;s play area, there were well-used tennis coutrs, and  croquet lawn. The croquet club members were busy setting up the hoops. I associate croquet with "Alice in Wonderland" and had no idea it was still a popular pass-time.

In an open area I saw this tree skeleton. It is sad when a tree dies but I guess it leaves space for the others to grow. I just loved the shape the dead branches make and took this photo of it. When  I am back on my computer I will convert it into a line drawing and make an svg of it. Then I can use it as the background on a scrapbook page etc.

On a differnt note, yesterday I spent the morning in the kitchen making a family-size lasangne. Normally this would have been portioned up and frozen for future meals, but there are eight of us living here so it was all gone by bedtime.

So now I will link with Annie's Friday Smiles and hopefully visit you all tomorrow. But next week I will not be posting as we are returning to Oswestry to have another look around the house we hope buy, and have a quick word with the man who is doing the structural survey on Friday. I will not have my tablet with me as we are travelling 'light', but I will still try to visit you all.

Friday Smiles 2025 # Week 27

This week I am starting with the best news, we have found a house in Oswestry and our offer has been accepted. Of course there is a long way to go but we have engaged a solicitor for the conveyancing and booked a survey for later this month. So this week has involved a lot of time spent on the telephone, plus quite a bit of time sitting indoors or under the gazeebo feeling just too hot to do anything more energetic. I am sure most of you have shared at least part of the heat-wave. Here in London it has been stifling. But I am glad I am not still in Spain where they have temperatures soaring into the 40's.

But back to the house. Our choice may surprise some of you as it is a mid-terrace Victorian house with three floors plus a cellar!. However the stairs are fairly gentle with a good strong hand rail, and it won't do us any harm to go up and down them a few times each day. The sitting room and main bedroom are lovely and both have views over the back of the beautiful town park. The third room will probably be my craft room and I can see me shutting myself away up there some days. We are going to change the bath for a walk-in shower, and have a new kitchen installed, so plenty to keep us busy. And I will have  a garden. At present it is rockery styled with paving slabs and gravel beds, and the plants are very overgrown, so it need a bit of TLC, but that is something we can take our time over. It is all very exciting, but we will just have to patient while the legal wheels tick over at their own pace.

I shall enjoy watching the colours change with the seasons in all those trees.

Here is a picture I took on our travels last weekend. This is Ozzy the bull and he lives in Birmingham New Street station. Every half hour or so he starts to swish his tail, his head turns from side to side and his eyes light up purple and slowly blink. Almost menacing but I thought he was rather magnificent.

As I haven't got much news or pictures I thought I would give you a quick catch-up on my crafts. I have three projects on the go but the cross-stitch hedgehog is making slow progress as I don't work on it when it is so hot because I don't want to dirty it with sticky hands.

While I was still in Spain, I asked my son to buy a kit for a wall hanging before they ran out of stock. I was happy when I opened the box and saw all these lovely coloured yarns. I quickly labelled them for easy identification. 

The first bit of the project was to make 60 of these little triangles. Each one uses two different colours and there is a chart to tell you which two to use. When made you have to fix a small numbered tag to it to help place it on the final layout. 

I have completed all 60 of the triangles so the next part is to make 24 of these squares.

And my third project is to make a thick winter jacket. This one is done with a mixed yarn that changes colours randomly as you work. I needed to make 66m of these tiny squares which were quite quick to do. You can see the variety of colours that these have worked up as. They are actually darker green than they appear here.

Next I need thirty bigger squares and I have done the first two.

I am not good at sitting waiting patiently, so these are keeping me busy.

And now it is time to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and publish this in the morning. I apologise if I missed anyone last week or was very late visiting. It was another very busy weekend!