Rocking your World 2014: Week 50

Hi folks. Today I am starting with the Smile I wanted to use a couple of weeks back. 

This is a photo of my beautiful grand-daughter, Emma, in her eighth month of pregnancy. The second photo is her little boy who is three. I think the Autumnal shades of his jumper and his bright, curly hair, make the rusty ferns a perfect setting for this photo, and I love it. Both photos were taken by Emma´s friend Nesta LLoyd, a very talented young photographer. I have been waiting for her permission to use these photos as technically they belong to her, but she was happy for me to show them. She took a beautiful set of photos for Emma and John´s wedding too.

I love the look of concentration on Isaac´s face. He is not phased by the camera at all. He is so excited about the baby brother that Father Christmas is going to bring him, so I just hope he arrives on time! And of course, we are very excited about having a second great-grandson, hence the Smile!

I do not usually give presents for new babies until they arrive, but I saw this pattern and just had to make it for him, and post it early so he has it in time for Christmas. In case you are wondering what it is, here is the photo from the actual pattern. 

It is called a cocoon and I think it looks so cosy, and might be better than tightly wrapping baby in a blanket. They don´t always need that in a modern, centrally heated home. I think they are an American idea, as there were lots of different ones on the American site where I bought the pattern, but I am not familiar with them in UK. Anyway, I thought this was rather fun, and Emma says she can´t wait to show it to Nesta, who will take some gorgeous photos of the baby in it. So you may be seeing it again in a week or two. The little one is due around the 19th.

Well that aside, I have had a lovely week and  this post might be a bit heavy with photos, so I´ll try not to talk too much!

Saturday was the day of our Gallarte sale. This was my table.

I was particularly pleased with the Nativity scene, light box that you can see at the back right of the photo. The sale was well attended and I took 100€ which is more than double what I have taken in previous sales. You can read all about the items I made etc on my craft blog, by clicking HERE.

I was on duty at the sale for the second half of the morning, so when we closed up for ´siesta time´, Chris took me to the local bar for lunch. It was a lovely warm day and sitting there in the sun I was warm enough to shed my cardigan. As it was a nice day I decided to have a glass of tindo de verano (Summer wine) to go with my lunch, and it came in a huge glass! Lunch was delicious and so was the drink, and the sunshine was lovely. And all that in December!!

That evening I had to ask a friend to keep an eye to my table at the sale, because we were singing in a choir concert at Vera Convento. As I have shown this venue several times with the choir on this blog, I have not taken more pictures of it, but I had to take one of this beautiful bank of poinsettias. There was one of these on each side of the entrance hall at the Convento. They were stunning!

And on the subject of poinsettias, we went out on Monday to buy new lights for our tree, and while we were out, we also bought these plants to go in the new stand on our front porch. They are quite sheltered there so we are hoping they will survive, at least over the Christmas period, and hopefully for much longer.

Considering it is December, the garden is looking

lovely, with splashes of colour all over the place. The two pots of pansies I planted up a while ago are still full of flowers making a patch of colour on the front step. We also have flowers on the deep pink hibiscus, and the red kalanchoe and blue plumbago on the garage windows are still going strong.

When we bought those, we also planted up two window boxes for the windows on the front of the house and they are now well established, and are looking lovely.

Over to the left of the house front, the incarvillea, which is really in our neighbours garden, is still a mass of flowers. It looks wonderful.

And to the right of the house, where we have our tiny square of plantable garden, the roses are having a late bloom. Every time I see these I think of my mum. She always had a little saying from a Patience Strong calendar, pinned inside her desk, which said "God gave us our memories that we might have roses in December". And now I have roses in December without the help of my memory, but they always bring back memories of Mum.

One last flower that I am really pleased with is this

one. It goes by the great name of Aeonium arboreum, Green Beauty. It grows just beyond the railings at the back of our house, and every year I have been hoping it would flower, but it never has before. This is not a particularly good specimen and I actually thought it had died last year, but as I said last week, it is hard to kill anything here! When really healthy, it has lovely rosettes of green, succulent leaves and the cones of yellow flowers grow up from the centre. I don´t think it should even be flowering at this time of year, but I believe it is saying Thank you to us for cutting down the trees last month, and giving it access to the light and sun. Some friends also gave me a cutting of the purple/black leaved variety which is in a pot in the front garden. It also has not flowered so far, but I am trying to find a better spot for it, and keep hoping!

Oh look there is one more flower in amongst the greenery!

I took Tango in as a rather pathetic little stray, back in May, and since then he has `blossomed´, and is now a beautiful cat, currently wearing his thick winter coat. Until now he has hardly left the house, but in the last week or two he has started venturing out. I am happy to let him now as he has proved he can find his way back home, and the fresh air and sunshine are good for him. As you can see, he is very wary outside, and the slightest thing sends him scurrying for the door again, but he is enjoying sitting in the soft greenery that has sprung up in the green zone since the rain came.

We have had two more choir concerts this week, which have been well-attended, and everyone seems to have enjoyed them. There have been some very nice comments afterwards. We have a lovely programme this time, and I do enjoy singing all the Christmas music. We have three more concerts to go during the coming week, and after that everything will quieten down, though I have plenty of things to catch up on when I have more spare time.

I have one more big grateful this week, for my patient husband who has tried every day to resolve my computer, and in particular my internet problems. He has now done a system restore to the month when I had the new computer, and it is a bit better, though the internet is still very slow in the evenings. But he has given up so much time to fix it, and I am really thankful to be able to use it again.

Inbetween all the other things this week, I have been

trying to get some Christmas decorations up. I usually put them up on the first weekend in December, but there has been so much going on that I just haven´t had time. But the tree is up, complete with its new lights, and I love it. All the decorations have such meaning and fond memories for me, and I love unwrapping them each year, and reminiscing on the great family Christmases we have enjoyed.

While I was out on Wednesday, our village also put up some Christmas lights. We always get one on the lamp-post outside our house, and this year it is Father Christmas. It looks as though it will be quite a colourful one. We get something different each year. Further up the road there are reindeer pulling a sleigh stretched right across the street, but I like the individual ones we get down our end. I expect they will be switched on at the weekend. Ours come on a bit later than some places, because we have a fiesta for Epiphany, so ours stay lit until after 6th January.

My other big Smile this week is my Wednesday sewing group´s outing to Granada on Wednesday. Here are the four mad friends I spent the day with.

We had a really fun time, with lots of laughs, a lovely lunch and even managed a bit of Christmas shopping. It is a long way to go for a day out, so our coach left the village at 8.00 in the morning, and got back at 10.00 at night. I slept well after that!

Of course I took quite a few photos but I decided I didn´t want to carry my heavy camera around all day, so I used my phone. This is my favourite photo of the day. We were in a lovely sunny plaza, looking down a shady street, and in the background you can see the snowy slopes of Sierra Nevada. Beautiful!

Here are just a few more images of the day.

The Moroccan bazaars that line the sides of the cathedral.

A Belén or Nativity scene above the farmacia. (Sorry about the lamp-post. I couldn´t work around it).

The trees on either side of this picture were artificial, and they were smothered in flower shaped lights. I would have loved to have seen them all lit up, but unfortunately our coach left just before switching on time.

As you can see, there were not exactly hoards of Christmas shoppers. I probably took this during siesta time, when many of the smaller shops were closed, but even so, you might expect to see a few more folk than this wandering about.

This constructed tree was the centre-piece in the big plaza in front of the cathedral. It was surrounded by cafes and little temporary craft stalls. Again, I expect it looked very pretty when it was lit up. 

As we left Granada we passed the second shopping centre on the outskirts, and by then there were quite a few Christmas lights on, but I couldn´t get decent photos of them from the coach.

Well if you are still with me after that marathon I will only bore you with one sky photo this week. No faces in it this time, (or is there?!) but it was lovely all the same.

Now I shall try and get this linked up to Virginia at Celtic House, and Annie´s Friday Smiles, and then I shall get a few more Christmas decorations out before I go to bed.

Rocking my world 2014.Week 49

I am once again experiencing problems with the internet. Tonight I can get access to my dashboard but not to my blog. Neither can I open either of the lovely blogs where I link this, so I am going ahead and preparing it, and if everything goes to form, I will suddenly be able to do it all at around mid-night!

My first smile today is this happy chappy, who is my ten year old grandson. Annie loves to share photos of her grandies, so I though I´d join her this week. He is looking very pleased with himself because he had just achieved his Rookie Lifeguard bronze award.

And on the very same day he had a letter in the post which contained a much coveted Blue Peter badge. His daddy actually has two of these precious badges still, and he had told his lad about them. He decided he wanted one as well so he wrote them a poem about this, and he got his badge! His brother is a very laid-back seven year old, who wasn´t at all bothered by all this attention his brother was getting, and apparently he was quite happy to settle for a bag of jelly beans. A great attitude to have! (I have refrained from using the boys names as their dad only refers to them as big bear and little bear on social media, so I must respect that).

My second smile today is two of my lovely sky photos. My long-suffering husband probably thinks I´ve lost the plot when I stop in the middle of feeding the dogs to grab my camera because "there´s another face looking at us in the sunset". I have to do it straight away as the clouds are shape-shifters, and each image is only there for a very short time. So here are the two little peekers. I think they both look quite friendly ones, so I smiled back!

I´ll be linking those up to Annie´s Friday Smiles as soon as blogger lets me open her blog.

But I have a few other happy moments to share with you too. When it was my turn to host our Life group here, a couple of weeks ago, one of the ladies was going home to pick her olives because her husband was away, and they were too ripe to leave. So I asked her if I could buy some of her oil when her olives were pressed. I left it too late last year and she had sold out when I asked her. The very next Sunday she came up to me with a 2 litre bottle. It doesn´t come much fresher than this! 

For those who aren´t familiar with the way things are done here, if you have your own olive trees and you pick the olives as they ripen, you can take them to a local press. There are several around here and they open to the public from November to late January I think. It doesn´t matter whether you have one crate load, or a lorry full, you join the queue, and your olives are weighed. Then you are given a ticket to say how much oil you can have, which you redeem from further along the line. So you may not get the actual oil from your olives, but it is all freshly pressed, and it is Extra, extra virgin oil! You may think it doesn´t look very appetizing, and it really is this murky green, but it is beautiful to use. I have already decanted some of mine because I am not good at pouring from the big plastic bottles, (even when they only contain water!), so my oil drizzler is a safer option for me! At the press you can opt for the slightly more refined oil which is clear, but for using on salad, or drizzling on bread, this is the best.

Via a friend of a friend.. etc, a lady in our choir heard that I make mincepies, mostly to sell for charity, but this year the mincemeat is too expensive for me to make as many as I usually do. Well she makes her own, something I have never done as in UK it never seemed worth the work when the bought ones were so good, and she decided to make one batch for me. So on Tuesday, at choir practice, she gave me this beautiful jar full of yummy home-made mincemeat. She even put a festive cap on it. Isn´t that lovely? Two batches of my pastry mix, makes around seven dozen pies, and this jar exactly filled them. Perfect!  I have made around fourteen dozen mince-pies for the sale tomorrow, but I don´t intend to make too many more this year.

Early last year I showed some little tri-pots that had languished in a corner of the garden ever since we came here, and I had given them a new lease of life by planting them with cuttings off several cacti and succulents that we have. I have watered them when I remember, and on the whole they are still doing very well. Here is one as it looks now.

I have a pair of them, and I ran out of cuttings for the second set, so for the last pot I used a few self-seeded baby gallardias, which did well in the Summer, but they are not as tolerant of my hit and miss care in the Autumn. Recently I noticed that all that remained of them was a clump of dead, brown sticks that resembled a rather untidy birds nest! I thought they were dead but decided that I would not replace them until next Spring. Then it rained, and when I walked past them again, look what I found!

It is actually quite hard to kill anything out here, and all these little babies wanted was a long drink. I shall nurture them now. They deserve to be shown some love, and hopefully, come the summer, they will reward me with some flowers.

Fortunately, although we have had some much-needed rain this week, most of it has fallen during the evening and night, and the days have been glorious. It is not that warm any more, but when the skies are blue, you don´t notice that the sun has lost its power. And some days it has warmed up quite a bit for a few hours around lunch time. I was able to sit outside to eat my lunch today which was nice. And one day in the week, I sat here at my computer and was warm enough to have the window right next to me, wide open. Of course Arwen thought this was for her benefit, and she immediately laid along the sill, enjoying the sun on her back for a couple of hours. And woe betide me if I tried to move her.

I am very happy that I managed to write all my Christmas cards for posting last night, and today I took them all to the post office. (The bill was 59€. Ouch! But as I said to a friend who was also bemoaning the postage costs, I enjoy making the cards, but what´s the point if you begrudge the postage. It is only once a year, so I pay up, and hope they all give someone as much pleasure to receive as they gave me to make them). I thought I was a bit late this year but I just made it by my target date. Tomorrow and Monday are both red days, or bank holidays, here, so the post office will be closed, and I try to get mine away before that. So today I was just in time.

I have been very busy this week making and finishing off cards, and also items for my second craft fair. This is the Gallarte expo in our village tomorrow and Sunday. It is a fairly simple affair, just for the folk in the village really, and I don´t expect to sell much, but I like to set out a good table all the same, and what doesn´t sell will be used by us, or put away for next year. I went up to the hall to set up today, but I didn´t get around to take any photos. Hopefully there will be time tomorrow. It will be busiest in the evening but I can´t be there then as it is our first major choir concert, so a friend is keeping an eye on my things for me. Hopefully by next week I will have written posts about some of my ´makes´for my craft blogs so I will be able to put some links on here.

I started with some sky photos and of course I also have some to close with. I like the first one just because you can see all the little birds flying home to rest. (You may need to click on the image to enlarge it to see the birds!).

The rest of these were taken in the morning for a change. I woke up late to see a blue sky outside with little fluffy white clouds all over it, so I jumped out of bed and rushed outside with my camera to take this.

By the time I was washed and dressed, lots more clouds had moved up from the south-east and they joined up to partly obscure the rising sun. 

I rather liked the look of this even though it didn´t bode well for a sunny day. But it stayed clear enough, and warm enough, for me to dry all my washing out on the line so I was grateful for that.

Then I went round to the back of the house, which doesn´t get the full sun until later in the morning. Here the clouds were also gathering and they reflected the rising sun with a lovely pearly pink sheen. It was so pretty I had to take one more picture.

So that´s it for this week. As soon as I am able to link this up I will, so I´ll see you at Annie´s Friday Smiles, or over at Celtic House. 

I am truly sorry that I didn´t manage to visit many of you last week. The only spare time I have had to come down here, has been in the evenings, and I have not been able to open any blogs at that time. If it is no better this week, I may have to manage some morning sessions, instead of doing the housework. That sounds like a good idea to me!