Rocking my World 2015. Week 4

Hello again my friends. Let´s start off with a smile. 

Flat Susan has been feeling the cold this week - as have we all - and she has taken refuge in Tango´s fur. I have some photos of them sleeping together, but this is the one that made me smile.

I´m not sure whether Tango is ´Keeping an eye on her´or ´Giving her the evil eye´. I hope it´s the former as she really does love to snuggle up in that silky soft fur. I´ll link this up with Annie´s Friday Smiles later.

It has been a rough week as I am still dealing with a sad situation at my church, but I am so thankful for the friends who have formed a support group, so we can all share our thoughts and talk it through together. Of course we are all thankful to the faithful Lord in whose hands we have left it all.

When driving over to a friend´s house, for a meeting of this group, I stopped along the road to take this photo. 

I am actually very glad that I live in a village. Many of my friends are much more isolated, but I love their views. While I was taking this, a little rabbit almost ran over my feet. If you zoom in on this view, you can just see the snow on La Tetica mountain.

I had been talking to my friend about my habit of spotting faces everywhere, and he said "Have you seen our hill Kate?". He took me to their boundary fence, and straight ahead was this hill.

Well I saw the face straight away, and I expect you can too. In fact I can see two faces depending which way I look at it. With the right side as the ´chin´I see a comic, jester-like face, and the other way up, which is how he sees it, it is more like a regal African face. 

Then he said "Come and meet Desmond". I followed him across the garden and there he was.

I think the name suits him. He looks rather downcast.

And before I leave the faces, here is a more usual one for me, that I saw in the sky a couple of days ago.

I see it as a rather cute little dog!

Of course the clouds are shape-shifters so he didn´t stay around for long. A few minutes later we had this lovely sky, but my little dog had gone.

I usually leave the sky photos until last but this week I have left another story to the end because I am going to post a whole set of photos. I have put these on Facebook, but as my family don´t use Facebook, I am repeating them on here.

I was very happy to have a distraction on Tuesday, so we went to a fiesta in another village. We took our friend Eileen with us because her husband is in UK and she is on her own. We went to the Bread Festival for San Sebastian, in a little place called Lubrin, which is one of the little white villages nestling in the hills behind us. This is view of Lubrin as we went down towards it, with the big brownstone church of San Sebastian easily recognisable.

It was one of those strange traditions that Spain is so good at celebrating, long after it´s meaning has been lost. I was able to discover that Saint Sebastian was a martyr who was killed for being a Christian. The first time he was tied to a tree and the king´s archers filled him with arrows. Later that night a Christian woman took his body and nursed him back to life, but later he was captured again and stoned to death. But I have not found out what the connection is between him and the bread!

On the 20th January every year, the village celebrates San Sebastian Day by making hundreds of bread rings - like bagels but more rustic bread - and hurling them down from their verandas to the waiting crowds below, while the statue of the Saint is carried through the streets. Mainly the men collect them and I believe originally the aim was to collect twelve - one for each of the disciples - but now they go out with ropes to thread them on, and compete to try and collect the most. As some of the rolls must be baked days in advance they can be very hard, but others are soft and nice to eat, and the village folk come out with bags of cheese and meat and have a picnic at one of the tables set up on the plaza.

There was all the usual things that go with a fiesta out here, a band with a motley collection of instruments, hand carts selling sweets, nuts and cheap toys, and bunches of character balloons everywhere. For this fiesta the children were selling red necker-chiefs; Everyone was wearing them so we bought one as well. They were also selling little tiny bread rings with a red ribbon that everyone wore as a brooch. I later learned that the children had made these in school the previous week. (Flat Susan thought this was just the right size for her).

We arrived in good time, thankful for our thick coats as we were higher up in the mountains than we are used to, and it was several degrees colder up there.We found seats outside a bar and kept ourselves warm with cups of hot coffee/chocolate and brandy, while we watched the preparations. The flags on the balconies alternate, one Spanish and one the flag of Andalucia.

I walked down to the church to see the statue there, and have a look around. Then the bell started to ring to call the people to mass. 

By the end of the mass the bread throwing had begun. The more proficient throwers skimmed them like frisbees, and they travelled quite a distance. It could be dangerous if a stale one hit you! 

There was great excitement when the procession started from the church, up through the village. The men got really competitive and were jumping up to catch the bread, regardless of who was around them, but it was great fun.

Now I have given you the bare bones of what happened, I´ll just show all the photos. It really was an extraordinary occasion!

We bought our red neck-scarves, and bread brooches.

The band came to entertain us.           

I went to the church to see the statue of San Sebastian.

The base of the statue was covered in rustic bread.

Some of the bread had whole eggs, in their shells, baked into them!

Then the church bells rang, calling the people to mass.

Waiting with his sacks of rolls for the procession to begin.

Throwing the bread.

He´s done that before. Not a drop was spilled!

From the balcony above where we were sitting.

Chris catches our first one! Doesn´t he look pleased with himself!

Here they come. Catch!

That one´s mine!!

The statue was carried past our plaza.

A casualty. The bread caught his glasses which cut his nose!

Showing off their collection.

Over loaded!

Well I hope you have enjoyed sharing our odd little outing. I will now link up with Virginia, and I´ll see you again next week.

Rocking my world 2015; Week 3

As promised this will be a shorter post than usual. It has been a quiet, uneventful week, but there is still plenty to be grateful for.

So I´ll start with my Friday Smile which I will link up over on Annie´s blog when I have finished this post.

It is one minute to midnight here, so 11.00 in UK, and this photo is my five sons having a family get-together, along with two of their partners and five of the grand-children. Thanks to the wonders of Skype I was able to be there with them for a little while, and as we were chatting, someone took this photo of them all and e-mailed it to me. What a super way to end the day!

With few commitments, I have had some spare time this week, and made good use of it by spring-cleaning the kitchen. It was in dire need of some attention, and as I was cleaning I also rearranged some of my equipment so I have a space for a new stand-mixer that will hopefully arrive early next week. My hands are not very strong these days and I was struggling with my hand-held mixer, so as a post-Christmas treat, I have ordered a Kenwood Chef. I can´t wait for it to arrive so I can have a good baking session.

Today we did some more rearranging. We have moved our big dining table into the end of the sitting room. It was too big for the dining room and we never used it in there, with the result that it got all my Africa knitting dumped on it. So this afternoon I sorted everything out, putting finished baby clothes and blankets into black bags, and sorting out the wool into plastic crates and drawers, so it is all tidy and organised now. Then we took the table into the other room where it looks much smaller! To make a space for it we have moved a small settee into what was the dining room and made it into a ´quiet´room, where we can sit if we don´t want the TV. There is still some sorting out to do in both rooms, but I am grateful that we got it done as we have been talking about it for a while.

On Wednesday I went to the hospital with my friend, so I could translate for her at an out-patient appointment, only to be told that there was no consultant there, and to come back the next day! The fact that it is a half- hour drive each way, and a waste of our time as well as petrol didn´t seem to occur to them, but there was nothing we could do, so we went home and returned again on Thursday morning. Everything went well the second time and I was glad that I had been able to help her. I keep trying to improve my Spanish but I sometimes wonder why, as I rarely get the chance to use it, so it was nice to have an opportunity to put some of it into practice.

I also used some of my spare time to make a ´New

Home´card for one of my sons who moved house two weeks ago. There was no time to make a card straight away, but as I had planned it, I made it anyway and posted it, and amazingly he got it two days later! I´ve never known mail travel so fast. And I know he was really pleased with it, because he put a picture of it on facebook, with a lovely comment. I had used a design that a lady on the silhouette facebook page had posted a tutorial for, but I used my own colour scheme and papers, and added a little verse on the back to make it personal.

We have both been grateful for warm, sunny days (most days anyway), which we have made the most of, sitting out for an hour or two each afternoon, and just relaxing. But we have also both been really grateful for the newly repaired fire that has made the sitting room so cosy in the evenings. The dogs have been coming in after tea and they are enjoying it too, though they do ask to go out again at bedtime. They sleep on the porch and seem to prefer it out there to a nice warm room, but I guess it is what they are used to.

Another project that I finished this week, is another blanket for Africa. Usually this means that I have sewn together some of the squares that friends at my sewing group have made and given to me. In fact when I had tidied up today I found I have a black bin bag full of squares so I must get some more sewn together soon, and edged. But this week I finished a blanket that was all my own work. Over the summer, when it was too hot to hold more than a very small piece of work, I made a set of squares with all the small balls of wool left over from knitted jumpers and cardigans. I wanted to try some of the many crocheted stitches that are available on the internet these days, so every square is a different colour and a different stitch. All are crocheted. Then I used some dark grey wool to crochet around each square and crochet them together. This makes  nice decorative seams which are much stronger than sewn ones. And finally I worked all round the edge. I love all the colours and textures in it. It will be going off to Africa in the next consignment that I send, so I hope a new little baby will like being wrapped in it too.

My last grateful for this week is for my husband and a group of friends who have listened and helped me to work through some situations that have been bothering me, without telling me what to do. I needed to make my own decisions which I have done now, but I was so glad of their support.

And now for my two sky photos for this this week. I particularly like photos of natural vegetation sihouetted in black against an interesting sky, so I have chosen two of these to show you this week. One was taken several days ago, and one was taken at tea-time tonight.

On that lovely note I will leave you to go over to Virginia´s blog to link up there, and I´ll see you all again next week.