Rocking Your World 2016; Week 28

Here's my smile for this week, Chris and I, with our friend Gillian, grinning like Cheshire cats again. Anyone would think we enjoy our life here in Spain!!

Needless to say, the occasion involves food again. On Saturday night we all went to our friend Chris's house for a barbecue to celebrate the 'end of term' for the choir. Most of the choir were able to come, along with our partners and a few friends, so there was quite a crowd of us. 

Chris' husband Phil gallantly manned the cookers, and his friend Richard came along to run a very low priced bar.

The man in a red shirt on the left of this picture, is our musical director David Murphy.

He has worked so hard for us all year, so he has now gone back to UK for three weeks for a well earned holiday. Mind you, he has left us with three new songs to learn while he is away!

This is Chris's mum, Jean. She will be 89 next week, and she still enjoys a party.

Chris's husband, Phil, is the man who runs a courier service between here and the UK, and he takes my knitting to Brian of Greenfields Africa free of charge, which is what makes it possible for me to keep going with it. He is back in UK this week, so on Monday I sorted out what I had and he took two bags for me, containing 14 blankets and around 40 baby jumpers, cardigans etc.

They included this set of fourteen lovely stripey cardigans. Aren't they delightful, and so much fun. They are all beautifully finished and complete with buttons. I am sure some little people will love wearing them.

I was also able to send over to Brian, a donation of 100€ collected by my house group since Easter. This is specifically for one of his projects - to continue the fight against jiggers, the sand-fly larvae that burrow into the children's feet and cause them so much pain and disfigurement.

Thursday saw us eating out again! This time we went

out for a menu del día with our house group friends as we won't be meeting again until September. (Everything in Spain stops for the hottest two months of the year). We went to a place called Gnomo Feliz (the Happy Gnome), and we had a lovely meal. They had set up a long table  so that all fourteen of us could sit together. We were in the conservatory, and we could look out over the patio and in the distance was the sea.  

I went outside to stretch my legs and took this picture looking back through the doors at our table.

You can't beat good food and good friends to share it with.

As you can see, the sky is greyer than usual for July, and in fact, by the time we got home it was even darker, and by the night we had a short, sharp thunder storm. It didn't clear the air as much as I had hoped, and once again, it brought a lot of dust and dirt with it, but I am sure the ground was glad to have a drink.

The forecast says we are in for a heatwave this week with temperatures above forty, and only going down to around 25 for the night! Let's hope it doesn't last for too long. 

It is now eleven o'clock at night and I have just been outside to read the thermometer on our shady porch. It is still showing thirty degrees!! Methinks we are in for a hot and sticky night!

At the end of the week it is our village fiesta, and this week there are men everywhere clearing the open spaces, unloading the equipment to set up the street bars, putting up lights and bunting etc. Each year the lights are different, we assume they are hired, and this year there is a very impressive one hung up across the road by the main plaza. I am looking forward to seeing that one lit up.

Of course, along with the lights come the fair rides and the noise, but I don't really mind. There is such a lovely atmosphere in the village for fiesta week, and we go over and join in  for a while most nights.

Part of the fair is always a bumper car ride, and it is the biggest one I have seen. For some reason it is always allowed a set up a week earlier than everything else so it has been going each evening since last weekend. It is across the greenzone from our house so I can see it (and hear it) from where I am sitting typing this. They start on the dot of 9.00 but I am grateful that, until the actual fiesta, they do stop right on midnight each night. I took this one tonight, just as they were opening.

Here is one taken now. As you can see, they have a lot of bright lights flashing, so another grateful is that I am not working on them!!

Last week, I wrote about some of the fruit I am buying and a couple of people asked me what paraguayos are, so here are some I bought this week.

I had never seen these before I came to Spain, but I know they are now available in the British supermarkets under a different name. They look like a flattened peach and taste very similar but a bit sweeter. They have a fairly small stone, and although their skin can be rather tough,when they are ripe they peel very easily. The down side is that, out here, they don't keep well, so I only buy a few at a time and make sure they get eaten quickly - no problem there for me!

There have been no spectacular skies this week, but as I went out to photograph the dodgems tonight, I thought this was pretty enough to warrant a picture.

Well that all for this week. I will link this up with Annie's Friday Smiles, and Rocking your world over at Virginia's blog, and then I think it is time for  midnight dip in the pool and a nightcap before I go to bed.

Rocking Your World 2016: Week 27

With all the negativity around this week, following the Brexit decision, it made me smile to see a post in Facebook about politicians that was written by someone with a sense of humour. I hope it makes you smile too. (Sorry about the vivid colour. It is just as I copied it, and I can't face writing it out again on a white background).

And now to my week. Well it certainly started off 'Rocking'. On Saturday evening, my choir had it's first ever full concert. We sang to a full house. We were all dripping in the heat, but the audience stayed with us, and we sang our hearts out for them. They gave us a standing ovation at the end, so I think they all enjoyed it. Then on Sunday afternoon we did it all again, and again we had a full house. And during the week we have been given some wonderful comments.

Our colour is purple so the men wore lilac shirts with purple cravats, and the ladies had a mixture of lilac and purple tops. These were not ideal, especially with the heat, but they did create an overall feeling of colour co-ordination, and were the best we could manage in the time. Next week we have a meeting to discuss how we can improve on them for next time. It is difficult as it was not an "in" colour this year, and we needed to find a supplier who covered a wide range of sizes! But at least we now know what we don't want, so hopefully we can find something better for next year.

I have to say I loved being a part of this. We sang a wonderful repertoire of song from the shows, balanced with numbers by the men's section and then by the ladies, and a very funny musical sketch by our musical director and one of the tenors. David puts in a huge amount of work, arranging the music and teaching us to sing it, and he is a lively conductor. Several of the audience afterwards said that it was so much fun just watching him. In the photo above, the ladies are singing their number, "I feel pretty" from West Side Story.

As people were coming in, and during the interval, our non-singing members ran a small bar in the foyer and sold raffle tickets. 

At the end of the two performances, with ticket sales and the raffle we had raised in the region of 1,700 €. Some of this will go towards the cost of our new stagewear, but on Monday David, and our stage manager Linda, were able to give a donation of 1,000€ to the charity group Harmony, who work in the local community, helping anyone with a particular need, from transport to hospital, translating legal papers, supporting cancer patients and their families, and giving to any organisation who need help.

Harmony work with both English and Spanish groups, So that made our concerts not just a lot of fun, but really worthwhile too.

I do love the summer fruits that are filling the market just now. The strawberries are just coming to the end of their season, but we have a wide choice of apricots, peaches, paraguayas, and nectarines. This year, for the first time, we have been able to buy small punnets of raspberries and blueberries. They don't keep for long, but they don't need to in my house. And now the cherries are coming in too. We have two different types, and one is sold without any stems - that's the only way I can tell the difference between them. The stemless ones are deemed to be better and are a little more expensive, but I buy whichever looks the ripest. They are usually big and shiny, but this week I spotted a stall that had some at a considerably lower price, and when I look closer I found they were mostly 'twins' where two had grown so close together they had merged. Others were a little misshapen etc so I bought two kilos of them and made some cherry jam.

I made this for the fist time last year, and it was very popular, and already the fourteen jars I made this time have mostly sold. I will look out for another lot of cheaper fruit, maybe towards the end of their season, and make some more, but in case I don't get around to it, I have put a couple of these jars away for us to use!

This week was the publication of the last of my Frida motifs, so here is the first one I made.

This one is called Frida's bouquet. I need five of them to complete my blanket, and then the week after next, the final part will be published giving us the pattern for the border.

I am an untidy worker, and as well as the Frida's blanket, I have several other projects on the go, and each one needs a large selection of coloured yarns, so once again my dining table, (which had been moved from the dining room to the main room because it had become a dumping ground for my knitting!), is again covered in wool, patterns etc. Tango thinks I have done this just for him, and he sits guard over it every day until I see him and shoo him off. He is not supposed to be on the table. But while it is so hot, the dogs wander inside to cool down, so I don't really blame Tango for keeping out of their way.

He seems to be on guard duty most of the time right now. Whenever I sit out on the porch with a cup of tea, first thing in the morning, or after lunch, he jumps up beside it and keeps an eye on it for me. It is not a bad thing because it protects it when Kim hears a noise on the street and rushes out past me to investigate. His tail is likely to knock my tea over if Tango isn't there to break the impact. But one day Tango decided to taste it for me too, and that was a step too far!! He had to get down.

One good thing about the hot weather is that the animals can't be bothered to annoy one another. This week Miki even laid down next to Tango for her siesta. This wouldn't happen in the winter.

A few other positive moments:-

Chris and I have been getting up at 7.30 each morning to take the dogs for a walk. We had to stop for a while as one or other of us had health issues, so it is good to get back into it. The dogs have the run of our outside area all the time, so it is not vital to take them out, but they enjoy it and it does us good too. We have to make ourselves get up for it, because later in the day, the pavements are too hot for their paws. I have seen photos of dogs pads that have been burnt and blistered, so we make sure ours stay in the shade in the afternoons.

Last Sunday was my eldest son's forty-fifth birthday, so we had a long talk on skype which is always nice. I also chatted with son number four. I have just started designing wedding stationery for him. Our youngest son Ben rang me because he was off work with a bad cold and sore throat, and we always chat for at least an hour. Then our middle son rang up from Denmark to arrange his holiday out here in August, and lastly I chatted for ages with my sister Jean on Skype, so it has been a good week for catching up with the family.

We have had a couple of cloudy, rather humid days, so it was good to hear thunder rolling around us, and I like watching the lightening if I am indoors. It didn't result in a good downpour to clear the air, as we had hoped, but later in the night there was some rain. That is quite unusual for June/July, and I am sure the plants enjoyed it. But unfortunately as it fell, it brought with it a lot of red sand and dust, so I had to wash the car windows before I could drive the next day, and the table top and all the garden furniture were brown - not to mention the pool that Chris works so hard to keep sparkling clean for us.

But a little bit of cloud does give us a pretty sky at sunset so here are two photos taken together, one just a little further to the right than the other. So many lovely colours together.

This is not the right conditions for making good pastry, but tomorrow I have (another) party to go to and I offered to take a fruit pie, and a lemon meringue pie! So I made the pastry this morning and left it resting in the fridge, and I cooked the apples, so now I have to go and put it all together. The things we do....!

My internet has just crashed again, so I will go and do my baking and hopefully it will be back up then so I can link this to Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking your World.