Rocking Your World 2017: Week 10

Hi folks. yes I have remembered it is Friday this week, so here are a few positives taken from the last few days.

Here is my rather strange smile for this week. Those who follow my blog regularly will know that my son Ben had an accident on his push-bike a few weeks ago which, amongst other things,  left him with two broken wrists. The right one needed an operation and he now has a fair-sized metal plate in it, but today he had the dressing removed and what made me smile was not that it has healed so well, though that of course is a real positive, but the fact that when the nurse removed the dressing, and accidentally removed a patch of skin as well (!) she put a Star Wars plaster on it. (Ben is a young man of thirty years old). I'd have thought they might reserve those for the children. Of course he will be wearing a wrist brace for a couple of months yet, but at least he can shower properly now, and even have a swim while he is on holiday if he feeling brave.

Our week got off to a good start with a party on Saturday night for my choir's second birthday. We have come a long way in that time. We all had our partner or a friend with us, so there was quite a crowd. We met in a local, family run bar, and they put on a splendid buffet for us. We were grouped around tables, but there was plenty of mingling and chatting done as well. These are just a couple of pictures I took as I walked around the room.

The man in a red jumper in this one is David Murphy, our musical director.

Natalie, one of our sopranos, made a cake and cut it up into enough pieces for us all to enjoy.

March now has us really feeling like Summer is on the way, but not until it had come in "like a lion...". We started the week with some really nice sunny mornings that deteriorated by tea-time, into grey and windy evenings. The storms roll in quickly and I sat and watched this one forming.

The sky got dark so quickly, and in the picture below you can see a flock of little birds hastily heading home to the shelter of the trees. (You may have to click on the picture to enlarge it, to see them properly).

These storms usually pass as quickly as they come, but they do leave a chill in the air for that night.

However, things are looking up now. We have had some beautiful days, and it is so much warmer. It was almost up to 30º today! We have spent time doing some more tidying up outside. Chris has done one layer of stain on the chairs we bought, and they already look a lot better.

I picked up a bargain in a sale at an English shop in Turre. They had several offers on bedding, and I got a new duvet and pillow case pack, and some cotton fitted sheets which will nice for the summer. So this week, I picked a sunny day and gave them a quick rinse through and by lunch time they were dry and folded ready for me to get on the bed tomorrow. I like to buy bedding at the English shop because we brought our English bed out with us, and the Spanish ones are a different size so their bedding doesn't fit so well.

I went shopping as usual this morning, and I came home with what I went for, plus a box of new plants.

I love the fact that our garden is in the minority here because I try to always have flowers in it. They take a lot of looking after when it heats up, so many people just have palms and cacti. Right now I have a splendid pot of freesias in bloom. I bought them at a table top sale last year and I am really pleased with the way they have come on this season.

I picked a small bunch to have on our table in the sitting room and it smells lovely when I open the doors in the morning. My Easter lily is in the pot in front of them, and as you can see, that has also decided to bloom, rather earlier than usual this year.

At the beginning of the week Chris pointed out that our pink jasmine which climbs all along the front wall, was also ready to burst open, and now, just a few days later, it is covered, and as you can see from all the darker pink bud, there are lots more flowers to come. The smell is heavenly, and it wafts through the whole house when I open the windows. We hear people commenting on it as they walk by, because you really cannot just ignore it. It amazes me afresh every year.

So why did I buy more plants today? Well there is always room for another pot in my garden, and when I drive past a garden centre, my resistance is low. As we don't have mains gas in our village, and electricity is too expensive to use for everything, we mostly have some appliances that run on bottled butane gas. For us that is the water heater, the cooker hob, and the fire in the sitting room. Whenever possible the bottles are housed outside and the gas fed in through a tube, so we have one for the fire right outside our window on the front of the house. Partly to hide it (the bottles are bright orange), and partly to shelter it from any extremes of weather, it is inside a little stone and wood house, and I have a pot of plants sitting on this, which are now rather tired and old. So I bought this little broom to replace them. It has small flowers that are very delicate, and will give us a different colour spot for a month or so. Then I may have to add a few summer annuals around it until next year.

I also bought two types of lavender plants to go in a pot round the back, by the new chairs. They smell lovely and are said to repel flies which will be a bonus.

The small and large bright orange daisies are succulents. Their colour is quite harsh but they blend in with everything else and they will have loads of flowers on them in a week or two. And the little pink ones are more baby kalanchoes. They are so robust and flower for ever. I will try to get outside for a while tomorrow to plant them up.

I have been busy this week trying to make a few things for a table at my friends coffee morning soon. I have a few bits and pieces now but still need to get more done. I wanted to try something I had seen in a shadow box frame but I have not been able to find any of these out here. When I am in UK I buy them at the Range where they are very cheap, but I don't have room in my case to bring back many. I went to The Range website and apparently they send to ten European countries, but not to Spain!? So my lovely sister Jean has stepped in and bought some for me, and the parcel is winging its way over to me as I write this. (There are other companies who sell them, who will deliver here, but their prices are more than treble the prices at The Range).

Anyway, that just leaves me with some lovely sunsets for you to enjoy. Earlier in the week, when the clouds were around, there were some stunning evening skies. As I have taken many like this  before, I concentrated on my favourite style of using the surrounding foliage etc as black silhouettes against the sky, so here we go.

I haven't forgotten that I said I would show last week's carnival photos today, so I will link up with Rocking Your World, and Annie's Friday Smiles first, and then I will add a few from the carnival. They don't need much explanation. Just enjoy seeing other folk having some fun. I love the way the tiny children and their parents all join in. The man from the Farmacia always does something daft with his friends, and one family group together to do a display that has their wheelchair-based son at the centre. This year he was a very splendid Neptune. The Granny in her bed had to come out of her mask for some air every now and then, and there were a lot of Red Riding Hoods and Wolves following on behind her.

Rocking Your World 2017: Week 9

Hi everyone. Sorry I am a day late posting this week. My reason - I was busy yesterday and I simply forgot it was Friday!! Unlike those of you who still have to earn a living, when you are retired, Friday loses some of its significance, so it becomes just another day. As we were going to bed last night, Chris said "Have you done your blog?" and I thought 'Oh my goodness it is Friday again already, and, no I haven't!' How fast the weeks fly by.

So here is something that made me smile. I think it was mum who liked the Mabel Lucie Attwell illustrations of chubby, rosy faced children. They were certainly a part of my childhood, and recently they have started appearing again. My daughter-in-law, Jo,  had three babies with round, rosy cheeks and I used to tell her they reminded me of Lucie Attwell children, but she didn't know what I was talking about, so I started sending little pictures to her when I saw one. This week I happened to glance at my phone and saw this picture. Jo is a knitter too, so I thought "I must send that to Jo when I get to the computer", (I am not very good at doing anything with my phone except reading stuff, and making calls of course). So when I got to my computer I looked for it and found that it was Jo who had sent it to me. Great minds think alike etc..  That really did make me smile.

Anyway, this week was a special one in our region, because 28th of February is Día de Andalucía, so it fell on Tuesday this week. As it happened, Carnival Day was also on Tuesday. They don't often coincide, and our village folk prefer it when they get two days to have fun, but they made the most of it anyway.

The day always starts in the big marquee left standing in the car park since Christmas especially for this celebration. It is day all about tradition and follows the same lines each year. The same lovely pictures of the autonomous regions in Andalucía form the backdrop to the stage, and the green and white stripped bunting stretches across the roof. The proceedings started with the village band marching down to the plaza, and then one of the dancing schools in the village did a display.

There were some really young children in this group, and they were so cute, trying really  hard to remember the moves, and follow the older ones.

Next the village choir sang some rousing songs, and during some of them, the two older girls who run the dancing school, did some dancing themselves and they were very accomplished.

The crowd love it when they start stamping, and on the hollow wooden stage floor it does sound pretty impressive.

Then it was the turn of the other local dancing school.These were a bit older children so they have several years experience, and again they did an excellent display.

The final act was a girl who danced while a small group of musicians played and sang to accompany her. This is a very popular form of entertainment and every one enjoyed watching them.

After the concert there is a fiesta meal provided, of meats and cheeses, breads and salads, all laid out on long trestle tables at the back of the marquee. We don't normally stay for this so we went home for a rest before going back over at 5.00 for the carnival. Because I am late writing this, and have several other pressing things to do today, I am going to keep my photos of the carnival to show you next week.

Fortunately it was a lovely sunny day - many of the carnival costumes are a bit skimpy and some years the participants look frozen! This year it stayed quite pleasant, so after we had watched the parade, we went for a quick drink in a local bar and then went home to enjoy some pancakes. So two Spanish traditions and then an English one, all in the same day  , not bad eh!

Once again the sun has brought the flowers out. I bought a little pot of narcissi in Lidl a few week ago and they all flowered together this week. One was a single flower and the others were doubles and they smell so lovely too.

I also bought three little primrose plants to brighten up a tired trough that hangs on the railings outside my craft room window. It had dried out completely and I decided it was time to tip it out and start again with fresh compost and plants. It is just in front of the row of seats I showed last week, and it is nice to have something pretty to look at when we are sitting there. It is a very sunny spot and I know the primroses won't last there for long, but I have put several cutting of succulents around them to take over when the flowers die.

And finally, my osteospermums have all flowered. I put four colours in the pot last year and was fairly sure the more common white one would survive, but I thought the others might die off at the end of the season. But in fact, all four have flowered again, and they look so lovely all together. I love daisy-type flowers.

Apart from the excitement of Tuesday, it has been a fairly quiet week, so I have been able to relax on a lounger in the porch and do some crochet on sunny afternoons, and we've even managed to eat lunch out there on several days. I have also spent time in my craft room and I have completed seven more pages of my Ireland holiday scrapbook. I will post just two of them here. They were made as a pair to go opposite one another in my album.

I also spent some time in the kitchen. Last week I made a big batch of piccalilli, which I have already sold a lot of, but several people have asked me for my Hot chili and ginger jam, which I make less often, as it is slower to sell. But as I had people asking for it, I decided to get making. It involves peeling and chopping rather a lot of fresh root ginger and garlic, but the next part is a lot easier now I have my big, super-fast processor. I also have to cut and de-seed a huge catering size can of tomatoes, so it is an all-day job. But I got it done and now my kitchen will smell of it for a week or more! But I will have some happy customers so it is worth it.

Last night we had a bit of a shock weather-wise. It was the end of a lovely day, but with no warning, (it wasn't forecast), and within the space of half an hour, dark black clouds rolled in, there were some heavy squalls of rain, and the wind whistled round the house. Chris and I battled together to tie up the parasol, shut all the windows and shutters, and pull in the loungers under the shelter of the porch. We were too late for some of it, and a plastic chair from the yard ended up right round the other side of the house!, and we had to fish a cushion out of the swimming pool. Today it is still cold, grey and windy, though not quite as bad as last night, but it is forecast to be bright and sunny next week, so that is good. It is all a part of the fun of living in Spain!

Now I have three pretty sunset skies to end with and then I must go and do some baking. It is my turn to do church teas tomorrow with my friend Ann, and we always like to take them some cake.

Aren't those clouds lovely? Now I will link up with Rocking Your World, and Annie's Friday Smiles, and I will try to post again on Friday next week.