Rocking Your World 2021: Week 19

Well here we go again. It has been a pleasant week on the whole with plenty of grateful moments. I am writing this on Thursday afternoon as tomorrow could be a busy day.

In the morning we are both going for our second vaccinations. They are two hours apart, which is a bit better than the first ones which were two days apart, but if the queues are anything like last time, we will be lucky to be home again by mid-afternoon! But we are not really complaining. It will be a good thing to have had them.

The week started off a bit shaky with windy days, clouds and some more rain, but it has got steadily better and today it is 'wall-to-wall' sunshine, and temperatures are in the upper twenties, even touching thirty some early afternoons. 

We have got a lot more clearing up done in the garden, (well mostly Chris has), and there is a big pile of broken chairs, old lounger cushions, rusty fencing wire and cracked pots to all go out by the bin tonight. We are fortunate to have two nights every month when we can put any large items out next to the bin, and the next morning the council workers come round with a grabber-lorry to collect them. Quite a bit disappears before they get there, but that's fine. If someone else can use what we have finished with, they are welcome to it.

This week I finished my craft project and needed to send it on its way to UK so I parcelled it up carefully and downloaded a customs form and we decided it was better to send it from the main post office in Mojacar rather than our little village one, so yesterday we drove down there.

Because it was such a lovely morning, and parking at the P.O. is at a premium, we parked on the sea front and walked up to office. On the way back we stopped to take a few photos. The sea was very lively, with waves breaking a long way out with a line of foam, and then rolling in and breaking again. It is so hard to catch this on camera, but here are a couple of shots.

The sea was very noisy. I tried to take a short video but I am useless at videos and ended up with nothing worth sharing.

There have been more signs of life in the garden. I was very pleased to spot this a few days ago.

It doesn't look much yet but it is flower buds coming on my baby silk tree. It will be the first year it has flowered so maybe in a week or two I will have some flowers to show you.

In the green zone behind us there are some splashes of bright orange which I know are flowers on the wild pomegranate tree. It looks as though it is fighting with a wild grape vine this year, that the birds must have planted there.

Plants have a habit of just appearing here and a couple of years ago we noticed a new 'stick' just beyond our back railings. It has grown quite quickly but we didn't know what it was. This year it is a small tree.

It is now covered with tiny clusters of flower buds. From this we realised it is an olive tree, again planted by birds or the goats that occasionally visit here. There are several olive trees down in the green zone but they are not looked after by anyone, so the goats have a feast when they come here. 

When our first two dogs were puppies and we used to walk them on the campo over the road, they used to rush to scavenge under the olive trees and the vet said the oil was good for their skin, and the pips would just pass through them, so I suppose it is the same of the goats.

Last week I posted a picture of what I thought was a type of ladybird, with an extra long body. I also put the picture on Facebook in a group I belong to called Wildlife in S.Spain. It has lots of very knowledgeable members and one soon told me that it is in fact a leaf beetle. So I also posted this picture of another similar critter I found this week, though I wouldn't want to count the spots on him.

That one stumped most people but eventually one member told me it is also a type of leaf beetle found only in S.Spain, Portugal and Morocco. It goes by the fancy name of Lachnaia Variolosa. I love that group. They are all willing to share their knowledge and I have learned so much from them. I am pleased to say I have also been able to help a few folk out too.

I was sent a lovely video by my daughter-in-law today, of our latest grandchild. She is changing so fast. Her features are settling down and she no longer looks 'new-born'. I am so happy they are keeping me updated. It will be lovely when I can come and see her.

These two made me smile today. Being somewhat short in stature, I keep a small plastic stool handy in the kitchen, and Tango likes to curl up under it, with his chin resting on the bar. Today Tolly wanted him to come and play, so he sat close to him, and then started rolling around next to him, just inviting some interaction.

Tango wasn't having any of it so Tolly started patting at him through the side of the stall. When this got no reaction either he jumped in on top of him, and then there was trouble! Tolly just won't learn when the answer is 'No'!

Although there have been plenty of smiles, not everything this week has been plain sailing. They say troubles come in threes. Well our first one was on Tuesday afternoon when I heard water running in the bathroom. I thought Chris had chosen an odd time to have a shower but when I went to check I found water flowing under the door of the second bathroom. (It is not used as much as the main one except when we have visitors). On investigation I found it was hot water and it was rapidly flowing all over the bathroom floor, and down the corridor in both directions. I called Chris to come quick and he located the link to the joint below the hot tap at the sink. So he rushed outside to turn the water off, and I set to with mop and bucket. Four buckets later we could walk without paddling. Fortunately we know a local plumber so Chris went round to speak to him and later that afternoon he called round. We had to pop down to a builder's merchant at the bottom of the village for some spare parts, but he soon had it fixed and we could turn the water back on. So I was very grateful for the plumber's quick and efficient response.

This morning I made a fresh fruit salad for breakfast and when I put all the peelings into the waste disposal I found the air switch no longer works. This is not a major disaster but I love that machine and use it several times every day. So we called up the folk who installed it and they promised to come as soon as they were free. 

Then at lunch time, the tall pull-out cupboard in the kitchen came off its runners so I couldn't shut it. Again Chris came to rescue and we shored it up so it is safe, and I again rang the man who installed it (The same man as above) and let him know I had two problems for him to deal with. Neither are his fault, not the fault of the actual items, so I guess I have to take some of the blame. Though I do get annoyed when something is made for use in a kitchen but can't handle heavy use. I will have to try to rearrange the cupboards to even out the weight in each one, but I don't have a lot of options! Anyway I am sure Dave will pop in on his way home from work tonight or tomorrow.

And we have had our three troubles so hopefully nothing else will go wrong for a while.

I shall link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World tomorrow and then get this published.

P.S. Friday morning and all three of our 'troubles' are now sorted. Grateful sigh!!
Now we are off to face the vaccination queues.

Rocking Your World 2021; Week 18

Well it is that time again, when we reflect on the happier moments from last week, but I have little news as it has been a quiet week. We have had all kinds of weather from hot and sunny, to too windy to open the door safely, to dull, warm and overcast, to heavy rain bringing in so much red sand from Africa you would think we lived in a desert.  Chris was using the power washer this morning to try and shift some of it. 

But in between the bad bits we have managed to do a good bit of clearing outside, and I got two loads of washing dry, even if I did have one eye on the clouds until I brought it in again.

The combination of rain and sun have brought all the plants on well. I was so pleased to see these gorgeous orange hibiscus out. The plant was suddenly infested with black-fly earlier this year and I thought it might die. It lost all its first buds, but I sprayed it and slowly it is recovering I think. It certainly managed to produce some beautiful flowers this week.

As I had hoped last week, my lilac mini-daisies are out all over the ground cover plant, and there are also flowers on all the cuttings I took in the autumn now.

As you know I love all the daisy flowers so I was equally happy to see these little gallardias out. They were self-seeded by insects or birds a few years ago and every year they produce so many little sunshine faces. I love them.

One other daisy that is struggling but still going is this shocking pink one. It is a ground cover succulent that can be smothered in these quite large flowers. Mine was swamped by other plants but this one stem is clinging to life so I may be able to rescue it.

I always refer to it as the 'crawling daisy'; a joke between the biology teacher and myself from my days as laboratory assistant at a private girls school. But it actually goes by many names and here are some of them. "Sally-my-handsome, Hottentot fig marigold, Giant pig-face, Sea fig, or Sour fig." In general it is just known as the Pig-face plant, a name I don't think it deserves! Of course it has a proper name too which is Carpobrotus Acinaciformis. I think I'll stick to pink crawling daisy. Its bright colour looks very dramatic when you see it tumbling down a bank with no space between the flowers.

Yesterday was quite sunny all afternoon though rain was threatening, but we both noticed how clear the Cabrera mountains looked from our house. They are often a bit blurry even on a good day, but the air must have been just right and I took this photo of them.

But when I turned around, the sky behind me looked like this!

However, it all cleared away again without shedding any rain on us, and it was so warm that we both sat out on the porch until bed-time, for the first time this year.

On Wednesday, I had my usual evening video call with my youngest son Ben. We often put the world to rights for a couple of hours each week, and it was getting late when he said 'I wish you could see the full moon outside my window. It is beautiful tonight'. Then he went outside to send me a picture of it. So when we had said Good-night, I went outside to look at our moon. This was around mid-night and the moon was covered with patchy clouds, though I could see where it was. I waited patiently as the clouds drifted across it, almost revealing it and then hiding it again, until finally there it was, in all its splendour. And it was indeed a beautiful one. Well worth waiting for. These photos were all taken on my phone. It has a really good camera, though I could do with steadier hands for these zoom shots!

The last bit of this post may be too creepy crawly for some of you, but all the wildlife does fascinate me.

The back wall of our house gets the full sun all afternoon, the hottest part of the day, so it soaks in the heat and you can feel the warmth coming from it right through the evening. This makes it quite attractive to the bugs and this week as I walked past I noticed this lovely little caterpillar walking up it.

I have seen the odd one of these before so I know it is the caterpillar of the Spanish festoon butterfly, a very pretty yellow one with blue and red spots on its wings. I have read on a wildlife in S.Spain group that I follow, that the caterpillars love the plant called Dutchman's pipe, which is an invasive weed that has interesting dark purple pitcher flowers and huge seed pods. It is a bit like bindweed and can be a problem in the garden, but I knew there was some growing just beyond our back railings on the bank of the green zone, so I went to look at it, and sure enough there were at least a dozen of these caterpillars in plain site. We see very few butterflies here, but I am hoping we get one or two this year if the birds don't get them all before they pupate.

I also noticed this lady high up on the same wall so I went in to get my phone to take a photo. But when I got back there, it had gone, and then I saw it had fallen down and was on the ground.

I try not to interfere with the natural order of things, but I knew I had to move it before my cats spotted it so I picked it up and relocated it at the top of a tall plant. It posed beautifully for me before I released it. Just look at that face! It's like something out of a sci-fi movie.

She looked quite mature so I am hoping she makes an egg nest (an otheca) somewhere nearby so I can watch it.

And finally something less scarey. This morning I saw this rather unusual ladybird on a plant next door. It was twice as long as the usual lady bird and it looked big when it opened its wing cases and flew away. I hadn't realised how many different varieties of these are out in Spain until I looked it up. I didn't find a specific name for it, but they were all called lady birds.

Now I can link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World.

I hope everyone is staying safe while enjoying a bit more freedom of movement now. We are looking forward to getting our second injections next week.