Rocking Your World 2017: Week 13

Hi folks. I'm a bit later posting tonight and also a bit short of time so it will have to be a quickie. 

This week started with a lovely church service for Mothering Sunday. Our Spanish friends were a bit non-plussed because they don't celebrate their Día de Madres, until the first Sunday in May. After the service, all the ladies were given a posy of flowers, made up mainly of the wild daisies and other flowers that are so abundant this year, with just one or two stems of cultivated plants in with them. Mine were yellow and white and they were so pretty, and they are still looking quite good almost a week later.

The week has flown by as I have been busy completing a few little projects so I had enough to fill a small table at my friends coffee morning today. And here it is though it is not a good photo. I nearly forgot to take one, so this was after I had sold quite a few pieces, and as my Easter cards were in individual cellophane bags, there is a lot of light refection from them.

We had a good turnout, and the sun shone for us, so it was a good morning. I took 65€ altogether, and I donated part of that to church funds, (the coffee morning was in order to raise funds for our church), and the rest will go to Greenfields Africa, the charity I continue to support although we no longer knit for them.

Jasmine, who organises these coffee mornings, is always busy knitting and sewing, and like me, she makes jams. She has a variety of fruit trees on her land, so generally she makes the fruit jams and I concentrate on marmalade and pickles, and we sell them together.

There was some excitement at the end as the winners went to choose their raffle prizes.

Half way through the morning I took a little break and had a wander around the garden. I had to take a photo of this splendid cactus in flower. It was so beautiful.

I also spotted this wonderful clump of osteospermums. Such a gorgeous colour, and it was smothered in flowers too.

I did manage to do a little bit of work in my own garden this week, planting out a couple of companula plants in Chris' window box, and finding homes for two pretty minature roses. Both of these were bought from Lidls when I did my monthly food shop yesterday. Their plants are very healthy and well priced too, so they are hard to resist.

We sat out in the fly-free area after lunch today and I watched the big, black, carpenter bees flitting around our purple flowering tree. It is just coming in to bloom now, but the bees stayed up on the top level and didn't fly low enough for me to catch them on camera. I don't know the name of the tree, but it is quite common in gardens out here, more often as a bush, but we bought ours as little standard tree, and it has grown massively. We prune it quite ruthlessly every autumn, but it always grows back, and it has lots of interesting flowers on it. I like its 'pom.pom' stamens, as do the bees.

Just below it is the white shrub I grew from a cutting off my friends one. It is another year on and I still don't know what it is, but again it has an interesting flower, and it continues to produce them right through the summer.

These two have the same flowering season and they complement each other, and look good together.

Out at the front of the house, the flowers are still looking good too. The rose bud I showed last week, has opened into the fullest, multi-layered rose I think we have ever had. It has a second bud just opening now too.

The Easter lily has a couple more flowers on it. Every time I go to look at it, there are at least two black and white spotted beetles in each flower. I don't know what they are. They seem to be collecting the pollen from the stamen, and they don't eat the flower, or damage it in any way, so I leave them alone.

And finally, this one is now just opening in many gardens around here. It is what we call the bottle-brush plant. Again it varies from a shrub to a tall tree. Ours, has to be a shrub in a big pot, as our little patch of plantable land is already full, but it has lots of 'brushes' coming this year. The first one is fully open. I think they are fascinating.

Most of ours are still at this stage, but I can see it will be really good in a week or two.

And that is all for this week, except for this photo of the sky, taken early evening today. It made me smile to see the sky criss-crossed by the vapour trails of all the planes bringing visitors over for some early sunshine. It made me happy, because tomorrow one of the planes will be bringing our youngest son Ben over with his partner, and on Tuesday his nephew Marcus, our grandson, is also coming over. So the chances of me posting next Friday are pretty slim. It will be Ben's last day, and we will probably be out somewhere. Marcus is staying for another week, but he wants some relaxation time before his uni exams, so I may manage to post the following week.

Sorry this photo is slightly blurred. I had forgotten that my camera was set to macro from when I was taking the flower pictures!

Right, I had better get this linked up with Rocking Your World, and Annie's Friday Smiles, and then I shall have a shower before going to bed as we shall be up with the larks in the morning to get to the airport for their early flight.

Rocking Your World 2017: Week 12

I am sure by now you all know that I can't look at a cloud (or a cliff face, or anything else for that matter), without seeing shapes in it. In general I see faces but not always, so when I spotted this picture this week, it made me smile, to know someone else is as daft as I am!

And here is something else which lifted my spirits. When I was so poorly with a virus just after Christmas, my friends Chris and her husband Phil came to visit me, and they brought me a rose plant in a little pot. As soon as I was feeling better, I cleared a space in our little bit of plantable soil and gave it a home. It immediately started to flourish and this week it has a flower.

Isn't it lovely? They had trouble deciding which one to buy but settled on this one because it was called KT-Rosa. There are a couple more buds on it, so it is doing very well for its first year.

As I came through the front garden the other day I went to look at a pot of squill, which have multiplied each year, and normally they have a cone of blue flowers from each bulb. This year there are none. I don't know if this is down to our odd weather this year, or because it is outgrowing its pot, but I will divide it up later in the year and see what happens next winter. But while I was there I saw a dear little viola flower peeping out between the squill leaves. It must have self seeded itself. Later I went back out to take a picture of it, and I found something had had half of it for lunch!

Whenever I hear people talking about our unusual weather, someone always says "But isn't it lovely and green everywhere, and the wild flowers are amazing this year!", and they truly are amazing. The oxalis are turning everywhere a bright, sharp yellow and there are whole fields covered with them where ever you look. On top of that, there are white and mauve flowers like I showed a few weeks ago, but far more of them now. But the one that has just arrived which I am not so keen on, is this.

Out here it is known by its proper name of acacia. I believe our Australian friends call it wattle, and in UK I knew it as mimosa. It used a be a luxury to have a spray or two in a wedding bouquet, but I think that may have gone out of fashion these days. Having looked it up on the internet I learned that mimosa is really a different plant but because they all come from the same wide family, and look so similar,  their names get interchanged, so I guess it will always be mimosa to me. And the reason why I am not so happy to see it appearing is because it grows everywhere in the wild, (not usually cultivated here), and each tree has thousands of flowers on it, and their pollen give me, and many others I know, hayfever! Fortunately I don't suffer as badly as some folk I know, but it is a constant irritant and you just can't escape from it. With all those flowers, there are also a lot of seeds and they germinate easily, and in the wild, no-one is weeding them out, hence the vast number of trees everywhere. I like the look of it, but many of the species around here are not such a pretty yellow. They are a darker, more brownish yellow. I much prefer another type of mimosa plant that grows here, which is also known as the silk tree, and it has long pink fans for its flowers. I was going to buy one for our garden, but the man at the garden centre told me they are too expensive to stock. Anyway, the ground will be yellow with pollen for a few weeks, and then it will be covered with brown dead flowers, followed by thousands of tiny black seeds, and then the long thin leaves fall. It's no wonder people who have one near their land, especially near their pool, keep cutting it down!

It has been another mixed week of days that are warm and sunny in the morning - hot even on some days - so we have been able to eat our meals outside, and I have sat out with my crochet some afternoons too, but then chilly later in the day. Today it is positively cold and I have had my fire on for a while, which is unheard of late in March. But it does mean I have been able to get on with my craft items for next week's sale. It is only a small affair, so I don't need lots of things, but I want enough to make my stall look nice, and I seemed to have a lot of half done projects. So this week I have concentrated on finishing them off. I still have a few to do, but this afternoon I sewed up this little teddy bear.

He was my first attempt at amigarumi crochet, which is making small figures all in double crochet stitch. He is rather cute but I found it awfully fiddly to put together with my fumble-fingers. I knew he was supposed to sit up but I thought he might need something to lean on so first off I sat him next to Arwin. She gave me 'The Look', so I hastily moved him and found he could sit unaided after all.

Cati sent me some nice photos this week of her children that are helped by ASADIS. Several years ago, when Gema was due to start school, I liaised between Cati, Gema's parents and The Lions group, when The Lions bought her a walking frame. At first her muscles were not strong enough for her to use it, but this year, the special needs class at the village school, has an excellent teacher, and he works with Gema in the walker every day, under the guidance of the physio therapist. One of the other children is helping out as well. 

She is gaining confidence now and although the teacher told me that she still needs help with her 'equilibrium', she can now stand unaided and is taking her first independent steps, which is great news. The teacher takes the children outside each day to talk about the weather, clouds etc, and I think in this picture she is laughing at her own shadow.

Yesterday was another local celebration know as the Day of the Old (or of the Grandparents). It is only celebrated in this region of Andalucía, and takes the form of a picnic, up at the area around the sports centre in our village. The origin of this was to give the workers one day when they could break their forty days of fasting for Lent, to enable them to continue working efficiently for the whole time. But around here, the picnic ends with the children all using sticks to break open pinatas made in the shape of old ladies, to get the sweets out of their heads. (Sometimes referred to jokingly as 'bash a granny day'!). It is a strange ritual, and one that I have not been able to learn any reason for, but it is a tradition which goes ahead regardless of the weather or anything else. We often take a picnic and go up there for a while. It is fun to watch the children enjoying it. But this year it was cold and windy and we opted to stay at home. However the Town Hall posted some photos today and it seems a lot of families wrapped up warm and sat enjoying a family picnic. Here is just one of the Grannies who was awaiting her fate.

Some families make their own figures, and other are made by a local day centre and sold in the village shops. Cati went into school and helped her little friends to make one, and she sent me this picture of them all.

Because there have been some clouds this week, we have almost had some pretty sunsets, but the clouds have been too thick by evening on some days. However, there was a lovely peachy pink colour in the sky when I was walking round to my Intercambio group on Tuesday, so I took a photo just to have a different skyline from the usual one in our back yard!

I then turned around and took this one,because I just love the shape of the big, old olive tree  on the rough ground where we start our dog walk each morning. If it were a cultivated tree, it would not have been allowed to grow this big. They are kept small to make picking the olives easier.

I turned out to be the first one at the group, so I continued walking for a bit,  and soon the sky colour deepened and turned pink. My Spanish friend came round the corner and saw me taking the photos, and she told me that in Spain, when the sky is that colour, then they say that the next day will be windy. So I told her our little rhyme "Red sky at night, shepherd's delight: Red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning". But she insisted it wouldn't be a nice day on Wednesday, just windy, and I think she was nearer the truth than I was!

And finally one from last night. After an afternoon of really black clouds that I was sure would drop rain on the pic-nics, it started to clear, and the wind split the clouds into layers giving us this stripey sky.

It has taken me ages to write this tonight. My computer wasn't in the mood to cooperate! So now I will just link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World, and go and see what others have been up to this week.