Friday Smiles 2024 # Week 4

Hi everyone. I didn't get around to preparing this yesterday as I usually do, but I am sitting here on a beautiful sunny morning catching up on last week.

I am very pleased to say that although the nurse has again wrapped my hand up well, she says it is no longer infected, and I have finished my antibiotics, so hopefully when I go back on Monday, I will be able to have it uncovered, which will make life a lot easier.

I cover it with a silcone glove in the kitchen, but I did manage to mix up some dough and cooked it in the slow cooker. This is so easy and you don't have to let the dough prove because it rises as it cooks. It takes two hours on high, and it made a lovely loaf. It is rounder and flatter than I would have chosen, but my loaf pan is milllimeters too big to go in my cooker pot, so I will look out for a smaller one when I go shopping. The bread was lovely and stayed usable for a couple of days which is all it needed to!

As I walked into the village on market day I spotted something that always gives me a lift. There is an old almond tree on the car park and it had its first flush of blossom out. A sure sign Spring is on the way.

Our weather has been very unprdictable, but the past few days have been sunny and yesterday it was warm enough to be an early summer day. It is cold enough for the fire by tea-time but we have enjoyed eating our lunch outside. The high winds of last week have dropped too but I did get one photo of a very wind-swept sky.

I have sat round the back of the house and watched the starlings flying over the green zone. There are not enough of them to be a true murmuration, but they are still fascinating to watch as they swoop and swerve yet never collide.

I had a long chat with Ben again this week, discussing his play list for his first official gig, playing the piano and singing, on Valentines Day. He is now self-employed as an entertainer and music technician.

I also had a long email from my oldest sister who is 94. She is spending a couple of months with her daughter who lives in France. I need to answer it and also write my annual letter that I normally send out with Christmas cards, but couldn't manage this year. So I am half way through dictating it on my computer, and I am surprised at how well it hears and understands my voice. I will have to edit it a bit at the end, and tailor it to each person, but fortunately all but one of my friends use the internet so I can e-mail to them all.

I also made my first Christmas cards this week for the challenge I enter each month. Sadly the lady who hosts it is 'retiring' for health and life reasons. I am hoping someone else will offer to take it on. A few years ago I might have done, but I am not in the position to make that committment now. But it was a great incentive to make a few cards each month so I was prepared in plenty of time to send them out.

So now I will link up with Annie's Friday Smiles, and go out to enjoy the sunshine.

Friday Smiles 2024 # Week 3

I am starting off today with an interesting cloud formation I saw when driving home the other day. It was like a small door opening into another world. Certainly someone had their eye on us.

But when I zoom out, what do you think it is? A fairly benign frog or something more sinister peeping out over the hills?

The other week folk shared the odd positions that their dogs rest in, so here is one of Leo. He still loves to run up his scratching tree to the platform at the top, and at first he curls up on it. But as he relaxes you can see he is far too big for it now so he just hangs off each end. He was asleep like this but he heard me get my camera and opened his eyes to give me a baleful look.

However he has got the sense to realise that stretching out between dad's legs is a more comfortable bed!

Just before Christmas our son Tom was on a work trip from Denmark to Portugal, so he stopped off with us for a few days on the way home. He brought me five lovely original tiles, two of which make nice big, easy-clean coasters on our new sofa tables. But as I am trying to introduce some blues into the room to complement the new furniture, I chose the two tiles with the most blue in them to frame. They fitted nicely into these shadow box frames, and for now they are up on a shelf, but I hope to wall mount them soon.

I am also getting into doing a bit of crochet again. I don't like sitting twiddling my thumbs in the evenings, and as long as I don't do it for too long at a time, I find it is okay. Always up for a challenge, I am trying a new technique called Tunisian mosaic crochet. It is worked with two colours in alternate rows, using a double ended hook. (I had not seen these before and had to buy one specially). The motifs are hexagons and you work one edge in the main colour, turn around and work back in the second colour. Then do the same for the next edge and so on. The pattern included a basic practice motif to work to learn the new stitches of which there are five. I did a lot of unpicking at first, but I have got the hang of it now, so here is my practice motif in two shades of green. The hexagons for the main blanket are much more complex designs but I think I know what I am doing now.

A couple of pictures from the garden. We have had very strong winds this week and as I said to one of my boys, it is raining oranges. I collected up another twenty yesterday, so I must remember to juice some. But the lemons are not quite ready yet, and so far they are hanging on tight. We have a bumper crop on our one little tree this year. There are at least forty fruits on there. I have no idea what I will do with them all.

And lastly our pink bougainvillia is still looking amazing, so I wnet out when the sun was on it, and took a few pictures. That would brighten up anyone's day.

One good bit of news this week is that I have finally had the biopsy on my hand. The hospital phoned me on Monday and said "You have an apointment at 4.00 tomorrow". It didn't take long and the anaesthetic worked well, but it was quite different from how they do it in UK. There were no screens etc, so I sat and watched. I am not sqeamish and I find it interesting, but I have to admit I was a bit surprised at how much they cut off the wound for testing. I now have to keep it dry for a week or so until I have the two stitches taken out. Hopefully they will find out why it is reluctant to heal completely, and be able to do something about it.

I spent a lovely afternoon with two very dear friends. We drank tea and caught up on our news, put the world to right, and really enjoyed ourselves.

But now it is time to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles.

A bit delayed! I am late posting today because when I woke up this morning I knew that the wound on my hand was infected again, so I went round to the medical centre to have it checked out. Now I am double bandaged and back on strong antibiotics, but hey-ho - hopefully they will get it sorted in the end.