Rocking your world: Week 5

I am sorry to be posting so late this week. We have been experiencing very high winds, and our internet has been up and down like a yo-yo for the past couple of days, so I am preparing this in Word and hoping we get an ´up`time just long enough for me to cut and paste it into blogger, and add the photos. Then I´ll need another ´up`time long enough to publish it! Hey ho. The sun  is still shining!

So we will start with a little smile. I saw this on the net and could so well relate to it. 

Having two long-haired puss-cats, I know they only have to look at a chair to cover it in fur, and no amount of brushing their coats  makes any difference. They still shed, and look so innocently at me when I moan at them.

Another week has flown by, and despite the high winds we have had some lovely days. I had to smile when I tried to use the outside sink to wash out the cat litter trays this morning. It was blowing so hard I couldn´t even get the water from the tap, to fall straight into the sink.

Although I did quite well losing weight last summer, most of it has crept back on over Christmas so I am having another go, and starting a bit earlier this year. I have a small appetite so the food side is not too difficult for me, but I am hopeless at exercise. So while it is sunny, but not too hot, I am trying to take a brisk walk each day, even if it is only all round the edge of the village.

But one day this week I had to go down to Mojacar for a specialist shop, so I walked along the beach.

 The beach itself was deserted except for these three friends, huddling together. I don´t know how they manage to stay grounded, and don´t just blow away.

It was lovely to stand listening to the waves for a while. They were forming quite a way out, and coming in as a series of two or three, and crashing just before they reached the rocks. I love it when the sea is lively.

I stopped to look at the fountain on the big roundabout on Mojacar Playa. It had been turned down a bit but when it is high the wind blows too much of the spray onto the road, which is dangerous for the drivers, and wasteful, as water is quite a valuable commodity here. It made the bottom jets look more like steam. It was nice to see so many of the Christmas poinsettias were still surviving around the fountain. Often the cold night air kills them off by now, but this year the wind has been quite warm some days, despite being so fierce.

I saw quite a few other flowers in bloom already. This delicate blossom, swaying in the breeze, is on a red-pepper tree, so by the summer, each tiny flower will be a scarlet pepper-corn. I like these trees. They keep their leaves well into the summer and offer welcome shade, as well as looking so pretty with the red berries.

This acid yellow flower is oxalis, and it grows along every road, and on every area of campo. But I think of it as flowing in March, so it is a bit ahead of itself this year.

Outside the information booth, along the playa, I noticed these flowers. The plants are from the aloe vera family, but they remind me of the red-hot pokers we used to grow in the garden in UK. I have one of these in a pot on our yard here, but it is still in tight bud at the minute, so everything must like being down by the sea.

One thing that made me really happy this week, was on Wednesday when I went to Vera bus station to book some tickets for my son. The lady in the little kiosk there spoke no English at all, but she was very helpful, and patient with me while I explained what I wanted. My son Ben is coming out with his partner for their usual few days in Benidorm over half term, and then they are coming by bus to us. A few days later, his partner needs a bus to Alicante for his flight home, ready for work the next day, while Ben stays another week with us. So I needed to book two lots of tickets, making sure all the details of date and time were correct, and giving their passport numbers etc. It took quite a while, but fortunately there was only one man waiting, and he was quite entertained by my faltering Spanish, and her efforts to make sure we were on the same wavelength, and didn´t seem to mind waiting for us at all! But the main thing is, she did understand me and I understood her, which is even more of a challenge, and I came away with the correct tickets. So now I can look forward to their visit mid-February.

On my way back from Mojacar I pulled in at my

favourite viewpoint, from where you can look out over the campo, dotted with little fincas here and there, and just glimpse the sea in between the hills. I took a couple of photos and I liked this one of my shadow moving out towards the Indalo man in the railings. This little man is the icon of Andalucia, and he is taken from some cave drawings discovered to the north of here. He features everywhere, from fences and house walls, to little metal and stone figurines, and even as pendants and bracelets (a favourite gift for tourists to take home with them!). I have seen him painted on commercial lorries, and stamped onto china, in fact you can´t go anywhere around here without spotting him. I am told that if one is given to you it will bring health, wealth and happiness, but being the least superstitious person I know, I am not interested in the legend, but I like the shape of him all the same.

Yesterday was market day on Turre, so I went to stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables as usual. This is the season for peppers and oranges. They look so lovely piled up on all the stalls. I bought a bag of these peppers in mixed colours, for  one euro, and when I got home I found there were ten peppers in the bag! Bargain!

The man on the opposite stall was struggling a bit. It

was too windy to keep his tarpaulin roof pegged in place, so he had just hung a few items on his cross bars, and even those were blowing down every few minutes! Normally he would have several tiers of clothes hanging up and you would have to fight your way between them to see what he had.

I started with a grumpy cat photo so I´ll end with one. This was Tango today. He has finally mastered walking through the fly screen of plastic ropes and chains that hangs across the back door. I leave the door open most of the time so the cats can go in and out. So now Tango likes to go out for a little stroll each day, though he soon returns to snooze in `his´ comfy chair. He was ready to go out today, but when he peeped through the screen and saw everything swaying in the wind, he changed his mind and just sat there. Doesn´t he look cross?!

That wasn´t quite the end because I have some sky photos for you. We had an absolutely stunning sunset on Thursday and I took lots of photos. I picked out the ones I liked best and put a small album on Facebook, so I will just show some of them straight off here too.

Well, now I just hope the internet reconnects soon, so I can link up with Annie´s Friday Smiles, and Rocking your  world over at Virginia´s blog, and then I can get this edited and published.