Rocking Your World 2018: Week 37

I am starting this week with a photo of my gorgeous great-grandson Alfie. When his family were here in August they were excited because he swam his first ever strokes without armbands on. Now, as you can see here, he has his badge for swimming 5 metres and the same day he got a second one for swimming 5m on his back. He is not four until the week after Christmas, so he is doing really well, and all that practising in our warm pool has paid off.

We have had a funny old week with Summer coming to an abrupt halt, temperatures several degrees lower and black clouds threatening rain most days. On Saturday the rain did come. There were flashes of lightening, and the thunder rolled around the hills, and when it rained, it really rained, several cms in one go. We hastily brought in our porch fan, and folded up the cushions, and I had a mini zoo in the sitting room with five cats and two dogs all refusing to go outside!

As usual, with no guttering on most houses out here, the heavy rain caused water spouts at all the corners of the house. I looked out the front door to make sure all my potted plants were getting a share of the water, and found my daisy pot was washed out to a muddy puddle. Fortunately there was not much left in it and now some new seedlings are popping up, so maybe I won't need to buy new plants in the spring.

At church on Sunday, a friend gave me a bag of almonds from her tree. So on Monday morning I got out an old nutcracker and shelled them all. I always loved the nuts we had at Christmas when I was a child, bought mainly as a treat for dad I think. I used to pester until I was finally allowed to crack some, but Mum never let me do the almonds. They are so hard, and with the old style of crackers, you were likely to crush your fingers and get a nasty blood blister when the shell finally cracked. Fortunately that doesn't happen with the set I have now, so it didn't take to long to shell them all. (Almonds grow abundantly around here, and the local folk put them on a stone and hit them with a hammer to crack them! There are also 'almond presses' in many villages that open for a couple of months each year, and you can take your nuts there to be shelled. They sell the hard wooden shells as fuel).

I managed to get most of mine out whole, and these I soaked in hot water for a while to blanch them, and removed their tough brown skins. The ones I broke, I added to my 'nibbles' box to snack on in the evenings.

This morning we took Chris's car to our mechanic for a service and then he took it for it's Itv (MOT in UK) which I am pleased to say it passed. Andy has a workshop in the yard of his house, out on the campo beyond the urbanisation at the bottom of the village. I followed Chris down in my car so I could bring him home as it is a fairly long walk, and I parked up on a piece of spare ground just before Andy's house to wait for him. While I was waiting I was looking around and I was amazed at the signs of nature all around. There were some fir trees with patches of brown leaves where even they couldn't cope with the heat of the sun. But new leaves were sprouting green all over it, and new bunches of young fir cones were forming.

Below the tree, the bare ground was responding to the recent rain, and tiny seedlings were spring up.

Near to that was this ground cover plant with tiny spears of white flowers on it.

Each one was so tiny, yet so perfect.

The ground is so dry with big cracks in the mud, yet these yellow flowers had found a way to force themselves through and bloom.

Across the road more yellow flowers were fighting their way through the clumps of dry grass, covered in buds just waiting to burst into flower. Isn't nature wonderful?

The land beyond the road is all planted with olive trees and fruit trees, all of which need a lot of water, as they were only planted last year. Next to them is a big reservoir and I have never seen the level of water in it so low. It will  be filled soon with water from the mountains that is piped to all the villages for agricultural use. This in turn, is used to water the fields of trees, and I have to say, they look very healthy on it so far.

You can see in the background, the Cabrera mountains that are often so clear from our house, were this morning swathed in mist. It was probably pretty damp up there. I am happy to say that the sun did break through and it is warm again today. Temperatures are now around the mid twenties which is a lot more comfortable than it was a couple of weeks ago, but it is nice when the sun comes out as well. We are on orange alert for tomorrow and Sunday for storms and local flooding, but I am hoping we are right on the edge of it again, and won't be too badly hit.

In the autumn of 2009, our two way road was dug-up, and a new road was made with one way traffic up into the village. The lane on our side became a parking place, and there were strips each side as pavements. There were no kerbs as everything was on one level. The road was paved in black herringbone bricks, and the pavements in pink bricks, and between the two they put a row of metal bollards. Everyone moaned about them because they were low, and the perfect height to cause a shin injury as most of my family can confirm! We have seen elderly folk fall over them, and because they were so low, you couldn't see them from inside a car, so many car doors bear dents from being parked to close to one. We eventually learned where they were outside our house, so we could park with the driver door between two, but they were a nuisance anyway. If they had made them waist high they wouldn't have been so bad.

Well my happiness is that this week, they have decided to do something about them. (There must have been too many complaints at the town hall!). So a small group of workers are travelling up the road, removing them, and filling the holes with more red bricks. We were surprised at how well they blended in. You could hardly see where the new bricks were - that was until it rained. Now they have had a good soaking the new bricks are bright red next to the old ones that have faded to pink. I don't suppose it will take long for them to blend in properly  though. I just hope people don't abuse them and start parking on the pavements now, or they might find something to replace them with, and we would much rather they didn't!

And now it is time to get ready for my choir practice again. So I will quickly link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World, and go and pack my music bag.