Rocking Your World 2019; Week 42

Hi folks. A real quickie today. I have my sister Jean with me this week, and we have been too busy chatting to do much else. The sun has been shining and we have enjoyed relaxing out in the screened porch, eating out a few times, and generally catching up with one another. I took this selfie an hour or so ago. It is not the best photo but I guess it says it like it is!

We are not the only ones who have been relaxing. Tango has mastered the art very well too.

It has been a happy week with both my husband and I celebrating our birthdays on Tuesday and yesterday respectively. Jean brought me a good size note book with the most beautiful cover that she had made. I haven't had time to photograph it, but I will show you soon.

On Tuesday I am going back to UK with her, and I have a fortnight of moving around the family so am not likely to be on here again until week 44 (8th November). I think I need to get some warmer clothes out before I go.

We had a very pretty sky again this week. I love this soft lilac and pink one.

Here is a little meme I spotted this week which made me smile, so I hope it does you too. 

I'll link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking your World, and I'll see you all again soon.

Rocking Your World 2019; Week 41

Hi again folks. Just a quick one today. It has been a fairly uneventful week and it is nice to have one like that sometimes.

It started with our Harvest Festival of Thanksgiving on Sunday - always one of my favourite services.

Here is just some of the gifts brought in by our congregation.

The service was followed by one of our famous community lunches where we all contributed something to be shared out, and as usual there was more than enough to eat.

As a result of the harvest gifts, and items collected over the past few weeks, our two great food bank workers, Keith and Peter, together with their helper Hazel, were able to take a wonderful twenty-six bags of food to Jim at Zurgena Town Hall, to be handed out to needy families in the area.

I had some cards to post on Tuesday and decided to go down to the main Post Office in Mojacar with them. This can be a bit of an ordeal, but now the holiday visitors have mostly gone, it is easier. I still had to drive along the seafront a way to find a parking spot, but it was a nice day for the walk back. This week, each day has started off a bit cloudy, but later the sun has broken through and we have had a lovely sunny day, though there is a touch of autumn in the air in the evenings. Tuesday was particularly cloudy and the sea reflected the sky and was a gunmetal grey, but it was still pleasantly warm. 

That photo was taken looking towards Mojacar Pueblo on my right. Then I turned to face the other way, towards Garrucha on my left, and the sun was out, people were on the beach, and one lady was about to go in for a swim.

It's hard to believe the two photos were taken from the same place, at the same time on the same day.

You may remember that our car broke down when Chris was driving to the airport to join me in UK, just over three weeks ago. It was towed back to village and as soon as we got home, we took it to our mechanic friend. We were getting worried that we had not heard from him, but on Tuesday the call came to say it was ready for collection. It had been a major fault under the dashboard and a whole unit had to be sent away for repair. But I am very happy to say it is now in perfect working order. I am pleased to have it back as the old grey car we keep, for emergencies, and when we have visitors and a second car is needed, seems very heavy to steer after the blue one. We are very grateful for our friend who keeps our cars in running order as we know very little about what goes on under the bonnet!

I am struggling a bit with my left hand but last night I managed to write all my Christmas cards for UK, so I can take them with me at the end of the month for posting nearer the time.

I must share some photos of a dragonfly that came to our garden this week. Very sadly he had died when I found him, but only very recently as he was in perfect condition and still had his colours which soon fade when they die. He hadn't been caught by a cat or he would have been damaged, so probably he was overcome by heat or lack of water.

Isn't he beautiful?. Just look at the pattern on his wings. The Spanish word for dragonfly is libélula which I think sounds lovely. Here is another photo taken from a different angle which clearly shows the bright turquoise triangle just below the wings. This may have originally been the colour of all of its body.

And finally a close up of its eyes which were absolutely amazing. They are made up of hundreds of tiny cells. I hope you can click on the photo to get a closer look, so you can see them. They had an almost holographic effect so you could see right into them.

I do think God's creations are marvelous!

And so to my other go to topic, the sky. Once again we have been blessed with some lovely sunsets, and this one on Monday was something really special. I guess it was pretty windy up high, so it blew the clouds around in spirals and made this gorgeous curl as the sun went down.

But it is not only the sunsets that are lovely. On Thursday I had an early morning appointment at the doctor so I witnessed the sun rising. It was struggling to be seen at first, giving a pretty pearly haze with the Cabrera mountains silhouetted against it.

But as I got further around I looked back towards our house and the clouds broke apart and the sun finally managed to show through. It turned out to be another lovely sunny day.

And that's it for this week, so I will link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World and I'll see you all again next week.

Rocking Your World 2019; Week 40

Hi everyone. Firstly an apology for my lapse in concentration last week, when I somehow managed to publish my post on my craft blog instead of here. But I am back where I belong this week!
This is a significant week for us as it is exactly eleven years since we rolled onto the ferry in Poole, with a very full car, to start our new adventure living in Spain. It was the following year in February that we moved into this house, but we enjoyed our first months here in a rented apartment on the coast, while we set about house-hunting. It was a good decision to move here, and we have no regrets. Let's hope we get to enjoy many more years here.

My smiles for this week revolve around sunflowers. By now you are probably mostly aware that I love sunflowers (and other daisies), and poppies, and more years ago than I care to remember (around 40 I think), I bought a simple summer dress at Wembly market, that was covered in sunflowers. I have always loved it, and have worn it so it is now paper thin, and I doubt the seams will take any more repairs. At the time it was quite 'adventurous', for me anyway, and I took a lot of stick when I wore it. It became a family joke and a symbol for 'Mum'. Some thirty years on, when we moved here, I again wore it regularly but now it was greeted with much more enthusiasm, and my friends all recognise it here too. 

Here it is (on the left), together with a new one bought this year. The new one is more of a sundress so it won't get worn quite so often, but the old one will still make an appearance, even if it is only as a 'house dress'.  Almost two years ago, on my seventieth birthday, the boys bought a plain set of Russian style dolls, and a friend painted them as caricatures of myself with the five boys. Some of the likenesses are really good too. So of course, in the photo they gave the artist to copy, I am wearing 'that dress'.

Now, this week I have given them all something else to smile about as I sent for a Chilly bottle, and of course I chose the one covered in a sunflower design.

This is quite a luxury for a drinking bottle, but it is guaranteed to keep hot drinks hot for 12 hours, and cold drinks cold for 24 hours, and it will be well used as I take a drink to both my choir practices each week. In the winter I take warm honey and lemon which is always cold by the time I finish it, and water or a sharp fruit drink in the summer, which gets decidedly warm by the end. I am also hoping I will be able to take a cold drink on long journeys as bottled water soon warms up in a hot car. So I guess my bottle will be a good investment.

Here are two little visitors that we had this week. I was sitting in the front room with Chris and looked up to see this little gecko high up on the wall. We do see quite a few tiny babies indoors, around an inch in length, but this is the first time I have seen one this size inside. I just left him there and he disappeared. He may be hiding behind the mirror or a picture, but it is more likely he found an open window and went home.

The second visitor was this handsome praying mantis. Again, it is one of the biggest I have seen out here. She was on the path when I went out to the bins so I wanted to encourage her into the garden and onto a plant where she would be less vunerable.  She wasn't keen on being moved and I was surprised at the strength in those long back legs, but eventually I got her to climb the wall and head for the garden. At this time of year she was probably looking for somewhere to lay her eggs.

Both of these visitors are very welcome because they feed on mosquitoes, and other bugs that come to annoy us. So as far as possible we leave them alone and they don't bother us either.

This week I finished another project which I will be writing about at a later date. But since then I have been busy making angels. A few weeks ago I introduced an Advent Angels project at my church where I am encouraging all the congregation to get involved in making little angels. These can be knitted or crocheted, made from felt or fabric, beads, ribbons and even paper. At the start of Advent (four weeks before Christmas), they will be blessed in a service and then we will distribute them along with a card listing all the Christmas services in the three churches of our Chaplaincy, leaving them on supermarket shelves, in bars, on park benches etc. It is a fun little project and lots of people have joined in. To give them some inspiration, and show them what can be done, I am making a few using different methods, to display in each church, along with some patterns. Here are some of my originals that I made before the project launch, and some images taken from the patterns.

And here are a few I have made this week.

I love the little felt one, centre, bottom row but she was very fiddly, so I have enlarged the pattern a little and will have another go. As my arthritic hands find these small pieces difficult to manage, much of the sewing has been replaced using a hot glue gun. I am not very clever with that either, but it is a good way of holding different materials together.

After so many months of blue sky and no clouds, there have been very few sunsets to marvel at. But this week, there is a real change in the air. The days are still hot and sunny, well over 30º on most days, but the evenings are drawing in, and the mornings are often hazy first thing. With more clouds around the sky has been lit up around teatime, so I was quick to take my camera out when I saw this through my window on Monday.

It was subtle and pale, but very pretty. 

My Wednesday night choir practice takes place in a glass fronted building and I saw a beautiful sunset. But we still had ten minutes of singing to do, and by the time we got out, only this bright orange glow remained.

But last night I was just in time to spot this glorious sight. It changes so fast and only lasts for about a quarter of an hour, so it is a case of being in the right place at the right time, and fortunately, yesterday I was.

And on that beautiful note I will leave you and link up with  Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World,