Rocking Your World 2021: Week 5

I am feeling quite upbeat today, maybe because the sun is shining. Our outside thermometers are showing 22º in the shade and a whopping 34º in the sun! I have just hung out a long line of washing which I am sure will be dry in an hour or so. Sorry if I am making my UK friends jealous, but this post is about what we are grateful for, and I sure am grateful for warm sunny days in January. Although we moved out here in October  2008, it is now exactly twelve years since we got the keys to our little villa in Los Gallardos, and our first few days here, we had very similar weather.

Sunday was quite bright with a mixture of sun and cloud, so I decided to walk the perimeter of our village, which is as far as we are allowed to go right now. According to my fitbit it took approximately 4,000 steps and was just under 4Km, so that is the extent of our confinement. As I have been a bit of a couch potato while it was so cold and windy, it was far enough for me this time. I was on the lookout for some signs of spring, but everything is only just waking up. The one thing I did see was the acid  yellow flowers of oxalis which grows in profusion over any open ground.

The bees were happy to see it. Several were hovering around this patch and burrowing into the flowers for their nectar.

The winds had settled down a bit which is good as they can be quite cold even when the sun is out, but they were still blowing hard higher up and they brought in this amazing cloud formation over the Cabrera mountains. It looks almost like a big black bird swooping in over up, but I prefer to think of it as angel wings.

On Monday a friend, who has supplied me with bitter oranges from her tree for the last few years, to make my marmalade, rang me to say that they had pruned their tree hard this year so only had about a dozen fruit but I was welcome to them if I wanted them. I still have quite a lot of last year's marmalade on my shelves as most of my sales outlets have dried up, and I have only sold a few jars to friends, but a dozen oranges is just enough to make one batch so I said "Yes please". They dropped them off at our gate on the way to the shops, and I set to and made a dozen jars of marmalade.

It looks so lovely when it is first made, so bright and clear. As it ages it gets much darker and the flavour matures. I actually like it like that, but as a diabetic I have to limit how often I eat it, otherwise it would be on my morning toast every day.

My last visit to the bigger supermarkets was over a fortnight ago, before this hard lock-down was announced. In Lidls I bought myself a little pot of three hyacinth bulbs. They take me back to childhood. My sister and I almost always had a bulb sitting on a glass support full of water so we could watch its roots grow, and I have planted a few most years since then. Here they are not a local plant and Lidls is the only place I have seen them. They do not do well in the garden, but if I do manage to get a pot, I always plant them out after they have flowered in the hope they may come up the next year. When I bought them this year, they were three bulbs in a very small pot, and they were just beginning to show a tight bud from each one. Within days they had stretched their stems and started to open.

I put a small stake in the centre as I thought they would soon become top-heavy, and even so I have trouble keeping them upright. They started off very, very pale pink, almost white, but they have gradually got darker.

This week I found that all three were producing a second head of flowers, hidden deep inside the leaves. I don't think I have ever had that before.

The first heads are fully open now and they are so pretty. I have them in the kitchen as that is where I spend more time, and I don't think they would like having the fire on each evening in the sitting room. When I get up each day, the kitchen is full of their scent. I know they won't last for very long, but when I have to cut them off I will have a second round of flowers to look forward to, so they will have given me pleasure for quite a few weeks.

So the rest of the week has ticked by. Several days we have been able to eat our lunch out on the porch, enjoying this lovely sunshine, and usually ending up snoozing out there before the evening chill creeps in!

I have chatted to some of the boys, read another book and made two more squares for my blanket. As all the squares are the same pattern, just different colours, I thought it would be nice to have a second project running alongside it. So today I have ordered some rather special yarn to make myself a cardigan. Online buying from UK, which has been my usual route, has become too expensive and a bit uncertain until all the new rules about taxes and custom duties is sorted out, so I spent a long time browsing the net until I found a Spanish shop stocking the yarn I wanted. So I am hoping I don't have to wait too long for delivery.

Last night there was a big full moon. I didn't get out with my camera until it was getting quite low in the sky with a few wisps of cloud crossing it, but I took these two photos, one straight after the other, just using slightly different settings on the camera.

And finally I have, of course, a few sky photos to show you. They are all so lovely, so even if they are similar, I have to keep taking pictures of them. The last one was quite different but very beautiful. I may have to make it my header for a while.

Now I will link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World, and then I must go and finish making our lunch so we can eat it outside before we lose the sun.

Rocking Your World 2021: Week 4

Well we have all survived another week, and it has been a very pleasant week here. We have had plenty of sunshine, though the days are short and the evenings chilly, but I have been grateful for the times we have been able to sit out on the porch, even eating our lunch out there on some occasions. The sun isn't guaranteed, and yesterday was grey though the promised rain didn't come. Today it is blowing a gale that nearly swept me off my feet when I went out to feed the dogs. The government have issued warning of coastal danger with 3 metre high waves. I'd love to observe it - from a safe distance of course,(I have great respect for the power of the sea), but we are still confined to the village.

One thing that has made me smile is our furry friends. They seem to play musical chairs - or beds - and keep moving around. The dogs beds are on the patio behind our chairs and when I turned round on Wednesday I found Tolly had taken over Foxy's bed, and Foxy was sitting in the corner, apparently unwilling to claim it back. At least she was sitting in a ray of sunshine.

A few minutes later when I look, Foxy had moved to Kim's big bed, and Kim was laying on the tiles between them, but he would certainly have claimed his back if he wanted to lie on it!

Another thing that makes me smile is our little lemon tree. 90% of our land is tiled so we have few places to grow anything in the ground, but right outside my kitchen door there is a small square where a different tree had once stood, and a few years ago we bought a tiny lemon tree to plant there. It flourished and is now well established. I see it every day as I feed the dogs just under it. Yesterday I noticed there were new buds and the odd blossom on it. It always fascinates me as it is the only tree I know that can have buds, blossom, baby fruit, developing fruit, and ripe mature fruit on it all at the same time. Here is a collage of photos I took all on the same day, to show you what I mean.

I have kept myself busy this week in my craft room and am very happy to say that I have finally finished clearing my desk. I now have doubled my working space which is wonderful.

It may not look very cleared, but believe me it is a huge improvement. The green basket on the left, was full and overflowing with stamps and dies that needed to be sorted and filed away. Some had never been used, and others had, but had not been put away. It was a mammoth job and I am determined to clear up after each project is finished this year. That's the plan anyway!

The green basket is now empty, and propped up against the wall so I don't start filling it up again. So here's a quick tour of the rest of my room. 

Up above my desk is the little shelf where I keep a few essentials ready to hand, and I also use it put projects on to dry etc. Above it I still have the old mirror that I decorated and the lovely card that my sister made for my birthday last year.

If I swivel my chair a quarter turn I see the rest of my desk space where my two most important pieces of kit live - that's my big shot die cutting machine and my Silhouette Cameo electronic cutter.

Another quarter turn and I am sitting at  my computer desk. It is very handy to have an office chair that lets me roll between these three spaces without getting up! Above the computer is my notice board with the recently made calendar that helps me plan holidays etc. with the boys when they ring me. And to the left of the computer are my two stacked printers. The lower one is an A4 black ink laser printer, and the big one above it is a flatbed injet colour printer that allows me to print my 12"x 12" album pages.

The rest of the room is shelves of boxes that house all my stash. As you can see I am really quite organised in there, and I like a tidy space to work in, so I am very happy to have sorted the desk area out. Since it was done I have finished two projects but they are not anything I can share yet.

And that is about it for this week. The days pass so quickly. I have managed to do lots of washing and dried it all outside which is always a blessing. 

I have had long phone calls and video calls with the boys, and with my sister, which is uplifting for both sides.

I have read two books on my Kindle while relaxing outside, or in bed. And the evenings have been spent watching TV - some good and some very bad! - while doing my crochet, and feeling cosy in front of the fire

The number of virus cases in our village is falling again and that makes me very happy. The Town Hall have authorised the lorries to drive round in the night, disinfecting all the streets and bin areas, and constantly issue messages of encouragement on Facebook, ending with 'together we will get through this'. It is good to be part of such a caring community.

So I will leave you with two sky photos. Neither were very dramatic, but both were so pretty. Then I will link up with Rocking Your World and Annie's Friday Smiles, and go and see whether Chris is wondering whether there will be any dinner today!

Rocking Your World 2021: Week 3

Here we are, half way through January already, but I haven't got used to writing 2021 yet; have you? Once again it has been a quiet week, but it has been so cold, that staying at home has seemed like a good option, even if we had the choice to go out and about.

We did have a lot of rain to end last week and start this one, but since then it has been much brighter, and quite sunny. It is that time of year when outside is warmer than inside as long as you are in the sun and out of the wind, so we have spent some time sitting on the patio, getting our sunshine vitamin D, but as soon as the sun moves behind the corner of the roof, we scurry indoors because there is a dramatic drop in temperature in the shade. The evenings are cold so we are glad of the fire, and often a lap blanket as well. But we can't complain. Further inland they have had it much worse than us. In Madrid they caught the tail end of storm Filomena and over night they had 30cm of snow, the most that has fallen there in over fifty years. It is a real novelty for them and there have been plenty of videos of folk skating on the ice, building snowmen and having snowball fights. (Everyone wearing a face mask I should add, though social distances sometimes were difficult to maintain!).

I particularly liked this photo taken in Madrid. The snow just covering the statue of a chariot gives it a rather splendid look. 

Mid-week I decided to go to the local bakery and I went the 'long way round' on the road instead of the usual short cut across the mud car park and I am glad I did, though the remaining puddles weren't as bad as I had expected. I stopped to record the reflections of the trees and clouds in the water. The mountains at the back were still a bit misty but we had no more rain.

Chris and I went round the garden emptying any containers as still water is a breeding ground for bugs, even in this cold weather. We have a black plastic dustbin in the front yard where we throw any debris, dead flower heads etc, and it was full to the brim, confirming our feeling that the rain had fallen right through the night. Chris then did some gardening, firstly cutting right back all the roses, and weeding the little patch in the front of the house. There is a very persistent weed that covers this patch all the time. It is quite aromatic when crushed, and the dogs love it, which is why they are watching from behind the gate. You can have too much help!

Chris then turned his attention to the jasmine that flows over the dividing wall between the front yard and the pool area. It is absolutely rampant and really would benefit from being cut right back, but as you can see at the right of the photo, it already has lots of buds for the spring flowering, so we didn't want to be too zealous with the shears. But I did ask Chris to prune back the part that had covered my Bird of paradise tree, so that too could bloom later. So now he has done that it is much better, with both plants able to have their moment of glory when the time is right. Maybe this autumn we will get them both pruned hard, so they can start again next year.

When Chris cut back the roses he found two last flowers that he picked for me. The larger pink one soon began to fade indoors, but the little yellow one was a tight bud and it opened in the warmth of the sitting room, and it is beautifully scented.

Meanwhile, I wandered over to my elephant foot palm and started to peel away last years blades from round the base of the new growth. Hidden right at the base of them, I found masses of tiny black and red flies in a webbed nest. Guessing they were not good, I did my best to move them out of the palm and I think I must have flicked a couple onto my clothes, which then got trapped inside them, because by nightfall I had around thirty bites all over one side of my body. They were so itchy and I covers them with bite cream, but that night I took an antihistamine tablet to calm them down so I could sleep. They continued to itch, though slightly less intensely for a couple of days. Now I can still see the red marks but they are not really bothering me. I haven't had time to identify the flies yet but I shall look them up later. 

I checked the palm again today and although the stems are now bare where the infected blades had been, I found quite a few had settled in the new growth, so I have sprayed them liberally and I shall continue to check on them.

As I said, we are happy to sit by the fire in the evenings. We have the TV on, but Chris often chooses to watch something different on his laptop. Paco has got wise to the fact that Chris sits quite still and has taken to sitting on the back of his chair with his chin resting on Chris' shoulder. He sometimes stays like that for hours.

Tolly on the other hand, has a good sleep after his tea and then wants to play. He is used to climbing onto the back of this chair to play with my string of 'Danish gnomes' that hang there every Christmas. He is very peeved to find they have all been packed away now and is half sulking and half dozing while he decides what else he can do to annoy us!

On Thursday, while Chris was busy in the garden I decided to have a baking session so I mixed up a white bread dough first. I cut the risen dough in half and made four big rolls with one half, and a small loaf with the rest. Then I made a ginger cake. I particularly like this recipe as it is lighter and less dry than some ginger breads are. It uses golden syrup and some of the syrup from preserved ginger, as well as having sultanas, and some of the preserved ginger pieces roughly chopped, added to the mix. It is a very 'wet' mix and the fruit always sinks but it tastes really good!

While Chris taps away on his laptop, and I have one eye on the TV, I still do some crochet each evening. As my hands are not so good during the winter, I only do a few rows each evening, but my squares are coming along nicely. I showed you the colour changing balls of yarn I am using, and the pattern, called Sophie's Dream, is several large squares all made to the same pattern. As long as you can work with a steady tension, you can just get three squares out of each ball. So with my first ball, called Rosewater cocktail, I made these three, and I only had a few meters of yarn left at the end!

 

Now I have almost finished the second ball called Blackberry mint, which started by making the deep blue square. Then the second one was more teal/turquoise. The third square has started out still fairly turquoise, but as you can see from the remaining yarn, it will mainly be an olive green colour. (Not my favourite colour but I know it will fit in with all the others just fine).

And that's about it for this week. We have very high numbers of virus cases in our village again, 49 by yesterday, so we are quite happy to stay home except for absolute essential shopping. I had a visit to the supermarkets yesterday and am unlikely to need to venture any further than the bakery just around the corner, until we are into February. In fact we are expecting tonight's announcement to put us back into a tight lock-down where we are confined to the village, which is why I did the supermarket run yesterday.

But we are warm and well fed, and during the week I have had chats with all the boys. Ben and I had a two hour plus video call on Wednesday night and put the world to rights. It is lovely to be able to chat and laugh with them even though they can't visit us. So we have plenty to be grateful for.

Now I must link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World, and we will see what next week has in store for us.

Rocking Your World 2021: Week 2

Hello again to all my friends and followers. Somehow this year didn't quite get started when it should, so "Week 1" of 2021 didn't happen.

Looking back at the last couple of weeks, very little happened anyway. Both Christmas and New Year's days passed as almost normal days. I did manage to make Christmas dinner a bit special, and both days I was able to video chat with all our boys so that was nice. Most of them had to cancel their plans though the oldest one, living in London,  suddenly found himself in tier 4 just days before Christmas. Two of his sons were away but were expected back for the big day, so after some frantic phone calls and hasty packing, their both got last minute trains and made it home minutes before the  lock-down came into force at mid-night, so their family was complete. The following week Ben managed to get down to his brother's place in Shropshire and arrived home the day before they too were both in tier 4. Now they are struggling to provide home schooling for their children, as well as trying to work from home, but they all have sufficient technology to do it, they all have a warm house to do it in, and so far they all remain in good health, so that is certainly something to be very grateful for.

We still have a certain amount of freedom of movement, but our numbers are rising again (37 in our village, up from the 2 we reached just before Christmas), so we are expecting more restrictions to be imposed soon. Fortunately I went to our 'English' freezer shop early this week, originally just to get my fresh milk, (because I don't like the boxed milk in tea), and I came home with three bags of shopping, as it struck me that we may not be able to get there again for a while, so I may as well do my monthly shop while  I was there. So we have full cupboards and freezer, and I have no intention of straying far from home now for quite a while. Another thing I am grateful for.

We have just had two days of continuous rain, and it is very cold, so home is the best place to be anyway. This week, some areas of Spain have recorded the lowest temperatures since records began.

It hasn't been all bad weather though. We have had some lovely sunny days when sitting outside with our morning cup of tea has been a real pleasure. On the Sunday between Christmas and New Year, we went to a concert by the Los Gallardos and Bédar band, on the plaza in front of the new village theatre. The band members were well spaced out as were the audience. We arrived at the last minute and all the chairs were taken, so we sat on a concrete bench at the side. (A heated cushion would have been nice!). The band are good and it was a nice change from being at home. Everyone was wearing a mask and we were in the fresh air so it felt very safe.

For their last piece, the band all put on red hats and played a Christmas medley. It included 'Jingle bells' and I heard a few lines of 'White Christmas', but most of it was Spanish songs. I did recognise one which our choir sang at a concert last year, and it seems to be included in everything to do with Christmas out here.

The Cabrera mountains made a lovey backdrop for the concert.

I can now share a little project I completed at the end of November but I couldn't show it until I was sure it had arrived at its destination safely. It involved some reminiscing and along the way I picked out these photos, that you might like to see. You are probably aware that I am the youngest of eight siblings, so here is a photo of my Mother with the six children who were born before the war.

Mum is at the back and Grace and Evelyn are both in front of her. Evelyn sadly died last year, just after her 92nd birthday and Grace a few years before that. Also both my brothers have passed away. The youngest in the photo is Dorothy who is now around 85 (I think), and the sister just to her left is Brenda who celebrated her 90th birthday at the beginning of December. It was for her that my little project was undertaken. She was always a gifted sewer, and her first job on leaving school was smocking baby dresses for a shop. 

This next photo was taken  in 1961 and I still find this amazing, it was the only day that mum had all of her eight children at home together!

Jean and I, the two 'post-war' babies, are at the end of the line. We are in age order, and Brenda is standing directly behind mum. When Jean and I were very small, Brenda would make 'crinoline ladies' for us using rose petals for their skirts. She would also embroider the ladies on the corner of hankies, or on tray clothes with crocheted lace for their skirts. 

When she got married, I guess I was about four or five, and Jean and I were her little bridesmaids. I think clothing was still on ration coupons so there was not the material for full crinoline dresses, but she made us each a bonnet that goes with the style. We also had adorable little angora boleros, and I can still remember that.

She has also always loved pansies, so whenever I am making a card for her birthday etc I try to incorporate a pansy in the picture. But for her special birthday - I think 90 is pretty special - I wanted to use a crinoline lady. It turns out that images of them are not in fashion at all, but I eventually found an embroidery pattern, such as she would have sewn many years ago, and adapted it to make a digi-image which I coloured and mounted for her card.

I also found an old pattern for a doily and I knew I had to make it for her. It was in finer cotton than I have used for a long time, worked with a very fine hook, and some was very fiddly to do. There were also a lot of ends to sew in which is not easy to do neatly on such fine work. But I was pleased with the end result, and when I had starched it a little so that it held its shape in transit, I parcelled it up and sent it to Brenda. I now know that it arrived safely and she loves it, so it was worth the effort.

Brenda has three daughters but not even they were allowed to travel to spend time with her on her birthday, so all of us, and wider family and friends, sent one of them photos, slide shows and videos, and they put together a 'family greetings' show. They put it on a DVD so it was easy for her to manage on her own, and she told me how much it meant to her, to watch us all. As you know, family is very important to me, and I am happy that we have managed to keep in touch with each other as our paths diverge, and occasionally cross one another again.

I have made good use of this time at home to continue sorting out my craft room, which I started before Christmas. I have a bad habit when new items arrive, to open them and put them in a basket at the side of my desk until I have tried them out, and then not doing it, so they just stay there. So I had quite a collection of stamps and dies that needed sorting, cataloguing and then filing away. I am almost done now, so I must really try to do better this year - probably not buying new stuff would be a good start. I think I've lost the plot a bit when owning a new stamp etc, outweighs the using of it!

However I did have one creative day when I produced my usual one-page calendar. I like to have a copy above my desk so when the boys ring me about planning a visit I have all the dates to see at a glance. Chris also likes to have a copy on his 'office' wall. Once again I have incorporated all our boys so they are smiling down on me as I sit here. (Have I mentioned, that family are important to me!). I have a flat bed printer so I am able to print these calendars out in A3 size, which makes them easier for me read.

Sadly there were no Three Kings celebrations here this year. We are the only village around here who has this play and fair so it was sadly missed. However my decorations still stayed up until twelfth night, as they always do, and the passed couple of days have been spent taking them down and packing them away. I used some empty plastic boxes to collect things in before finding their correct home, and someone thought they could help!

A couple of others thought it was too much work, and just laid there watching! Since the rain started two days ago, they have hardly moved from this spot!

So now we face another quiet, uneventful week. On the whole I am quite content with this slower pace of life, though sometimes it gets a bit boring. I really miss seeing all the family. It has never been this long without one or other of the boys visiting us, since we moved here nearly twelve years ago, and I have tried to get to visit them as well as my two sisters in Dorset most years. But I do hope and pray that the vaccinations will bring this virus under control, so that soon some semblance of our usual life can return.

Stay safe and sensible everyone, and here is a little message of hope for you all, that was posted on our church Facebook page today.

Now I will just link with Rocking Your World Friday, and Annie's Friday Smiles, before everyone thinks I have disappeared altogether.