Friday Smiles 2022: Week 25

Wow. Week 25. Next week we will be half way through the year. How time does fly.

My main story today is about a little 'happening', (it doesn't seem right to call it a fiesta), that took place last Saturday. It was really an extension of a Roman Catholic celebration for last Thursday known as Corpus Christi. Everyone around here though, seems to celebrate it on or near the closest weekend to that day, and for our village it was Saturday. The road was  signed as closed from 7.30 in the evening, so just after that we wandered up to the church, where we found three ladies very busy, designing a floor pattern from coloured salt, pressed through stencils, and setting up an altar table at the head of it.

It was fascinating to watch, and they were finished just before folk started to arrive for a special mass. All the while they were working, the church bells were pealing and close up they are very loud!

At this mass, the children who had their first communiun service last month, again come in their special clothes. For the girls this is usually a white dress, sometmes with a coloured sash etc, and the boys mostly wear variations along a sailor suit style.  The first Communion is a very special day for these children, almost like a wedding, and many families go off after the service for a big, formal meal at a hotel, though some celebrate at home. A Spanish friend told me that all the guests give generous gifts of money to the child which sets up a bank account for them for when they go to college etc. But Corpus Christi is a second chance for them to 'dress up', and they do look lovely.  

During the afternoon families who regularly attend the church, can chose to set up an altar outside their house, and after the mass the priest visits each altar in turn. Four men take it in turns to hold poles supporting a canopy and they walk with the priest, providing him with shade. (He must have been grateful for this on Saturday as it was a very hot day and he had many layers of heavy robes on). 

The children followed the priest carrying baskets or trays of flower petals, with the priest's assistant keeping a watchful eye on them. At each altar the priest knelt on a pad provided and said some set prayers, which I could not hear well enough to understand, but the local folk following said responses. He then turned and held the Monstrance up high and said  something to the crowd, and the children in the procession threw their flower petals at him. You can see they enjoyed doing this! As I understand it, he is asking for a blessing on the house for the next year, and on the home owners, but I do not know what else is said.

This was the first house we stopped at.

This one gives a clear view of an altar ready for the priest, with a white cushion for him to kneel on. His two assistants have to kneel on the hard road!

It took about half an hour to visit each alter. This one is down near us and it is always one of the most ornate ones.

Finally the procession wound its way back up to the church where a similar blessing took place at the far end of the road decoration.

By the time I had walked back down to lower end of the village to meet Chris, all signs of the altars had been swept away! It is a really special day and I like being a follower on the edge.

While we sat outside the church watching the preparations, I spotted a baby bird on the floor. It was a swift, almost fledged, but I knew they are a bird which cannot 'take-off' from ground level. I tried to launch it into a tree, but it couldn't quite get its wings going enough, so I lifted it onto a shaded window ledge out of the way of passing feet. Later a man managed to throw it onto a roof above where I found it, so hopefully its mother came to feed it.

We had a couple of very hot and 'muggy' days at the start of the week, and on Tuesday it was a relief to hear thunder rolling around. We hoped for some rain to clear the air and lay the dust and that evening we did have a couple of short but very heavy downpours. Chris and I rushed outside to pull the new chairs under the porch shelter, and collect the cushions from the ratten furniture. These I just tossed onto the dining table for convenience and when we came in a few minutes later, Tango had already found his comfy spot for the evening! He was still there when I went to bed too.

Yesterday was much clearer and a good few degrees cooler which was a blessing. It was still very warm but we both felt a bit more comfortable. Late in the afternoon a strong wind blew up but I was sheltered in the porch and sat out there until gone midnight. This morning the garden, and the pool which Chris had just cleaned, were full of dried leaves and flower heads, and other debris, but nothing seems to have been damaged.

For some reason I had the urge to bake something yesterday afternoon, so I quickly mixed up a batch of Welsh cakes, and soon had a production line going. They cook really quickly on the griddle so I have to keep an eye on them. We enjoyed some for our tea, and tonight we will have some more, and a few found their way into the freezer. They do freeze very well! They always make me happy and nostalgic too. It is mum's recipe, given to her by the blacksmith's wife that she and her two youngest pre-war children were evacuated to in Wales. Mum lived with us for the last ten years of her life (aged 80-90 bar a couple of months), and she ate like a bird, but she was always happy to have a few Welsh cakes for Sunday tea.

Today, (Thursday), the wind is still blowing a gale outside. I did a little bit of washing and double pegged each item on the line to stop it blowing away. Half an hour later I brought it all in again bone dry. There is nothing better than wind and solar power to dry the washing.

I had a happy moment this week when thanks to a gift from Chris, I was able to order the new phone I have been saving up for. It is a 'posh' one, but as I so enjoy taking photos, and my arthritus means that I cannot carry a camera everywhere as well as my bag, it is important for me to have a phone with a good camera. Nearly always my 'tech-toys' are my son's cast offs, and I am very grateful for them. Sadly my current phone came to me with a cracked screen and over time it has got worse so the cracks now interfere with what I am trying to do. So this time I have chosen the one I want and I am eagarly awaiting its arrival. I think it is in the Netherlands at the minute, and should be here early next week.

Yesterdays windy weather caused some broken clouds to appear in the evening and they just caught the colour from the sun as it set. They were so pretty.

There are lots of lovely flowers in the garden right now and I know many will fade away as the temperature rises, so I thought I would make an 'Annie-style' collage of them to remind me of how lovely they have been. It seems to be a season of mainly pinks and reds.

I rarely add funnies to my posts as they ramble on for long enough without that, but this caught my eye this morning and really made me chuckle, so I thought I would give you something to smile at too. 

This was captioned 'Dads feeding their babies'.

And with that I will link up with Annie's Friday Smiles ready to publish tomorrow.

It is now Friday morning and I am feeling decidedly groggy. I guess I have whatever Chris has had all week, so I will link up now but won't get around to commenting until tomorrow.

Friday Smiles 2022: Week 24

Well I am writing this on Thursday and it's a tad warm today! My family in UK have been posting that it is hot there today but I don't think they have reached anywhere near this.

Admittedly this sign is on our Farmacia store in the sun and I saw it when I walked up to the post office at midday. But when I got home, our own thermometer in our shady porch was showing 36º. These are temperatures we expect on occasional days in July and August but this is only mid-June! It is definitely a day for staying indoors or finding the shadows, and needless to say I am staying in here with my floor fan upped a speed, but now the evening is approaching I shall be having a dip in the pool. It will probably feel like a warm bath.

I have got myself a little problem as I have lost (misplaced) my driving license, which means I am reliant on Chris driving me anywhere I want to go, until I have got a replacement. It was sheer chance I missed it as it is not something I need to look at very often, so I have no idea when or where it went astray. I have made some enquiries and apparently the first step I needed to take was to take out a 'denuncia' which is the Spanish name for any reported crime or incident. So yesterday we made the trip into Garrucha and sat in this waiting room for what seemed like a long time, but eventually the officer who had taken my details, came out with a form which I had to sign. This is my 'denuncia' and now I have taken it to our local gestoria who will do all the rest for me. We could have done it ourselves, downloaded the forms to fill in and then travelled to the Trafíco office in Almeria city to hand them over and hopefully get a temporary license in return. But we really didn't want that journey in this heat so it is worth paying our legal friend to do it all for us.

Chris has managed to complete one more project in the garden; he has cleaned and serviced our 'Susan' and she is now working properly again. We inherited Susan with the house, and perioodically she has worked - she has two water spouts, one from a little tap beside her, and one from her bowl she is holding- but the small trough was constantly filled with dead leaves, and we often forgot to plug the pump in, so they rotted and blocked the tubes. She now has a solar pump with a separate panel that we have fixed to the top of the wall which has sun for most of the day, so there is no need to switch her on and off now. Also we have moved her from the back garden to the front, and she is sitting on a small raised wall next to the jasmine. I have no idea how I came to refer to her as Susan, but I have always liked her. 

She has a lovely serene face. So I am happy to see her working again.

On Tuesday I had a hospital appointment for a follow up on the biopsy test I had done just before I went away. I was happy to hear it came back as negative and there is absolutely nothing to worry about, so that was very reassuring, and was what I was hoping to hear. They will do one further test in a year's time and then if everything is still fine they will sign me off.

We have had a couple of interesting bugs in the garden this week. (Apologies to those of you who don't share my interest in all the creepie crawlies). This first one was in our pool. He was struggling feebly but when I fished him out and layed on the side, I knew he was not going to make it. Lots of bugs come to the pool for a drink and end up drowning. I recognised his markings and knew he was a mammoth wasp. These are quite big compared to their more familiar cousins, his body was about 1½cm, but they are totally non agressive and harmless, and of course they are important member of the pollinators. So I was sad I didn't find him in time to save him.

The second visitor was this little fellow which some of you may recognise as a glow-worm. It was hurrying across my kitchen floor so probably came in on one of the cats. Again I recognised it from previous finds, but they often have much brighter stripes of pink along their sides. They are interesting little creatures and I learned a new fact this week, that they are actually the same species as fireflies, which are adult males. (I thought they were two completely different things). The glow-worm is the larvae stage and females never move on from that, They are the ones that glow on the ground, while the males turn into true brown beetles and fly around looking for a glowing female to mate with. They can of course also glow, hence their name of fireflies. I think mine was an adult female as June and July is the time they are most active, and once she has mated and laid her eggs (which can also glow), she will die. Anyway I relocated her into the grass next door.

Last night around mid-night I went out the back by the kitchen door, where it is very dark, to see if I could spot any glowing glow-worms but there was not a light to be seen.

However I did stop to photograph the almost full moon. I played around with different settings on my camera and chose these two pictures to keep. The one at the bottom was taken on full zoom. I am always amazed that I can get a picture like that on just a phone camera. The top one was taken on the night setting. I couldn't see that dark circle with a naked eye, but apparently the camera could.

And that's about it for this week. So I shall put this away and maybe go for that swim, and I will be ready to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles in the morning.

Friday Smiles 2022; Week 23

As Friday rolls round yet again, it is time to look back at what has made us smile. I am certainly smiling at our two new seats in the fly-free porch. They arrived, as promised, on Monday, and soon Chris had them assembled. They are very comfortable and it is nice not to worry in case you fall through the seat! To be honest the matching foot rests are a little bigger than we had expected, but I do need to put my feet up whenever possible, so they are a real bonus. They are also very sturdy and will double as two extra seats when the family visit in August.

On Monday we needed to visit an office in Garrucha, so as soon as the chairs had been delivered we set off, only to find the office in question was closed all week for staff holidays! So we wandered back to where we had parked the car, and on the way we saw this huge barge being towed into the port by tugs. There is usually one of these moored at the port, taking on vast loads of gravel that is brought from a quarry near Sorbas by a continuous stream of lorries, all day every day, except for Sundays, so we are used to seeing them, and often there are three or more moored out at sea, waiting for their turn to come in and load up, but this is the first time we have seen one being towed in for the last stretch, and it made us realise just how huge they are.

Tuesday was market day and I went over to it to see whether they still had any strawberries. Our strawberry season is much earlier than in UK where they are just getting plentiful now. I realised that as I have been buying fresh aprecots, nectarines and cherries the past couple of weeks, the strawberries must be almost over. Sure enough the first two fruit stalls did not have any, but I did find one stall that had a few and I bought up four trays (1 kg each), in order to make some jam. I haven't done much jam making for the past two years as I was wary of selling from my home kitchen while everyone was being so health conscious, and also I had no real market to sell the surplus. But I am now going to my sewing group and sometimes to church, plus strawberry jam is the one that Chris will eat so I like to have some in the house all year for our own use, so I was pleased to get a few fruit.

So this morning, out came my big preserving pan and soon I had rich red brew bubbling away. It set really fast and I was able to make seventeen jars of jam. 

I think one ploy of the retailers is to make the jars a little smaller than they used to be, rather than raise the price per jar, so maybe that is why I got so many out of my mixture. I was only expecting to get about fourteen jars. Of course they need labels now. I keep a file of labels for any jams and pickles I have made, as I took time to make sure I had the ingredients in correct Spanish, and don't want to do it again every time I make some. So I soon had a page printed off. I just need to write a tiny date on them and add them to the jars, and they will be good to go.

I saw this photo on Facebook today and thought it was quite interesting. I often talk about Mojacar Playa, and sometimes about the Pueblo, but this is the first time I have seen them together on one photo. It is viewed from just off the coast so I suspect it was taken by a drone. The front part is the sea and then the main road that runs along it, and then all the white apartments and holiday houses that make up Mojacar Playa.(They go back further than I has realised).  Beyond that the ground rises steeply until you come to the little white town of Mojacar Pueblo, which has been listed as one of the most beautiful places in Spain. It is a warren of narrow streets, steep rises and falls, pretty patios and cafés, and a small touristy-type shops. Only the outer edges can be reached by car, so it is a good place for a quite stroll through the streets and a refreshing drink on a shady plaza.

I have done a bit in my craft room this week. With the fan on gently behind me, it is the coolest spot late morning and early afternoon, before the sun gets round here. I had a lot of cards to make before the Summer holiday season starts and everything becomes such hard work! So I have been busy with those.

We watched quite a bit of the Jubilee celebrations on TV and enjoyed seeing everyone so happy. I was quite glad I wasn't in the middle of those crowds though. 

I managed not to watch too much of the political shennanigans that have been going on this week. I am not very into politics, but the current situation just makes me mad, and sad for my home country. I just hope the right leader comes along to sort it out soon. 

I have also had long chats with son Ben and my sister Jean, and have dipped in and out of the pool to cool down between tasks.

It has been very hot all week, in the upper thirties most days, and the sky has been mostly clear, so there haven't been many nice sunsets to enjoy, but I did just spot this out the corner of my eye, as I sat here at my computer one evening,  and I rushed out to take a picture.

It didn't last long, and soon settled down into a lovely golden glow.

And with that I will head over to Annie's blog and see what has made you smile this week.

Friday Smiles 2022; Week 22

I seem to have been busy this week, yet I have very little to write about.

I am pleased to say that the cushions for the outside furniture are finished and the planters are filled. 

We returned to the garden centre on Saturday to buy some bags of medium gravel to line the base of the planters and help with drainage as they only have one central drainage hole, and while we were there we bought a pretty red rose to go in one of them. Then we set to and got them all planted up. Everything has settled in nicely, and hopefully we will have some colour there for many weeks to come.

As an extra bonus we have ordered two 'Poang' chairs (IKEA's iconic S-shaped wooden frame chairs). We have had ours for many years, back from when we had our first two pups who chewed the arm rests quite badly. They have been extra seating in the main room for much of the time, but for the last few years they have been our comfortable seating out in the fly-free area, where they have been rained on, suffered a few sand storms, and been beds for most of the animals. But we sit in them every day. It is the one place I can relax in the shade, so it is my 'go-to'seat.  Sadly a couple of weeks ago the seat strapping gave out on Chris' and then a few days later the same thing happened to mine. We did consider restrapping the bases, but really the cushions are almost worn through too, so it seemed reasonable to just replace them. It helped that IKEA have removed their delivery 'zones' which we used to be just outside of, and will now deliver to any postcode in a much wider area. The new ones are due for delivery on Monday. Our nearest IKEA is in Murcia which is a longish drive for us now, and even dismantled, we would have struggled to get two chairs and two matching footstools into our car. We may still have a go at repairing the two old ones as extra outdoor seating when the family come to visit in August.

On Sunday we had planned an afternoon out in Vera for the Lions Club annual Party in the Park. We have been a couple of times before and have always enjoyed it. However it was even hotter than usual and was almost too hot to enjoy wandering round the stalls and sitting in the main area to watch acts on the big stage. So we ended up going to a smaller courtyard labelled 'The Chill Out Bar'. Here we could at least sit down with a cold drink, and we soon found a table under the shade of big sails stretched across the area. For once the mojito is mine, and my chilly bottle of cold water was Chris'! (Other cups and cans were from previous users of the table). When we arrived there was a good small group of country/folk singers and we enjoyed listening to them.

Later it was the turn of Fusion, a community charity band who covered some Irish songs,and songs from a few years back so we actually knew them! and they put on a good hour's entertainment. The lady in red in the centre is our vet's assisstant so we know her quite well. 

Soon after that we went home to feed Kim and the cats, and to cool down in the pool. I am glad we went despite the heat. They are the one charity that we have seen help so many folk around here, both English and Spanish, so I like to support them when I can.

Amazingly we managed to visit all the bars on the Tapas Route, something we don't usually acheive. It took us to a couple of bars that we don't normally go to, and one was very nice. I knew they had changed hands and the name had changed, but we had not been there since the takeover. It has been really well decorated and the staff were friendly and helpful. Their tapas were also very good! Unfortunately it is just too far outside of the village for us to walk to it, but we could still visit it sometimes, maybe at lunchtime, as I drink very little so am still good to drive us home. But neither of us choose to drive at night now unless we have to. We sat in the outside area of the bar where there was  a small additional bar, a children's play area and a huge covered patio with an interesting roof. You can see part of it in ths picture.

To one side of this area there was a tall rock face which has some intersting green plants growing up it and a high waterfall adding a pleasant relaxing sound.

Today I spent the morning clearing our bedroom. It tends to get a lot of 'stuff' dumped in it as we don't have a lot of storage space and often can't think where to put things. But now it is all clear which will help me feel more relaxed tonight. I have one bag of 'very good' clothes that are going to the Lions charity shop tomorrow, two bags of 'well used but wearable' clothes that have gone in the Red Cross dumpster at the edge of the village, and a big bag of general rubbish to go out to the bin tonight. So it was a good morning's work but it left me feeling in need of a rest.

It has continued to be extraordinarily hot all week. We have been glad of the pool to slip into for a cool down most days. When it is so hot, it really pays to get going as early as possible in the mornings and getting what needs to be done, done and dusted by lunchtime, so you can relax in the afternoons.

Unfortuantely, just as were going out on Saturday I noticed a wet area on the path outside the kitchen door, and we soon realised that we have another underground leak. So we have been turning the water off whenever we can, as we are on a meter, and once you have used a certain amount, the bill rises quite steeply. That is understandable as water is a valuable commodity out here, but we had trouble contacting our insurance company, so the man only came to fix it today. However he soon located the leak and mended it, and in a few days time, when the ground has dried out, he will be back to repair the hole in the path! The insurance will only pay for a reapir, so we have found another plumber who will be round soon, to estimate replacing all the pipe from the house, as it is getting old now, and has needed to be repaired three times in the last few years. But he is pretty busy so we may have to wait a while for that, but for now it is fine.

In order to fix the leak we had to move a plastic chair that is Tango's favourite place to snooze in the mornings. He was not impressed but I had to smile when I went out again and found him curled up unter a stool that we had left on top of a cupboard. Anywhere for a bit of shade!

And finally I have two family photos that I have been sent this week. This is our great-grandson Isaac. He likes doing cross country and over the past month he has been involved in the inter-schools competion and after four races he finished in second place for years 5/6 boys, so helping his school to come out on top over all. That is quite an acheivement.

And here he is with his parents and his younger brother Alfie. Baby boy number three is expected to put in an appearance in just four weeks time!

And this is our youngest grand-daughter Aisling with her daddy. Jonathan sent it to me. She is looking so tall and straight, and so much older than when I saw her a month ago, because she has found her feet and is now walking everywhere. 

And with that I will pop over to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles. I hope I managed to visit everyone this week. Apologies if I missed you. Some days when it is too hot, I don't come down to my computer at all.