Rocking Your World 2015: Week 19

Hello all. I am going to be my own Friday Smile for this week. 

I got Chris to take this photo of me to use with a brief bio I prepared to go on my Guest Designer spot for the Butterfly Challenge. (You can read about it here and here. The first one is the challenge page, and the second is my description of how I made my card, from my own blog).

It is exactly a year since Tango came to live with us. He was such a poor old thing back then. He is in the middle of his main moult right now, so he still isn´t looking his best, but he looks a lot better than he did then.

Now the challenge has gone live, I shall use this photo as my google profile for a while. My sons change theirs every few weeks but I never think to change mine.

It has been a week of mixed fortunes but there was nothing happened that we couldn´t live with.

Last week I had several comments on my picture of "Miki having a bad hair day"! So today I thought I´d show you one on a "Good hair day". I had just given her a good brush, and she is like a big, fluffy teddybear, but it last for just a few minutes. Then she gives herself a shake and she is back to being a scruffy-muffin again!

While on the subject of animals I though you might like to see what I meant when I was bemoaning the arrival of the circus across the green zone from us last week. By the next day several strange animals appeared, in cages, in pens, and grazing on the sparse vegetation in the green zone.

These ones were no bother.

These were perhaps a little too close for comfort!

I thought this was a very handsome beast. He just stared at me with a rather mournful expression. There were actually several of them and one big black one, but this was the poser!

I took all these photos from our back yard, just outside my craft room window!

What with their bellowing and the lions roaring, and our dogs barking back at them, it was not a very peaceful few days. Fortunately on Thursday they packed up and moved on.

There were a couple of other items of interest in the green zone this week. This is one of my favourite wild flowers. It is a bit like bindweed but is more inclined to be a ground cover, than to climb, though I have seen one very like it on the railings and fences. It is such a pretty colour and flowers so freely. I am happy to see it fighting its way through all the dead branches and grasses just the other side of our back railings.  

Also the pomegranate trees came into flower this week. With their fruit being such a dark pink inside, one might expect the flowers to be pink too, but in fact they are a bright orange-red, so they stand out against the dark leaves even from a distance. 

Wednesday was a bit of a disaster. The car had not sounded quite right in the morning but it was going OK so we decided it was fine for me to go to choir practice in the evening; a 30-40 minute drive from here. Unfortunately, about half way along the motorway I knew something was really wrong. I phoned Chris, who was helpless to do anything, but it was reassuring to talk to him. In the end we decided that I should try again and sure enough I travelled a bit nearer my destination. I did get off the motorway which was a blessing, but I didn´t quite get as far the choir room, before I stopped altogether. The engine was overheating and losing power and I knew I could do some serious damage if I tried to continue. It was then a real test for me, as I would usually sit back and let Chris deal with anything like that, but I was on my own so I had to do it. (I should add here that we are not allowed to contact a friend to come and work on it at the side of the road). I found the insurance policy and rang the office - in Madrid! After some desperate efforts on my behalf to understand the mile-a-minute Spanish instructions that were being barked at me, I managed to explain that I couldn´t understand and needed someone who could speak English - a promise from the company. In fairness, it was getting on for 8.00 by then and most of the staff were going home, but eventually a girl came on to speak to me. I gave her my policy number in English, and confirmed it in Spanish (I can do numbers), and that seemed to exhaust her English vocabulary, so then I had a pigeon English v. pigeon Spanish conversation with several other people. They were having difficulty grasping my location and kept asking for the name of a shop or hotel nearby to help them find me. I tried to explian that I was on an open road with not a shop or house even in sight. But eventually a more local recovery company came on line, and through an interpreter, I managed to tell him where I was, and very soon after that he rolled up to take me, and the car, back home. They would have paid for me to have a taxi but as I have never used a taxi out here, I didn´t know any numbers, so I opted to travel in the pick-up truck, and I did arrive home safely just before dark.

I was quite proud that I had aquitted myself adequately, and I would not worry if I had to do it again, but the thing that really tickled me about it was that, everytime they put me on hold, they played music, and each time it was singing in English "Happy days are here again"!! I couldn´t help but wonder whether they knew what the words were saying.

Sadly the car needs a new water pump and possibly a thermostat, and our mechanic friend is very busy. He has had a quick look and has promised to fix it early next week. With no public transport in and out of the village at all, we really do rely on our cars, but my lovely friend Eileen has lent us hers for a few days, as she will only be going out with her husband in his car over the weekend. So I am mobile until Monday afternoon at least. That is so good of her to trust us with it, and it helps me out a lot as I have several commitments over the weekend.

Seeing as I was tied to the house yesterday, in case our mechanic friend managed to come over to look at the car, I thought I might as well do something useful. So I got out all my knitting for Africa items, to sort them out ready for a shipment next time my courier friend is going over to UK, probably later this  month. The clothes are all sorted really but I had lots of blankets in various stages of completion. I sorted out two black bags full of finished ones, and another one of blankets that need an edge crocheted round them. Then I have a big crate full of squares. Several of my Wednesday group ladies just knit squares at our meetings because they don´t take too much concentration when they are chatting with their friends. So each week I get handed a few more and I throw them all into the crate, full of good intentions to sew them together. I have completed a couple of blankets recently but I think I have around 500 more squares to use! So yesterday I went outside and sorted them all into sizes. They are supposed to all be 6" squares but they vary from four to eight, and everything in between. I then counted them out in groups of around 36, as we make the blankets six by six unless the squares are very small. Then I might do seven by seven. It doesn´t matter if they come up a bit big, but they shouldn´t be any smaller than a metre square. So here are all my piles of squares.

Aren´t they lovely and colourful? They look a bit of a mess with all the strands of wool, but I asked everyone to leave a tail when they had finished, and then, instead of having to sew all the ends in before I join them up, I can use the end to sew up with. They took me very literally, so some have a much longer tail than they need, but that is better than it being too short.

Today another kind friend came round and took two blanket´s worth of squares away to sew up for me, and she promised to enlist some others to help too. It doesn´t take too long once I get started, but they need to be done as it will soon be too hot to sit with a blanket on my knee all evening while I work on it.

I have also managed to do another two pages of my Ireland scrapbook. For this page I used a purchased page template. I have never used one quite like this before. It was designed to take seven photos but I did fit eight on. It also had around forty-four layers i.e. little paper strips, flowers, bunting etc, each of which should be replaced with ones of your choice. I didn´t use them all, and it is still a very busy page, but it makes the finished book quite interesting to look at, and I enjoyed the challenge. I did it all in Adobe photoshop using an Irish digi scrapbook kit called I feel Lucky.

Although we celebrated Mothering Sunday back in March in UK, many other countries have their Mother´s Day this weekend so I decided to do a little feature on my boys, who make me feel so blessed to be a mum. I couldn´t have a much more varied bunch of lads, each with their own speciality, and I love them all to bits. So here is the eldest one, Jim, doing what he does best. As you can see, he is an Anglican vicar, with a church near Wolverhampton. With three children of his own, holding a squalling baby for her christening doesn´t cause him any problems, and at least she stopped crying for the photos!.

Son number two, Mike, is a Peter Pan character who has no intention of ever growing up! He is a people person which makes him very good at his job of fund-raising advisor for The Severn Hospice. He wisely keeps his work very separate from his social media life, so I do not get many photos of him in his official capacity, but I think here he is helping with a raffle at a fund raising event. In his free time he is happiest when he is jumping into rivers with his two sons, or cooking weird and wonderful family meals, or listening to very loud music!

Tom is a clever lad who graduated with a first in Maths with Computing. He is a computer whizz and is very good at advising me or talking me through any problems I have with my machine. My husband is also great with computers but he is not a teacher, so he puts things right for me but can never explain to me what I am doing wrong. Tom is more patient, and we talk on skype. When he gets together with his dad they might as well be talking a foreign language, as I have no idea what they are on about!
He likes to go out for long rides on his bike. This was taken in the hills along the Welsh border where we used to live. The snow never used to put him off at all. A year ago he moved to Denmark when the company he worked for was taken over by a Danish company. So now he is out and about exploring his new surroundings. I can´t wait for our week in July when we join him out there, and get to see some of it for ourselves.

Next is Jonathan, who is a very talented drummer.

He plays in three heavy metal bands, and while it is not my style of music by choice, I love to see him play. He puts every ounce of his heart and soul into it. You can see how fierce he looks! 

This photo was taken by a friend called Robin Hall. They were playing at a weekend heavy rock festival in Cardiff last week, called Red Sun. He lives for the live gigs, but to pay for them, he works at the Manchester branch of The Brighton Institute for Modern Music. He is in the throes of setting up his own recording studio which will realise his dream.

And that brings us to ´my baby´ Ben. He is also a talented musician, playing the piano, guitar and saxophone. But I like it best when he plays and sings the songs he has written. But this week he has discovered Billy Joel, and has recorded himself doing cover versions of two of his songs. I laughed when he told me because Billy Joel is much nearer to my age than Ben´s, but he said the words were just how he feels, and they moved him to want to sing them too. And I guess that´s what music is all about really.

And he is right, they do suit his style.  So here is a rather poor photo that I captured from his video. Unfortunately he hasn´t uploaded his videos to the web so I can´t share them with you as I had hoped to.

So there you have it. You have met the Perry Tribe, and I am sure you can see why I am a proud Mum!

Now all that is left is for me to share a set of beautiful sky photos I caught one day this week.

Isn´t that last one beautiful?!

Now I will go and link up with Annie´s Friday Smiles and Virginia at Celtic House.

Rocking Your World 2015: Week 18

When we moved into this house, like Annie, we inherited some plants, many of which were quite unfamiliar to us. Among them was a lovely palm ´shrub´which I really like. Every couple of years it uncurls a new circle of fronds from the centre, and you can almost see them growing! But of course, eventually the outer round of fronds die, and they need to be cut off close to the stem, so gradually our shrub is turning into a small tree. It is in a pot, as are nearly all our plants, and it is beginning to be a bit top-heavy, and rather unstable, but we are loathe to try to repot it, as it is doing so well in the one it has now, plus it has some vicious thorns at the base of each frond! But now, whenever the high winds come it gets blown over, and it takes the two of us to right it again. It went over this week while I was out, so Chris left it until I got home to help him, and when we went to lift it, we found Paco had taken up residence. He wasn´t a bit impressed when we moved him on.

So here is my Smile for this week.

We are still having some unsettled weather, but it has been a bit better this week, and on the good days it has been up to 30º. (I´d be quite happy if it stayed there for the whole summer!).  But I made good use of one of the cooler days by clearing out our garage. We don´t put the car in there, but it is a general storage room, and anything that doesn´t have a home, gets pushed in there, until we reach the point when it is dangerous to enter! It had just about got there, but now everything has been put away or stacked neatly and safely, and I have some clear floor space, and good access to my big floor-to-ceiling cupboards. It is very satisfying to feel you have actually achieved something by the end of the day.

As you know I am a member of Vera Photography club, and I am becoming more and more aware of the limitations of my bridge camera, though it is very good, and adequate for most of my needs. I am not in a position to rush out and buy an SLR camera, which I may or may not ever learn to use properly, but I have looked at one or two second hand ones. I have to admit I am a bit overwhelmed by all the technical details, so I talked to a man at the last club meeting who was very helpful, and gave me lots of good advice. He also very generously loaned me a camera to try, and gave up an hour of his time to briefly explain a bit about how it works. It was a very expensive piece of equipment and I was half scared to take it out, but I did go for a walk with it that afternoon. As it happened it turned out to not be a very good day for it, as the clouds rolled in and the lighting was quite poor. But I did take some photos and I was quite pleased with them.

The first set were all of the wild flowers that are blooming all over the campo right now. Everywhere is either shades of purple or yellow, or a mixture of the two. 

This last one shows what our potato tree should look like! This was out on the campo so it had either been thrown over the wall by a gardener who no longer wanted it, or had grown from a seed dropped by a bird feeding on the berries. Sadly ours is a very poor specimen compared with this one.

I have not been very satisfied with my landscape photos, so I wanted to try to get more depth of field, so I took this one from the back of our house, and it is better than I usually achieve.

So then I went back to my own camera, and as I now understood a bit more about the manual settings, I had a play around changing the ISO, focal length and shutter speed, just to see what happened. Of all the shots I took, I liked this one. It is dark because it is underexposed, but I like the effect on the sky, and the general look of it.

I also had a go at some close up photos. I am not convinced the ones I took with the borrowed camera were any better than I take with my own on macro setting, but while I was out I did manage to capture this beautiful dragonfly, which kept landing on the ground ahead of me, and taking off again just before I got close enough to see what I was doing.

Then later in the garden I saw this very pretty moth, sitting on our baby citrus tree.

Finally I thought I would try taking photos of the animals, but you know the saying about never working with children or animals ..... They don´t co-operate! Eventually I managed this portrait of Miki, who was having another bad hair day! She looks her usual dopey self and very loveable with it.

Foxy was a bit more willing to pose and she just stares at the lens. Her blue, blue eyes make her very photogenic.

By this time Kim was bored with the whole affair and had wandered off to annoy Tango. He´d love to play but he has had sufficient encounters with Paco to know that cats have sharp claws, so he kept ducking his head to one side to keep out of range!

I had one last attempt to get them in the frame together, even getting involved myself, but Kim  kept his distance even then, and Tango was keeping an eye on him, in case he came too much closer.

We have just brought them all indoors, because, today, the circus arrived in the village. They park their four or five huge lorries on the flat ground across the green zone, immediately behind our house. One of the trailers contains several large cats - usually two or three lions  and a tiger. It makes me nervous that they just have their cage and the trailer side between them and us! It must be their feeding time because I can hear them roaring, and the dogs are barking like mad!  I hate to think of these beautiful animals in cages all day, and then made to perform in the evenings, but it is still allowed out here, and they look healthy and well-cared for. I just wish they were still roaming in the wild, but it is a side of the Spanish culture that we have to accept, even though it goes against our better judgement. Fortunately they will only be there for a few days.

Last week I showed you the lovely lilies that my friend gave me. Well one by one the buds opened, every one of them, and they looked so beautiful. There was only just room for them in the jug. 

Today the first one dropped its petals, and tonight a couple more have gone, but I have had them for almost two weeks so they have done really well.

I had another gift this week, though it was a bit less welcome. I suspect it was Luna who brought it in for me, as she is the huntress!

Yes it was another humbug lizard, and he was considerable bigger than she usually catches. As you can see, he has lost his tail. These are designed to come off easily, and in time he will grow a new one, but when they break off, they continue to swish around really strongly for quite a while, which is probably why Luna let go and ran off. When I found him on the floor he was still in shock, but very much alive, which is why I can hold him so easily. Once recovered, he will run much faster than I can move to catch him. However, I put him out on a sunny windowsill and he soon ran away. Then I found the missing tail on the floor and it was so long!

If that had still been attached to him, he really would have been quite a specimen, for here in the village. I expect they survive better, and grow larger out on the campo, but I have only seen quite tiny ones here, no longer than this tail  from head to toe.

I did manage to crochet a nice firm border around the blanket that I showed you last week. It looks much better for that. Now I am working around another one - made from some more of the squares that people knit for me.

One day recently I must have left the door to my feezer ajar for a while, and there was a layer of ice over everything, so yesterday I decided to clean it all out. I like to go through everything in there occasionally anyway, just so things don´t get lost at the back of a drawer for ever. We are having a second month of ´living from the freezer´for May, something else I do from time to time to ensure a regular turnover of the contents. Because it was a lovely sunny day, I had to do one drawer at a time, and then leave it for while to make sure the temperature didn´t rise too much, so it took me nearly all day to do it. Surprisingly for me, I didn´t find very much that really needed to be thrown away, and now I have nice clean and tidy drawers, and an inventory of what´s in there! That´s going some for me. I was also pleased to find that nearly everything still had its label intact, which takes some of the guess work out of our meals in the weeks ahead. It´s not unknown for Chris to ask what are we having for dinner, only to be told, "I´ll tell you when it´s thawed"!

One thing that I did want to use up quickly was a small bag of raw peach slices. It is almost time for the peaches to be in the market again, and I don´t want any of last years left when they do. So I put them into my blender, still fairly frozen, added a few frozen blackberries from the end of a bag, and just a couple of big frozen strawberries. Then I added a small carton of apple juice and a very over-ripe banana, and blended it all together. The result was too thick to call it a drink, and just too thin to be a proper sorbet, but it was really delicious! I must remember to freeze some more this year, and try to use them up a bit quicker this time. Next time I´ll add a yoghurt instead of the juice and we should have a soft ice-cream.

Because today was a bank holiday in here in Spain, I knew the shops would be closed all day, so I did my food shopping on Wednesday instead. I happened to pop into Lidls and I bought a silicone mould for baking a flan case. I do like silicone bakeware, and I am gradually replacing most of my old metal pans. Nothing really sticks to it, and I thought I might make a better job of a sponge flan than I usually do. So this morning I mixed up a fatless sponge and baked it in the ring mould and it turned out really well. I made a simple cheese-cake style cream and added a thin layer to the sponge and topped it with strawberries. These would normally have ended their season by now, but there are still quite a few around, and probably because they have ripened a bit slower, they have a really good flavour now. I made a bit of a mess with the Quick gel glaze, but I wanted to get it done before we had our lunch, and it didn´t detract from the flan which tasted good!!

I haven´t spent all my week in the kitchen; I have managed to do some crafting. I have completed the card for my guest designer spot, but I can´t show it here as it doesn´t go live until Wednesday. But I also finished another page of my scrapbook about Ireland, and I can show that.

When I had finished sorting the freezer, and enjoyed my blended fruits, I came down to my room just in time to pick up a skype call from my youngest son Ben. We ended up chatting for two hours. Skype is wonderful!! Then after tea, my other son Tom, who lives in Denmark, also Skyped me and we chatted for two hours, so I had a lovely family catch-up day. The world is a smaller place with Skype.

 A few people have been asking about my sky photos, and this week I did manage to catch a couple. One day, when there was just a few clouds around, they began to break up in the evening and as the sun went down they looked really pretty.

And last week, as I came out of choir practice, I did catch a soft sunset with my phone, and several of you left kind comments about that. Well this week, at the same time, there was another lovely sky. Again  I only had my phone with me, but I still got quite a good photo of it. It turned into a really bright firery sunset, which I could see in my rear view mirror as I drove home, but I was on the motor way so I couldn´t stop to try for another shot. Maybe next week I will remember to take my camera to choir with me!

So I will leave you with that lovely sight, and go over to Annie´s Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World at Celtic House, to link this up, and I´ll see you all again next week.