Rocking Your World 2019; Week 21

Well first of all, my apologies for not visiting anyone last week - not until last night anyway. I managed to comment on the hostesses of the two blogs I link up with, but completely forgot to return to visit everyone else. I will make sure I do better this week.

It has been a very quiet week except for one thing. On Sunday it is our local elections, and they are quite important. We have three or four parties to chose from and candidates are elected from them according to how many votes each party gets. And the leader of the one with the most votes becomes the next mayor. This is the one election that 'foreign' residents can vote in, so we will be going to the polling station early on Sunday morning before I go to church. This is the main plaza, with banners flapping in the breeze, and lovely flowers planted all around the platform area. You can just see two beautiful blue jacaranda trees in flower in the background.

They have a good system here, where no-one is allowed to canvass until three weeks before the election. Then, suddenly there are banners and posters on every lamp-posts, and loud speaker vans drive around the streets broadcasting their main aims. This week we have had visitors from each party at our door. We have been here long enough now to know the candidates, and they mostly brought us their manifesto in English. Yesterday they all had a big push and I could hear the main candidates addressing the crowd on the plaza.

This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago when there was a small parade including the village band, on the streets. The poster on the lamp-post is an interesting one. Maria has been our lady mayor for over twenty years and she stands for the PSOE  which is a socialist party. Fran, (pictured on the poster) has worked for her at the Town Hall ever since we came here, but this year he has changed his allegiance to the Ciudadanos  party, and is standing against her. Ciudadanos, meaning Citizens,  is a relatively new party that started in Catalunya, and leans slightly more to the right of PSOE, so the outcome on Sunday should be quite interesting.

However I am not greatly involved with politics, so I will leave it there, and let you know what happens next week.

Meanwhile here are two nice flower photos to brighten my post. The first is a lovely climbing rose that blooms each year on the corner of a house near us. The flowers are tiny and they bloom in huge numbers all at the same time. Every year I think how pretty it is.  

The second is the oleander that grows on the other side of our back railings, just outside my craft room window. It has variegated leaves and a double, double flower that is like a little rose or a camelia. It is covered in flowers already this year.

I had  a lovely afternoon on Wednesday. Unfortunately my English friends are spread over a huge area, so we don't have many opportunities to just meet up for a coffee and a chat. So one of our group offered her home for an English tea-party this week. There was quite a gang of us turned up. The sun shone without being hot enough to 'cook' us, so we sat in groups around her garden, enjoying copious pots of tea, cakes and scones, and dainty sandwiches. Just a few were brave enough to go in the pool while the rest of us looked on, but the water is still quite chilly. We had a lovely natter, and moved on to different groups so we got to chat to lots of folk. It was enjoyed by everyone and we are definitely going to organise something similar again. Unfortunately we were too busy talking to take any photos this time.

I was looking at the oleander through my window last night when I noticed two planes leaving vapour trails in the sky. I went out and watched them as they gradually broke up and melted into the clouds. It was so peaceful out there.

The only sound was the little birds making their way to a resting place for the night. Several chose the wires around a telegraph pole across the green zone, and I had to smile at them. They were constantly swapping places with one another, then settling down again, only to fly off somewhere else. Then back they came again.

A few weeks ago I showed you the beginning of my next crochet project - a blanket for our son Jonathan and his wife, Ella. Progress has been slow because my arthritic hand has been particularly painful this spring, but I try to do a couple of rows each night. This is all I am going to show you of it for now. I'll wait for the big reveal when it is finished but the days are getting much warmer, and I am thinking it will have to go away soon and be finished in the autumn.

Of course, Jonathan and Ella saw it when they were here last week and they loved it, so that is a good incentive to keep working on it while I can.

In the meantime here is a little look at another project I am working on as well. I wanted something more simple and more portable to take to my sewing group on Wednesdays, and also something smaller and lighter for me to handle when I can't manage the big blanket, so I started making some squares. The pattern is again for a large blanket but it is made of 53 different squares and rectangles, with two each of 26 designs, and one large one for the centre, and they are all in the same locking filet stitch I am working for the big blanket. I like the technique and it makes an almost double fabric so it is very warm and cosy for a blanket. I have about six bright colours and dark navy for the contrast on them all. Here are the first two finished pieces with one repeat half made.

They are nice little pieces of work , and quite straightforward after all my practice on the other one, so I should be able to keep working on them for a while yet.

And finally here are two photos of a rare stunning sunset that I spotted through the kitchen window one evening. The sky has been too clear most days for photos like this. Once it starts to get dark here, the light goes very quickly. We don't have twilight like we did in UK. It's either light or dark and you have to be quick to catch the little window between the two.

I prepared this post last night but I just had to come back and add one more photo. I spotted this little gecko as I returned from closing the gate on the dogs after their breakfast. He has chosen to rest on the back railings right by a branch of oleander which is really dead, but it escaped my shears when I was tidying up the bush, because it has another praying mantis nest on it. So I just tied it to the fence until the babies emerge and then I will prune it back. I like the geckos. They eat a lot of unwanted bugs, and just look at those wise eyes, and that dear little hand!

So now I will link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World, and I really will try to visit everyone before the weekend is over.

Rocking Your World 2019: Week 20

Well it has been a busy week here as we collected our son Jonathan and his wife Ella from the airport on Sunday, and took them back last night. It was a short break so we spent as much time with them as possible. 

Unfortunately I did have to go out on Monday morning at it was my first PCC meeting since being elected to the church council, but it was an interesting meeting, and I knew Jon and Ella wanted to do a bit of exploring on their own, so they went out too, and then we all spent a late afternoon/evening together.

They were very lucky with the weather, and both looked sun-kissed after the first day. Jonathan is fair skinned and I had to be very careful with him at the beach etc when he was little, but they both used plenty of sun cream for the rest of the week, and went home with a healthy'glow'.

They spent a lot of their time here, sitting in the fly free porch, or out by the pool when the shade caught up with us in there. Jonathan had one dip, but the water is still on the cool side. We had some leisurely meals and a fair few bottles of wine and beers - at least the men folk did. Neither Ella nor I are drinkers, and we tended to stick to tea and water most of the time. It was lovely to be warm enough sitting outside until bedtime, with a couple of wall lights and a big candle to light our way. Jonathan had plenty to share with us about the recent tour he did with his newest band, and the songs they are booked to record very soon. He is a drummer in a heavy metal band - actually he is involved with five bands, but this is the one that he favours right now. They live in Manchester so they get quite a few opportunities for gigs. Ella is an occupational therapist, so most of her work is confidential, but she shared her hopes for the future.

We were too busy chatting to think about taking photos, but I did like this one of Ella. She just loves all the animals, especially the dogs, and she would never move one off a chair in order to sit on it herself, so here she is perching on the footrest of a lounger, while Paco lays out on the seat!

On Wednesday night we all went for a lovely meal down on Mojacar Playa. There are plenty of people around now, but it isn't yet crowded with summer visitors. Ella is a vegetarian and that just isn't a part of Spanish culture, so we are short on choices of places to go, but that morning I dropped them on the beach, and worked my way along the street, checking the menus outside each eatery, and eventually I found somewhere that actually offered a choice of veggie dishes rather than the one obligatory pasta dish that is the norm. And we all had a lovely meal while the sun set behind us and the sky we could see, gradually turned a lovely pastel shade of pink and purple, before turning dark.

Yesterday was their last day, but they didn't need to be at Almeria airport until 7.00pm, so we decided to leave early and stop off at Nijar Cactus Garden. I am so glad we did. It was really lovely there, with extensive grounds planted with a wide range of cacti and trees, and of course, an area at the end where you could buy them. Here are just a few of the photos I took.

I called Chris and Jon to turn round just as they reached a large prickly plant...

... and at the same time, Ella was on the lower path, busy taking photos too.

The views were amazing with a range of mountains all around us standing out against a deep blue sky.

In the centre of the garden there was a small amphitheatre and I know the garden has been used as a venue for concerts, so I guess that's where they are held.

Much of the land was covered with a succulent that was a mass of small lilac daisies. It was like a carpet and looked so pretty. This area was particularly dense and it smelled a bit like almond essence.

This tree caught my eye. It was covered in big seed pods that had lots of white 'fluff' about to burst out. I asked the man in charge what it was and he said it was a kapok tree. I remember when soft toys and cushions were stuffed with kapok, before polyester fibres were so readily available.

A few more plants that I liked...

As we got to the end of our walk we came to a round raised bed with a very big cactus 'tree' in the centre.

It was rather splendid so we tried to all get into a selfie together in front of it. It doesn't do anyone any favours, (especially me), but at least we got a photo of us all together.

Of course we stopped to peruse the rows of plants on sale and came away with a few small ones. I bought one pot of the little lilac ground cover succulent. I was considering a second one, but the man told me one would cover a square metre of ground in a year, so I thought that was enough for now.

We bought two others that were rather special. This one has a long Latin name but is generally known as the dessert rose. This morning I went to the garden centre and bought a pretty hanging pot to plant it in.

This one has the fancy name Tilansia Cyanea, but is sometimes referred to as the Pink Quill plant. It is part of the family of 'Air plants', that need very little, if any, soil, but it is planted in a little soil and the care instructions apparently need to be followed quite carefully to keep it going. But it is such a striking colour, and something a bit different for the garden.

After that we continued to the airport and still had enough time to sit and have a drink with the youngsters before seeing them go through to their flight.

I have little other news this week, and I haven't had time to sort though the last section of my Ronda photos. But I will try to get them done and up in a post in the next few days, and I'll give a link to it next week.

So now I will leave you with another lovely smiley photo of our 7 year old great-grandson Isaac. It is the end of the season for the three football clubs he trains with, and he was awarded the "Best boy on the Block" trophy. He looks so very pleased with it.

Now its over to A Stitch in time and Celtic House to link up with Annie's Friday Smiles and Rocking Your World. Have a lovely week everyone.