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.

Rocking Your World 2015; Week 17

Those of you who are regular users of Facebook, (I am because it offers the best way for me to keep up with what all my family are doing), will know that they have introduced a feature whereby they will randomly repost whatever you happened to have posted two years ago. 

I don´t know why they do it, and it can be annoying, but this week it made me smile because they reposted my picture from 20th April, 2013. I had attached the caption, "After 34 years I have finally discovered that I married an Irish Piskie!" Yes it was our wedding anniversary, and Chris was patiently waiting for me to finish a meeting with some lady friends, so he made himself comfortable with a glass of wine, and spying him, I took this photo. (I wish I could sit cross-legged like that!). Then I played around in photoshop and added the pixie hat before posting it on Facebook. We both have some Irish blood, but Chris has more than me, and I thought he might be amused to find himself posing as a ´piskie´.

It just so happens that Virginia, who´s blog I link this to each week, also celebrated her wedding anniversary this week, and she posted her wedding photo, so I thought I should post mine too, so here we are, thirty six years ago. 

Chris´dark frames glasses - the Buddy Holly look? - are right back in fashion now. And my word, I had some hair in those days didn´t I? I remember my friend spent all morning getting a bit of curl into the ends. It was too heavy to stay there for long, but it lasted for the afternoon.

Of course it was my second marriage so it was in a registry office, and the two little fellows at the front are my two sons from my first marriage. They had no contact with their own dad, and Chris did a wonderful job of treating them just the same as the three boys we later had, and the fact that they were anything other than his sons was never mentioned. It wasn´t until we had been married for fourteen years, when I sent the boys to bed and told them to be good boys because I was cooking a special anniversary meal for me and daddy, that one of them asked what anniversary it was. So I said it was our fourteenth, and you could almost see them working it out, and then one said "Did you have Jim and Michael before you were married then?" We had to laugh over it, because that photo had sat on our television all their lives, and they had never once thought to ask why their big brothers were there when we got married! But I´m glad to say, that finally knowing the facts, in no way changed the relationship between them, and they are all great friends together still.

It was a very simple wedding, as we already had a family, and very little money to spare, so after the ceremony we had a very happy get-together of friends and family at home, and that night, Chris´mum took the boys away and we went up to London and saw the musical Tommy on the stage, which is the main reason we called our first son Thomas, and we called him Tommy when he was little. 

One other funny little story attached to that time was provided by my younger son Michael who was nearly six at the time, and in the reception class of the local school. On the last day of the Spring term he had written in his news book "Mummy and Chris are getting married." He obviously wasn´t very impressed with the registry office ceremony because, on the first day of the Summer term, he wrote in his book, "Mummy and Daddy got married. It only lasted five minutes"! Well I´m glad to say it has lasted rather longer then five minutes, so I hope you have smiled along with me as I had a little time of reminiscing.

So on to what has rocked my world this week. We actually have never made a fuss about our anniversaries, and some passed almost unnoticed as we had a young family around, and Chris commuted to London every day so he was home late and tired, but maybe we will push the boat out in another four years when it is the ruby one. But this year it just so happened that we were invited out to lunch with a big group of friends, and although that was on Sunday, one day early, we made it our celebration for this year.

We went to a place called El Castillo, which is a bit off the main road and up on top of a hill so there are lovely views of the surrounding countryside. It is quite a big place with seating for a good crowd, and Sunday is probably their busiest day, but they coped well. There is a lovely patio at the front where you can sit and enjoy the sunshine and the view while you have a drink. (This photo is taken from their own website). But on Sunday it was lovely and sunny but rather windy so we went straight inside to our table that was in the conservatory area.

We were a group of sixteen and the restaurant had laid up a big long table for us. We all ordered something different but we were all more or less served together and there was much banter and laughter, and of course, the consuming of wine. I nearly forgot to take the obligatory photo, but just in time I got this one.

We got home in time to have a late siesta, and then we went down to our local for a night-cap. It turned out to be someone´s birthday. They had had a big dinner party too, and then they had a singer and they invited us to stay and listen to him. It was Jake, our favourite of the local entertainers so we stayed longer than intended, and enjoyed listening to him.

I had a lovely surprise too, because we were sitting with our friends while Jake was playing and Tony disappeared for few minutes. When he returned he presented me with a big bunch of lilies. It was a ´Thank you´ for taking his wife to the hospital last week, and translating for her. It was so unexpected, and really took me by surprise. 

When I got home, I took them out to my outside sink to cut them down a bit, because they had very long stems, and arranged them in my largest vase. They looked lovely, even in bud.

But when I came to move them I realised that they were top-heavy and likely to overturn. I had another think, and suddenly remembered my collection of jugs that live on the dresser in the dining room. I fetched the largest one which has a fat base so it held plenty of water and was heavy enough to be stable. They looked very comfortable in that and during the week they have gradually opened, and now look even more beautiful. And there are still enough in bud for them to last for a second week too.

I suggested that Tony´s wife, Eileen might like to come to the new choir I am in, as she is a great singer, so she has been twice now. She came round on Tuesday and I was able to download all the music for her, and print it off, as she does not have a printer. We are all enjoying the new style of the choir, and are even managing to sing a couple of songs without our books - something we never did achieve in Cantante. It is still a bit scary at times. We are a small group so there is nowhere to hide, and we have to make sure we practise at home to keep up with everyone else. Dave has provided us with very good practice files on the computer, to sing along to, which helps a lot.

I have been fitting in a bit of sewing/knitting/crochet this week, depending which mood I am in. It is all for my Africa project.  Several folk at the Wednesday craft group find that they keep making mistakes in their knitting because they are busy chatting to everyone - which is what it is all about really - so they sit and knit squares for me as they don´t need too much concentration. As a result, I come home most weeks with three or four squares to add to my collection. All of a sudden I found I had a whole crate of them in the garage and I thought it was about time I stitched some together. Although we aim to make them all six inches square, they do come to me in assorted sizes, so I picked out 36 that looked around the same size and stitched them together. Then I found some dark green wool and crocheted round the edge. It doesn´t seem to matter what colour they are, and many of them are two or three colours as people use up all their odds and ends of wool, but they always make up into a lovely bright blanket that will be highly prized by an African mum.

I must try to get some more of them put together soon, before I make up my next consignment for transporting to UK. One of my friends had her sister over on holiday for a couple of weeks and she wanted something to do while she was here, so she took 72 squares away and the day before she went home, she gave me two more blankets all stitched up. I just have to go round them with a crocheted border which doesn´t take me long to do. Wasn´t that kind of her?

I have also just finished the main body of the blanket I have been making myself. A few weeks ago I showed

a parcel of wool that had just arrived. I had a pattern for a crocheted blanket that was made all in one piece, and I thought this variegated wool would be just the thing to introduce plenty of colour, without me having loads of ends to sew in when it was finished. I still have a few ends of course, but the blanket only took about three and a half balls so there are not too many of them. I ordered ten balls, so now I will have to think of other things to make with the rest. This is the finished blanket and I am really pleased with the way it turned out.

I bought the ball of dark blue wool when I was out shopping this morning. I thought it was a good colour to go around the edge with to finish it off. 

As you can probably see, this was started in one corner and worked diagonally until the side measured one metre, and then decreased back in until I reached the far corner. I was pleased with how square it stayed. The last time I worked a small diagonal square, it turned out a very odd shape! For anyone interested, this was worked in small blocks of three chain and three trebles, with one extra block being added, or taken away, on each row. I have added a small close-up so those of you who crochet, can probably see what I mean.

I have been so busy finishing this off that I haven´t had much time to play with my newest craft bits, nor to do any more to my scrapbook, but maybe next week...

Last week someone commented that there were no sunsets again. This is because there has been very little sun, and the days it has come out to play, it has clouded over before sunset time. Today it has been lovely and warm, and quite sunny all day, but I have just been out to feed the dogs and it is really misty now. The lovely hills below the village are completely hidden. You wouldn´t know they were there. So there is no sunset again today. However, when  I came out from choir practice on Wednesday there were some streaks of colour in the sky. Of course I didn´t have my camera with me, so I had to use my phone, and I am not all that pleased with the picture, but as it is the best I have managed for weeks now, I will post it to end with for this week.

Now I will link up with Virginia at Celtic House, and Annie at A Stitch in Time, and then I will have to think about feeding us.