Tuesday 28 November 2017

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 28 Nov 2017 - T for kitchen


Hello peeps, it is Tuesday again and time for our T-party hosted by Elizabeth and Bleubeard. Please do join us with a blogpost that features a drink in it somewhere.
My drink will appear a bit further on, but first I would like to show you my postcards. This one I received from Germany last week:


It's about the traditional dress of people living in Rügen, an island off the coast of Eastern Gemany in the Baltic sea. Rügen is known for it's beautiful beaches and White cliffs. I love these clothes. The couple in the middle might be a wedding couple. I also like the fact that there are small children too. In those days they dressed children as mini adults. (not practical).
The stamps on the card were nice too:


Lovely flowers.
This stamp is also in the vein of traditional costume. This time about the national dress of Bavaria (You know, lederhosen etc) The writing says: 125 years First Bavarian mountain dress association) I'm sure our German speakers will correct me if I am wrong.

The second card also comes from Germany:

The castle (yes, it is real) looks like a fairytale castle out of Disney. I think it's beautiful.
Again the stamp is lovely but it gets a bit hidden under the overbearing date stamp.

 What have I been doing this week? I have spent a lot of time at my computer and not just using it. I have been doing small maintenance jobs. One of the fans was making a lot of noise and when I opened the side I saw it had a lot of dust on it.
The white fan on the left was OK but the black fan was very dusty. The fan is black so all the grey bits are dust. This fan is important as it cools the motherboard.
 I had a can of compressed air to blow the dust off. That's all I dare do as I have no technical knowledge of computers (I wish I had)

Hubby has been busy in the ground floor flat. The back door is in and most of the tiles laid. 

The carpenter came yesterday to put up the carcasses of the kitchen units. It's only a small flat and the kitchen is a small corner of the living area. But I think it will be functional. 
 I must now really order my cooker as I can't have the granite put on until the stove is in place.
And this is the qualifier! I mean, this photo has a drink in it. The carpenter's assistent didn't want his beer and left the can on the worktop. Yes, I know, it is minute, but believe me, that is a can of lager beer.

And finally I will leave you with a few animal sculptures:





Happy T-Day all! Have a good week and keep smiling,
Hugs,
Lisca

Friday 24 November 2017

A Postcard A Day - Friday 24 Nov 2017 - Friday smiles

Hello lovely people, How are you all? I'm here again to share a postcard with you and some smiles.


Here is this week's postcard which was sent to me from Belgium.


It shows the front page of the comic Tintin. I remember reading these whan i was a kid. They were created by the Belgian cartoonist George Prosper Remi, better known as Hergé. Tintin was very popular in Europe. He is a courageous young newspaper reporter assisted by his dog Milou. Ah the memories.


The card had a lovely Christmas stamp:
Now what can I tell you about my week... I have finished the book I was reading. It is called The Circle:




This is what Goodreads writes about the book:


When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.
As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO.
Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America - even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.



I had the impression the story was modelled on Google, who are known for their amazing offices:



Or perhaps Apple, who have a new HQ in the shape of a perfect circle:


Although I thouroughly recommend it, I found the book scary, as I can see this happening in reality. Issues such as privacy and limits and freedom are being touched on here.


I hope I have made you smile a bit. Come and join us at Annie's, and perhaps you'd also like to say hello to Virginia.


Have a great weekend and a wonderful week ahead. Keep smiling,
Lisca


Finally a few amusing (street) art images I found recently:




Tuesday 21 November 2017

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 21 Nov 2017 - T for a partridge, a birthday and some snow



Hello lovely people. How are you'all? It's T-Day again, when we share something drink related in our post. I found it difficult to find anything this morning, but I remembered I took a photo of our meal last week. I had cooked a Dutch meat-based dish called 'hachee' (pron: ha-sjay). I cooked the beef in the slow cooker and served it on a bed of home made mashed potatoes. Yum.


Of course I had to have a glass of red wine with that. (Sorry Elizabeth, I know you don't drink that). Later on I'm going to link up with Elizabeth and Bluebeard at Altered Book Lover. Why don't you join us?

Saturday I was in the stairwell (our house is built over four floors so there are a lot of stairs) and I spotted a bird. It was not sitting by the door as in the photo but halfway up the stairs.

I recognized it as being a 'perdiz' or in English, a red legged partridge. Around here they are used as game birds and are mostly reared in captivity. 
He or she is a Little beauty. It also has a tag on its leg, so obviously belongs to someone local. 


The partridge is a médium bird, somewhere between a pheasant and a quail in size. They live and nest on the ground and eat seeds and insects. So the famous song of the Partridge in a Pear Tree is not realistic as you would not find them in a tree.

My postcard this week is from a series of posters during WWII. This one encourages people to save energy and fuel. Particularly difficult for the English and their bath culture. I have been told that people had to have a bath in a few inches of wáter. Nice!


This Little chappie is my gorgeous grandson Luciano. He turned three last week. Here he is with his mummy (my daughter-in-law) getting ready to blow the candles. He can't count yet so it doesn't matter he has 6 candles. The more the merrier.

The weather here is still beautiful and sunny. We are praying for rain. It hasn't rained in nearly a year. (apart from a few drops). It did snow in higher altitude though not long ago.

I took this picture while travelling on the motorway near where I  live.(through the windscreen). No, I wasn't driving. My hubby was driving.
 It is the famous Sierra Nevada, which translates as 'snowy mountain'. The is a lovely ski resort up there but that cannot be seen from this side.

Someone (Loli) from our local photoclub had a much better photo and it was accepted by the TV station and shown. She sent me a photo of her tv screen(as I don't have tv)


I think I will leave it at that. 
A big hug to you all and of course I wish all my American friends a very blessed Thanksgiving.
Happy T-Day,
Lisca 

Friday 17 November 2017

A Postcard A Day - Friday 17 Nov 2017 - Friday Smiles


Hello lovely people, Happy Friday to you!
How are you all? Have you had plenty to smile about? I have.

Let me tell you about my week.... well, I have been in bed with a bad cold! I have not been to the gym and have hardly been out of the house. So there is not much to report.

But that didn't last long and I am feeling better now and have been out and about since yesterday.
I have written quite a few postcards while i was at home feeling sorry for myself.
This was one of them. It is one of the posters made by Alphonse Mucha. Very daring for its day I would say. They realised even then that a bit of pretty flesh would sell a bicycle/car/whatever.

And as we are in the mood for smiles, how about this cute card?
Two donkeys. Aren't they gorgeous.

The post mistress had some stamps for me (How unusual) and they are very beautiful:
It is a Christmas stamp and features Joseph (or San José in Spanish) from the Napolitan nativity scene in a church called Santo Domingo de la Calzada (La Rioja). Italian nativity scenes are huge. They are to be found in large churches but also in public buildings and squares. A couple of years ago we came across one in the indoor market in Valencia.



The outside of the market looked like this:
Changing the subject, yesterday we popped out to our local garden centre:



 

 I had received a voucher from our friends when we celebrated our anniversary in August. I wanted some climbing plants for our little patio downstairs.
I ended up buying two evergreen jasmins:


 Look at the height of those!

I love walking around garden centres. Here they are not as huge as in the UK, where they have diversified so much. There is no coffee shop, not gift shop, no clothes department, no garden furniture, no children's playground nor miniature railway. Just plants and flowers.


O, yes, they did sell ceramic letters (to put on the house or door)
How about that Little cheeky chappie in the window sill?


If he doesn't make you smile....

One last photo:
A pomegranate on the tree. The fruit had burst open and you can see the red inside.
That is it from me today. I hope you will join me at Annie's at A Stitch in Time and at Virginia's Rocking you World Friday.

Have a good week and...
Keep smiling,
Hugs,
Lisca



Tuesday 14 November 2017

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 14 Nov 2017 - T for porcelain clay and a certain Rosa


Good morning lovely people,
It's T-Day again! I will be sharing something to do with a drink later on.
But first, here is my postcard. I received it this week from Hongkong.



It is beautiful and shows the process of making porcelain out of clay in ancient China. The stamps are also beautiful:


Can you see them clearly? I hope they enlarge sufficiently to see. The one on the right reads : Kitchen ware  street. A you can see the card was bought at the museum of tea ware! Very appropriate for T-Day I would say!

Some of you might know that now I'm retired I like to play online computer games. My hubby and I both play Elvenar, and I alone also play Forge Of Empire, a city building game that is based on the course of history. Every phase in the game is an era of history. I am playing in the late middle ages at the moment. Every now and then they do special quests about famous people throughout history. Last month it was Ghandi and now it is Rosa Parks:


This is what I found on the internet about her:

By refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus in 1955, black seamstress Rosa Parks (1913—2005) helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States. The leaders of the local black community organized a bus boycott that began the day Parks was convicted of violating the segregation laws. Led by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the boycott lasted more than a year—during which Parks not coincidentally lost her job—and ended only when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Over the next half-century, Parks became a nationally recognized symbol of dignity and strength in the struggle to end entrenched racial segregation.

I was only 4 year old at the time, so I don't remember, but I have Heard about her. It must have taken courage in those days to do that. What a lady!

My postcard could qualify me for T-Day but I would like to share a few images with you which I found:


I want to eat my cereal out of this every morning

There's a whole set of these apparently:
tazas-creativas-7

Plus a tea pot:
by Esther Horchner
I'm afraid I will be out until late tonight so comments will be as from tomorrow.
Happy T-Day all!
Blessings,
Lisca