A Postcard A Day - Friday 16 Feb 2018 - Friday Smiles

Hello everybody! Here I am again, a little later than normal, but we had a little crisis to sort out this morning. Phew, that done I can sit down and tell you how my week has been and show you some postcards.

Here is the first one. I received it a couple of days ago from Finland:

Yes, It's Inge Löök's famous naughty aunties. The image is appropriate for nearly everyone at the moment, when there is snow in most countries. The aunties are doing their bit for the community. The card is in aid of the Red Cross, so by buying this card (the stamp is included and printed on the card) the sender supported the Red Cross, a worthy cause.

Ritva, who sent it to me, writes that she is a retired teacher of hand craft and art history, and lives in a village in southern Finland.

The writing on the card translates as: Happy Friend's Day. In Finland they call Valentine's Day: Friends Day. A much better name I think, as Valentine's Day is for lovers. I know in America they send Valentine card to their friends. I remember the first time this happened to me I thought this girl was inviting me to become her lover and was quite shocked!

This is my second card, and you might have guessed it comes from Russia. It is by a well known artist called Tanya Sitaya and is titled 'Robin'. It was sent to me by Tatiana who lives in Kazan City, a beautiful ancient (more than 1000 years old) city on the banks of the Volga river. Tatiana tells me she likes to watch sports, in particular figure skating. I bet she is watching the Winter Olympics now.

I don't have a tv but my mother in Holland keeps me updated on the Olympics. Apparently the Dutch speed skaters are very good and have won many medals.

We've had a good week. On Sunday we had the first praise and worship evening in our new venue. We are a house church, so we tried to make it like a living room as much as posible and managed to find some sofás. It looks quite good.

We haven't finished painting yet. All the walls will eventually be white. The plastic you see is to protect the wood from the paint. 

The youngsters love to play on the bongos and gongas etc. Here is hubby (on guitar) and one of the young men playing congas.

We are a lively lot when it comes to worship. Here are two of my friends dancing.

That área will become the children's área once we put some furniture and toys there. And it needs painting too.

On Tuesday the 'marble guys' came to place my granite worktops in the new kitchen in the flat downstairs. This is what it looked like without the work tops.

Then two lovely guys turned up and in no time they had laid the work tops.

They had measured accurately and cut all the pieces in their workshop.

The floor pieces are fitted too, and 'Bob's your uncle'. (Now that is an expression for our American friends to get their teeth into)

Lots more has happened this week, but I might leave that until next week when I might have less photos.

I have been on a weekend course photography and we have taken our scooter for its vehicle inspection yesterday. All of that another time.

Now I will leave you with a few funnies:well, one funny and a few reflective ones that I pinched from Denthe (have a look at her blog, she is a gifted artist).

I'm heading over to Annie at A Stitch In Time, and to Virginia at Rocking Your World Friday.

Have a lovely week all of you,

Blessings,

Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 13 Feb 2018 - T for Tuesday

Just a quick note to say I am having computer problems. Somehow my laptop doesn't register the SD card of my camera and consequently I cannot show you any photos.
This is from the internet:

I thought that was handy...

On top of that I forgot to bring my postcards (on Tues I always blog from our weekend home).
Very frustrating.

Anyone thinking of opening a coffee shop? Can I offer a suggestion?

This laptop is very old and I am thinking of buying a new laptop. My sister is trying to convince me to buy a proper iPad. Does anyone of you blog with an iPad? I will have to look this up on the internet, but I doubt whether an iPad has an SD slot for my photos and in that case I cannot blog with it. Any advice ? 

As this is T for Tuesday, I can assure you I am sipping a cup of tea, even though you cannot see it. It is mint, green anice and camomile mixture.
So my birthstone is definitely not a coffee bean, lol.

That is it from me,
Have a good week all of you,
Happy T-Day,
Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Friday 9 Feb 2018 - Friday Smiles

Good morning,


Here we are again, showing each other the smiles and silver linings of this week.


I received a couple of great pòstcards this week. In fact this one arrived yesterday:

Does that ring a bell for some of you?
This card was sent to me from the US by a 76 yr old lady who lives with her dog Ducky.


The second card is from Holland:

As I have asked for cards with traditional costume, I got sent this. It looks like an old fashioned poster. I don't know. The card does not mention it.


This week has been a fairly good week. I have done a lot of baking and cooking. We had some over-ripe pears on the fruit bowl. So I looked on the internet for a pear cake récipe. I found an Italian récipe. It uses flour as well as corn starch, which is new to me. The cake turned out very well.

I promised to show you some photos of our new meeting place. Our fellowship is going to meet in a bar! I'm not joking. We have rented an unused bar for our meetings.
It is 160 sq meters and has a kitchen as well as two toilets, airco and central heating.

Saturday we are going to paint it. The walls have Wall art on them which is not suitable for a church environment.

The kitchen is a mess and would not pass any food standard, but I spotted a bread oven.

We can have fun with that. I'm thinking pizza parties with the youngsters. Lets make our own pizzas, larking around with the dough, choosing the topping, cooking them in the oven and then the eating.


This place has a lot of potential, but for the time being we are just going to hold our meetings there.


I did some scrapbooking yesterday and made a lay out. I used to join CSI (Color, stories and inspiration) and I think I'll play along with them again. The prompt for this month has bright colours.

They are asking for hearts and flowers. The inspiration is: Forget, laugh and connect.


I made a page with the photo of our last day at the gym before the summer break. That was laugh, connect and not forget.

The colorsceme was spot-on:

I had a great time getting all the bits and pieces together.


That's it from me today. I'm going to link up with Annie at A Stitch in Time and with Virginia at Rocking Your Week Friday.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Hugs,
Lisca


Now for some funnies:

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 6 Feb 2018 - T for royals, snow and a Tea-party

Hello lovely peeps, 

We're going to  have a party. A T-party. 

Elizabeth and Bleubeard are holding it at Altered Book Lover.

If you have anything drink related in your post you can join.

If you can't read it, the little rhyme goes:

One, two, howdy-do!

Three, four, you can pour!

Five, six, the cake I'll fix,

Seven, eight, pass your plate,

Nine, ten, come again!

This is how I would like my T-Party:

Yes, these are the famous 'Aunties designed by Inge Löök. This is one of my postcard.

Talking about postcards, here is the one that arrived this morning (I'm writing this Tuesday night):

It comes from the Netherlands and features the king's wife queen Maxima. She is Argentinian and is very much loved in the Netherlands.These are the stamps:

The person who sent it also sent me this: a vintage postcard of the wedding of (the then) princess Juliana of the Netherlands, king Willem Alexander's grandmother, to prince Bernhard of Lippe Biesterfeld in 1937. It's a real photo and I really like it. I might do a scrapbook page with it.

 

So, what's happened this week? We had lot of snow. Here is a picture of the view from my bedroom window this morning:

I've continued to take it easy and, although my flu symptoms have gone, I still haven't been back to the gym. This week with all that snow, I gave it a miss. The hall where we do the aerobics part, is unheated and has a leak in the roof. We would be jumping around the puddles.  I must go back soon though as I am putting on a lot of weight....

I'll leave it at that peeps,
have a lovely week,
Hugs,
Lisca

Second on the Second - An old post we can look at again. -

This is a post from March 2014. 

Since then we have closed that gap with fly screen as our house is a cave and it needs ventilation.(so we can't close it)

The garage doors are old fashioned concertina doors. Hubby has since rubbed them down to the original wood. They look lovely now and before the heat of the summer we have to stain them and put some protective product on them. The hot sun is merciless here.

Here goes:

What I found on top of our front door

What I found on the top of the front door.

There is a little gap between our front door and the ceiling. The other night we found a kitten snoozing on top of the door. When we got up the next morning it was still there. My DH Graham thought it might be 'stuck', but it jumped off as soon as he approached.

 There are a lot of cats living outside our house (we live out in the sticks). They don’t belong to anyone although people in the neighborhood feed them occasionally. They (the cats) breed enthusiastically and there is a tom terrorizing the young females. I think this little one was fleeing an over amorous male.

 The next day we saw the same kitten, who had invited a friend, on top of the garage doors.  What a strange place to sit comfortably. I bet you’ll all come back to me now with stories of strange places that your cat chooses to sit/lie.

I'd love to scrap these photos and I'm waiting for the right color palette to come along at CSI that I follow (Color, Stories & Inspiration).

That's all for now.

Thanks for looking and... keep scrapping!

A Postcard A Day - Friday 2 Feb 2018 - Friday Smiles

Good morning folks,


Sorry I'm late. I usually prepare something the night before but with one thing and another it never happened.

Postcards.... well I never received any this week, so I will show you two that I sent out myself:

I bought a box set of 100 postcards with New Yorker front pages. The person I sent the first one to said she likes New York and I also read that she had cats. Perfect!  The second card went to someone who asked for fashion and/or vintage. Well there you go.



What have I been up to this week? I have been scrapbooking again. I have a pile of photos from 2017 and I intend to scrapbook them all. I have done January and February.


The main event in March was buying a new car. For the first time in our lives we bought a brand new car. You can tell our state of minds by looking at my hubby's face. 

Here he is on the left hugging the sales person.

The other event in March was a gypsy wedding. The bride is someone we know from church. They had no money and it was a low key thing. Looking at her dress it I would call it a 'short key' thing. (What does she look like!). But as you can imagine, we had a great time and I believe I blogged about it at the time.

I need to write a few details at the bottom but I couldn't find my black pen.

I have two large loudspeakers in my craft room at the mo. The speaker stands that we had, somehow got lost in the move. They are quite expensive so as we didn't need the speakers just yet, we just let it go. But then hubby found his bicycle stand in the garage (which did come over in the move).

 We have no bicycles at the moment so he took the top bit off and made it into a perfect speaker stand! The bicycle stand we had bought at Lidls at the time. Well, this week they had them in again. (Only 29.99 EUR! Much cheaper than a proper speaker stand) So now  we have two speakers stands. Hurray! 

The speaker stands have come very timely really, as we can now use them for church. We go to a small house church. For a while now we have been looking for premises as we are getting too big for a sitting room. As from next week we will have a lovely venue. An ex-bar/restaurant. So it has a kitchen, lots of chairs and tables, a small stage and a bar. Some members are involved in the Red Cross food distribution and want to be able to start one up in our village. Bingo! Lots of prayers of thanksgiving are going up, I can tell ya. (Photos later)

Now lets have some funnies (the theme is sales and shops):

That is it from me today. I'm going to go over to Virginia at 'Rocking Your Week Friday' and link up with her and also with Annie at A Stitch In Time. See you there!


Have a good week,
Blessings and hugs,
Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 30 Jan 2018 - T for snow, churros and Precious

Good Morning Folks,

I'm back behind my desktop computer with its enormous screen, enjoying the images that I have just uploaded. I'm looking at the card I received not long ago from the Netherlands. It wasn't through Postcrossing this time but it was sent to us by some dear friends of ours with Christmas wishes.

It is one of my favorite cards. It pictures Holland as I remember it. The skating on the rivers and canals beside the ever-present wind mills. These were used in the old days to pump wáter in and out and keep wáter levels right. (Now they use huge diesel pump stations) .

Talking of snow.... we have had some snow this week. On Sunday morning we woke up to this:

The structure you see on the terrace is the table minus the glass top, which is safely in the living room tucked behind the sofa. 

Our house is built on the side of a mountain and from our back door to the village is a small but steep slope. But the snow prevented us to get our car up there. (When snow or ice is predicted, we leave our car at the top of the slope as a precaution, but this snow was a surprise).

We couldn't go to church, so we decided to walk to the nearest bar and treat ourselves to 'churros and chocolate'.

Most of the local bars are open on a Sunday morning to accomodate the hunters that go out early and have a coffee, a chat and get lunch bags made up. We had a coffee and ordered thick chocolate to dip the churros in.

The churros were freshly made there and then and were too hot to pick up (hence the serviette) But I couldn't wait!

I thought I'd show you a photo of our cat called Precious. He is lying on a cushion that I use for the lounge chair on the terrace. I often sit out in the afternoon sun and read a bit. But with all this cold weather, the cushion is lying on the back of the settee and Precious has taken posession of it. What does he look like!

Talking about cats: Look at these little spoons. Aren't they cute!

One last photo of what our view looks like now. It has stopped snowing and the sun has come out. Roll on spring! I can't wait.

Now I'm off to Elizabeth and Bleubeard to join the T-party. My glass of chocolate qualifies me for joining in with the fun. Please come along with a blogpost that has a drink or something drink related in it. See you there!

Bye for now,
Blessings,
Lisca