A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 31 Oct 2017

 Hi folks, it's Tuesday again! Time for the T-party! Elizabeth and Bleubeard host it and all you have to do is submit a post with a drink in it. And i will start with that right away.

It is a card from the Philipines. It was not sent by one of my Postcrossing friends but by Patsy, a Christian blogger from the Philippines. She participates in WOYWW so some of you might know of her. Their family have a publishing business called Papemelroti and Patsy's brother has designed this card (and others that I have seen). A few of the goodies in the picture we have in Spain too like turón and ensaymada (cheese bread from Mallorca) and Polvoron, (crumbly shortbreads).
Top right features Halo-halo, a shaved ice drink. I have never Heard of that but it qualifies me for the T-party. The name made me giggle, as there used to be a tv series called 'allo 'allo,

 a funny take on the french resistance during WW2. The Brits amongst you will remember that.


I really wanted to show you the grape juice that we made. A neighbour had given us a tub full of grapes.

I have a juicer and I wanted to show you our glass of grapejuice. But when we had juiced it we drank it without taking any photos (story of my life!)


Our games evening went well last week. We played mainly Rummicub and we had a go at Ligretto, which was a laugh.
The next day my friend and I played a game that she had brought with her: Set. It has cards with shapes. 12 are layed on the table and you have to make a 'set'.

A set can be three of the same color, or same shape or same infilling. But also can be three different cards: different shapes, different colours and different infulling. It's a quiet thinking game. I really liked it once I got the hang of it.


My friend has since left and I spent the week slowly getting the room back to normal and washing all the bedding and towels. The room they slept in is actually my craft room, so hopefully I will get some crafting done next week. Watch this space.


Here is something funny I came acrfoss on the internet the other day:

Of course I'm not telling you to go away. And in the same breath I am saying I'm stopping here and get this ready to post.


Have a good week,
Happy T-Day,
Hugs,
Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Friday 27 Oct 2017 - Friday Smiles

Good morning peeps,


Sorry I am late in posting this morning but I overslept. I woke up at 9:15! Shocking! So I didn't go to the gym and here I am writing about my week.


We have had visitors: my bestie and her man. They come every year after playing bridge for 4 weeks in the south of Portugal (Nice!)

Here she is in front of our Little weekend home, planning the next leg of the journey. They have come in a VW campervan, which gave me a tiny pang of regret that we sold ours.


Because the week before I had written some cards, I now have received a few. (That's how Postcrossing Works) Here is one:

This one comes from Germany and is for my collection of doors and windows.
The next one comes from Finland:

A nice vintage image. My grandma used to make dresses like that and I have found beautiful collars, like that one in the picture, in her sewing box. Also the decorative strip down her dress looks familiar and i am sure I have a little roll of that somewhere.


What else happened this week.... our neighbour brought us some of his (last?) tomatoes:

So the tomatos for yesterday's sauce did not come out of a tin! They are also delicious to eat as is. They are so sweet!


I think I'll leave it at that. I will put some funnies at the end. I found images of clothes labels with funny things on them. Someone playing around with the label machine or perhaps a quirk in the translating engine. See for yourself.


Have a good week and keep smiling,
Hugs,
Lisca

 This is the last line from a well known nursery rhyme, which goes as follows:

Hey, diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 24 Oct 2017 - T for green wine, board games and postcards

Hello lovely peeps,
How are you all? Here things are slowly getting back to normal... well, perhaps not quite as I have my bestie from Holland (and her partner) staying with us. It's lovely having them around, but I'm still not back into my routine.


My friend had been to Portugal. She goes there every autumn for the autumn bridge drives. They spend three weeks playing bridge! Then on the way back to Holland, they drive via Spain and come to see us. She knows I love Vinho Verde (lit: 'Green wine'), a Portugese White wine. And bless her, she brought me 12 bottles of the stuff!

As it is T-Day today , I will be linking up with Elizabeth and Bluebeard to show a drink related subject (hence the wine). I hope you will join us. (doesn't have to be wine).

I wish you could hear what I can hear at the moment. As it is nice sunny weather, I have the doors open to the terrace. There is a large flock of sheep (or goats) passing by below and every animal has a bell. They are all different tones and it is such sweet music to hear them walk past.

Now for my postcards: I haven't received any cards yet as I have recently switched myself on 'active' again, but I have certainly been sending a few from here. Here are a few I have been sending:

 

 The person I sent the above card to, wrote that she loved the artwork of Alfons Mucha. I happened to like that as well and have quite a collection of postcards with his art.

Baza is our nearest town and this card features the main church seen from a side Street. In front of the church (to the left of the tower) is a large public square. It's all quite quaint and old. Baza is 10 minutes drive from here and it is the place where we do our shopping.

I sent this card to a couple that lives in Brooklyn. They had a list of favorite cards that they would like to receive and this was one of them. I happen to have this card. (I have a large collection of 'New Yorker' cards). I don't now what this cat is thinking but he/she does not look very happy....

At the moment we are waiting for the plasterer to come and assess the job we have for him. Hopefully his quote will be reasonable and he can start soon. We are finishing the bottom flat. The carpenter is finishing the kitchen cabinets and I should really be looking at cookers. I have chosen a granite worktop and some neutral Wall tiles. (It's a light oak kitchen).

We are planning to spend Christmas in Holland with my mum. And hopefully it will all be ready then. (Pigs might fly...)

That is it from me today. Tonight we have planned a games night (as there are four of us) and I am greatly looking forward to that. We will be playing Yatzee,

Rummicup,

Chronology,

and a game with letter dice.

 I also have a new game called Ligretto,

 which we will have to learn to play together.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Wishing you all a happy T-Day,
Hugs,
Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Friday 20 October 2017 - Friday Smiles

Today is Friday and I'd like to tell you what made me smile this week. And perhaps I can make you smile too with a few funnies.


I've started my Postcrossing again. While we were travelling I put it on hold for a couple of months, but now I have seven postcards ready to send. They are going to Belarus, Poland, Germany, USA, Russia, China and France. Two recipients mentioned that they love horses, so I am sending these ones:

Dressage is a big thing here in Andalucia. It is beautiful to watch. It's like the horses are dancing. The other card is Diego Ventura, the famous rejoneador (a mounted bullfighter) practicing in the bullring complex in Ronda.

So what has made me smile this week? Certainly the weather. We've had rain! It rained twice, though not enough. But it's a start. The drought has lasted so long. The soil is hard and dry and crakced.


Last week I mentioned that they were improving our Little lane behind the house. Well a few days ago (before the rain) they cemented the surface. Because the Street is not suitable for a lorry to come up on, they have the cement mixer lorry, on a nearby road, on a lower level. That has a contraption with a remote controlled hose, and then they pump the cement through that. The chap in the photo is just squirting it in the right place.

It looks very neat now. We are very pleased.


That is it from me today. I'm going to link up with Annie at A Stitch In Time, hoping she had a fab holiday in the sun.
And of course I also usually link up with Virginia at Rocking Your Week Friday.


I'll leave you with some giggles (at the end)
Have a great week and keep smiling!
Hugs,
Lisca


Now for some funnies.... Here are some babies and nappy situations:

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 17 October 2017 - T for Middlesex and cesar salad

Hello lovely people! Here I am again. I haven't joined the T-party for a while now as I have been travelling and we didn't have internet everywhere. But we are back now. It's good to be home again. Good to be in the sun again. Good to sleep in my own bed.

No postcard today from me. I haven't received any while I was away (I put my Postcrossing account on hold).

As it's T for Tuesday, I would like to share something drink related. When we were in the UK we visited many old friends and one couple of friends (C &D) took us out for lunch at the golf club in Farringdon (Somerset) which was about a mile from where we were staying. It was a lovely place with fantastic views:

Here is hubby (with hat) with C&D enjoying the view:

We ordered and didn't have to wait long for our order to come through:

Me on the left, then C opposite my hubby and lastly D.

Hubby had ordered a traditional pie with chips. We can't get this sort of fare in Spain.

The chips (US:fries) were really delicious.

Mine was a Cesar salad, but it was the strangest looking Cesar I have ever had:

The two 'lumps' were a sort of potato salad with perhaps a hint of chicken. There were two bits of ham and lots of anchovis. The yellow things are crackers and the lettuce is covered with a drizzle of yogurt. It might be typically English, but I usually have real chicken, croutons, Parmesan shavings and a special Cesar Salad sauce on a bed of lettuce. Needles to say I was disappointed. So we decided to have our dessert and coffee elsewhere.

We drove to Bath (an ancient Roman town East of Bristol) and visited the Bath Mill:

A gorgeous place. We all admired the lamps as we came into reception:

Further in there were more hats:

I took this picture from where we were sitting:

And to the other way:

Here is a close-up of the quote:

I think Jane Austen used to live in Bath.

I was so busy taking pictures that I forgot to photograph what we had for dessert, but here is a shot of what was on offer in the line of cakes:

The gardens are beautiful. It used to be a camp site and we had camped there with our motorhome(RV) only last year. Here is hubby enjoying the gardens:

I realize this has become a rather long, photo heavy blog post but I do want to share what I have been reading. I've read loads of books on my Kindle while on holiday, but this one was quite unforgettable:

This wonderful book is a  sweeping, three-generation epic novel that covers the lives of Calliope's grandparents, parents, and her own childhood It is a saga with a twist in the end as the protagonist Calliope is born a hermaphrodite (5α-Reductase deficiency). Middlesex refers to the name of their house in Grosse Point but also to her gender, which is in the middle between male and female. The first three quarters of the book is the family saga and the last part is about how Callie copes with being different.
I loved it. It is beautifully written and is 530 page long. When books are that good I don't want them to end. So 500 odd page is good.


Well done if you are still with me. I'm going to link up with dear Elizabeth and Bluebeard at T for Tuesday. Want to join me? Just include anything with a drink in it.


Have a good week everyone and keep smiling,
Hugs,
Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Friday 13 October 2017 - Friday Smiles

Hello lovely people,
I hope you have had a wonderful week with lots of smiles. I feel so much better now I am back in the sunshine. The British weather was really getting me down!


I want to share some embroidery with you, that our friend Gill Trueman made. She has framed it and it is hanging on her wall. When we stayed with them, I took this photo:

It was inspired by the bark of a tree. Here is some detail:

I think it's beautiful. I didn't know she could embroider and she told me that she just 'messed about' with some bits and pieces she had lying about.


One of my smiles this week was the fact that the council is improving the little lane that our house faces. Our house is built on an steep incline (over four storeys). So we have access to the bottom lane as well as the top street (which is in the centre of the village).
This is the lowest floor of our house, which is still under construction:

It's a bit of a mess now and we get woken up every morning by the noise of the diggers etc.
They are also putting all the overhead powerlines underground. Hurray. In the photo you can see the pink/brown tube where the lines will go underground:

It will be really nice when it is all finished.


Remember the restaurant we went to in the UK with lamps that looked like hats? (My blog 22 Sept 2017)
Outside was an insect hotel.

I had never seen one before and I think it is a great idea. It certainly made me smile!
I have cropped the explanation so you can see:

I hope you can read it.


That is it from my this morning. I will be linking up  with Virginia at Rocking Your Week Friday. (The lovely Annie is  enjoying her hols, so no link-up there.)


At the end there are some funny doorstops that I wanted to show you.


Meanwhile, have a good day today and a wonderful week ahead full of smiles.


Hugs
Lisca