A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 27 Feb 2018 - T for scrapbooking, postcards and a bit of food.

Hello everyone, a happy Tuesday to you all! Are we all sitting comfortably? Then I will begin....

I have been having 'gut' problems and that is nothing new. I have a slight wheat intolerance and half the year I eat wheat free to keep this discomfort away. So I knew it was time for the diet again. Also, as I have been in and out of bed with the flu and have not been as active as normal, consequently I have put on a lot of weight. Needless to say that weight needs to come off. So I've cut out sweet things like cakes and chocolate, also wine and spirits. I'm doing wheat free and low-carb, old fashioned diabetes diet. You know: little and often. We do this every year at a certain point and we eat much better when we're on a diet. Hubby loves it (he can have bread of course). I have a spiraliser and we love zucchini noodles or sweet potato spaghetti. Here is what we had yesterday:

It's spiralised sweet potato with kale, tomato and white beans. Cheese on the top and put under the grill. Yummy.

I have set myself the task to scrapbook one day a week. My husband gets a good fire going so that the room is nice and warm and I spend a day 'playing' with my stash. And yes, I have also made some layouts:

This is one of my mum. The journaling reads:"Mum at age 92, enjoying life in spite of (very) bad eye sight. January 2017"

This is our neighbour Serafín bringing us a basketful of beans. The journaling reads:"Serafín often brings us produce. He is an older chap but works his patch of land every day and walks there in 20 minutes. He always brings his wife a jerrycan of water from his well. So sweet!"

I've kept my layouts simple. No complicated artwork and messy mixed media. Just memory keeping.

I did receive quite a few postcards. Here are two with a 1950s theme. The first one is a black and white photo of a girl playing hop-scotch. We used to play that but I can't for the life of me remember how it went. Does anyone remember? Did we sing a song while hopping?

It was sent to me from Russia, as was the next one:

A  typical American 1950s picture. I think it was considered a pin-up in those days. 

The stamps are beautiful. The triangular one is about embroidery and the middle one is a gem stone but I can't read what it says.

It's T for Tuesday, so I am going to link up with Elisabeth and Bleubeard for this occasion. I hope you will too. All you need to do is feature a drink in your blog somewhere. Here is an empty wine bottle. My last bottle before the diet started. It's water from now on (and herbal tea).

Wishing all of you a very happy T-Day.
(Don't forget  2nd on the second on Friday)
Blessings,
Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Friday 23 feb 2018 - Friday Smiles

Hello lovely people,
It's Friday again and I would like to tell you how my week has been and share my smiles. (I'm smiling most of the time). I will then link up with Annie at A Stitch in Time for her Friday Smiles.

First my postcards: This one comes from Germany. It has beautiful rock formations and a sort of bridge. I am intrigued. The card does not mention where it is. I would love to know...

This is the stamp:

An old tree. It seems an old man with his arms open wide and saying: Ooo..

The Marylin Monroe picture surprisingly comes from Japan!

It was sent by Sayaka in Tokyo. She loves reading and is reading at the moment a book about Iqbal Masih. This is what I found about him on the internet:

Iqbal Masih, Pakistan, received The World's Children's Honorary Award 2000 posthumously, for his struggle for the rights of debt slave children. Iqbal became a debt slave at an early age, for the owner of a carpet factory who then sold him on.

Iqbal was around 5 or 6 when he started working in the carpet factory. He worked from early morning until evening and was often treated badly. When his mother Anayat needs money for an operation, she took out a loan from a carpet factory owner. The loan, or ‘peshgi’, was in Iqbal’s name. That means that Iqbal owes Ghullah the 5000 rupees (100 US dollars) that his mother’s operation cost. Now Iqbal was a debt slave and the factory owner was in charge of his life.
Five years later, Iqbal was liberated from debt slavery. He started attending the Bonded Labour Liberation Front (BLLF) school. Iqbal talked to his friends who worked at carpet factories and spoke at meetings. He gave many carpet worker children the courage to leave their owners. The owners threatened Iqbal who, after receiving an award in the USA, was murdered on 16 April 1995.
Today, Iqbal is a symbol for the fight against harmful child labour and slavery all over the world.

Sayaka used some cute stamps:

So, what have I been up to. I have attended a two day basic photography course here in the village. Saturday was indoor, learning the basics about aperture and exposure etc and learning to find our way around our SLR camera.

It was great to see quite a few youngsters.


On Sunday we braved the cold and went outside to practice with composition and also photograph moving things.

I really enjoyed the course and learnt an awful lot. (I'm there on the left in the red jacket.)


Also during the week hubby needed to take its scooter for his vehicle inspection (English MOT), which in Spain is called ITV. It's all very oficial. We went to the ITV building

As it happened there was a document missing. We were sent home to go look for it, but we didn't find it. So in the afternoon we went back to ask them if we could order a copy.

Which they did, and told us it would take 10 days. OK. Back home, after a few hours, hubby triumphantly shows me a grubby looking piece of paper. He has found it! It was outside on the terrace in a crate of car cleaning stuff. It was nearly 7 pm and we decided we would go to town for the third time that day to cancel the document copying and make a new appointment for the inspection.
They were just as delighted as we were and offered to do the inspection there and then:

Wait by the entrance until the light is green.

Drive in towards the technician.

I'm not allowed in to translate, so sometimes it is easier for the technician to do things himself rather tan try to explain to my hubby what he wants done.

Here the exhaust fumes are checked with a probe. They are very strict on that.

The whole process took all of 10 minutes and we are OK for another two years.

Yesterday I have been scrapbooking. I made six layouts. One of them is this:

I had found a box (years old) with teal coloured papers and embellishments. I fussy cut the flowers and used the letter stickers and leaf embellishment that came with the kit. The photo is my mum a few years ago when she went on a 'pamper day' and she is giggling away here having a manicure.


I found two more photos of my mum on an outing during the same month so they can be a double page:

She was going on a coach trip with her friend and had great fun using the lift to get into the coach.


Talking about fun.... Lets have some funnies:

Caption: 'I thought this lady was staring at me until I realised it was a magazine...'

That's it from me for today.


I hope you all have a great weekend and see you next week.


Lisca

A Postcard A Day - Tuesday 20 Feb 2018 - T for another royal wedding, tapas and hello kitty

Good morning lovely peeps,

It's great to see you here. I really appreciate your visits. I hope you will like what I have to share today.

Remember last week I received a vintage postcard of a Dutch royal wedding many years ago. It was queen Juliana (then princess)'s wedding to prince Bernhard. 

Well, this week I received another card (from a different person) of another Dutch royal wedding!

It was the wedding of queen Juliana's grandson Willem Alexander to Máxima. Juliana was queen when I was a child. I also remember Beatrix succeeding her in 1980. And of course as recent as 2013 her son Willem Alexander became king. 

But this royal wedding was in February 2002 (yes, they have just celebrated their wedding anniversary).

This was the stamp on the card. It shows a waste water treatment plant in Kingaroy, Australia, that uses a new technology developed by the Dutch. This is the info I found on it. "Nereda is the wastewater treatment technology that purifies water using the unique features of aerobic granular biomass.

Nereda is sustainable and cost-effective: it requires a quarter of the area of conventional activated sludge installations and the process can reduce up to 50% on energy-costs. The award-winning technology was invented by the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and developed in a unique public-private partnership between the University, the Dutch Foundation for Applied Water Research (STOWA), the Dutch Water Authorities and Royal HaskoningDHV."  Interesting.

There is a T-party going on over at Elizabeth and Bluebeards's. Come and join us with a blog post that has a drink in it. I just want to say to Bluebeard that (our cat) Precious says hello:

Our best friends are called David and Patricia. At least once a month we go out for a drink and something to eat. Usually we go to a restaurant called the Venta del Sol. I didn't photograph the menu (like Elizabeth always does) because I couldn't find it. Locally we just ask what they have to offer, or if you fancy something in particular, like whole squid, you ask: do you do whole squid? 

We started with drinks. And with every round of drinks comes a free tapa. 

In this case, the tapas were the baked potatoes with garlic mayonnaise, which we had nearly completely devoured before I remembered to take a picture.

The tapa that came with our second drink was fish. A few fried sardines with some olives. Very nice.

My drink again was a glass of red wine:

After all that we were not hungry enough to order a full platter of stuff. So we had our favorite: Filled toasted ciabatta:

Here I am tucking in. The ciabatta was filled with Serano ham and Manchego cheese. Yum!

What else can I show you. 
Ah, here is our friend Alfredo. He is a good friend from church. When we found out he was a builder, we employed him to build the foundatons and the basic structure of our house. (Hubby built the rest). Alfredo has stables and 28 horses. He organises riding holidays as he also has accomodation in the form of holiday cabins. His favorite horse is this white horse. On festive days he dresses in traditional Andalucian dress and rides. Isn't he handsome! 

To finish off, I would like to show you a photo a friend of mine took. It is to show you where we live. It is basically 'badlands', but I find it strangely beautiful. The reservoir you can see in the photo is (on a sunny day) turquoise.

Fortunately we don't get many cloudy days like that.

That is it from me today.
I wish you all a wonderful T-Day,
Hugs and blessings,
Lisca

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