Week 41 - Cakes Galore!!!

Week 41 is marked by cakes galore!!  Starting off with these two fabulous wedding cakes I saw in the shop window in the specialist cake shop in the Covered Market.

Then the Lake School teachers organized the 'Great Lake Cake Off' to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Charity!  Teachers baked cakes and then sold them to students and teachers during the coffee breaks from Wednesday onwards.  They raised over £200 and the results were amazing!!  I took the following photos of the wonderful and delicious creations.

Below a group photo of the Lake School staff, showing off all the cakes made :-)

I am delighted that some of the photos you can see above that I took have been included in the Lake School Facebook page here. 

I did my bit by buying quite a few of the cakes and eating them during the breaks .... and yes, I do need to go on a diet now!!!

On my daily cycle ride to work I came across this red bike with a basket full of flowers.  I think this sort of thing really brightens up the city centre.

 I also took these images of some typical signs in Oxford:

I am very interested in the ivy covered tree and wall below.  I wonder how many years it has taken for the ivy to spread so much?

I am wondering how my concrete pole in Abruzzo is getting on with the ivy creeping up around it.... I can't wait to get back to my garden!  I miss it very much indeed.......

Week 40 - On the move again

 I am now back in England for the next few weeks and I am already missing Abruzzo, K & the furbies, and my garden and seedlings.  My one thought is will my sweetpea seedlings survive?  How about the melons, peppers, onions etc that are all still growing?  K already has a lot on his plate, keeping up with the land maintenance, renovation work and dealing with the twice daily feeding frenzy.... although he copes admirably with it all.  

Freddy has been going to bed at 4.45pm recently with no fuss or cajoling!!  This picture hanging in my current room below reminds me of home!

 The pair of 2 cockerels were a gift from the family and I will be taking these back to Abruzzo.  I love them!  Youcan see the weather yesterday was not good - lots of rain!

My bedtime reading over the next few weeks will consist of 'Backyard Composting'.  It is a brilliant book and I have already learned a lot from it!  I bought it from a charity shop for only one pound - a real bargain!  I discovered that I must never ever add Oleander leaves and its flowers to the compost bin as it is poisonous and may affect the vegetation.  I am guilty of adding it to the mix, I won't ever do it again!! 

Also another interesting fact is that bits of bay laurel leaf plants in a compost bin may deter healthy plant growth due to the toxins and acids contained in them.  Again I feel a bit bad now because I chopped lots of a bay tree branches and added it to the compost mix last week!  I won't do this again either .....

 Out and about with my mum we had a lovely lunch in Fred & Jacobs a local cafe / restaurant.  I noted they were hiring and so took a photo.  I will inform students at school tomorrow if they wish to find a part time job, this might be a good place as it is small and very friendly.

Another lovely gift was waiting for me when I arrived - a jewellery stand.  I love it as reminds me of the days I used to dress up in glamorous outfits such as the one below.  I still like a bit of glitter though, but I rarely get the opportunity to dress up in this way in the middle of the rural countryside in Abruzzo!!

This is a very short post this week as I have been very busy with online work, catching up with family, and tomorrow I begin full time teaching again at the Lake School.  Also I am doing a six-week course with the Consultants-e on mLearning, and so there will  not be much Me-Time over the next few weeks.  However, it is going to be an exciting and challenging time ahead.  I just need to be super organized and hopefully I will rise to the challenge :-)

Week 39 - all go in the garden!

 

This tiny toad was spotted in one of my pots and I had to take a photo of it.  It is so camouflaged that it is not easy

to see it.  Behind it an old owl tea light holder that lost one of its legs, now reclines against the wall watching over the plant pot.  Lots of lavendar cuttings surround the toad.

My compost bin is getting filled with spent veggie plants, especially the tomatoes, which are almost finished now.  I chop up the stems as finely as possible as it makes it easier to degrade.  

 

There must be thousands if not millions (not sure if I am now exaggerating here) of creepie crawlies in the compost bin underneath the new additions and I hate to see the mass moving and swaying together with a gentle whirring noise as they all get down to doing what they do... 

I use this plastic container to put my chopped bits when I am preparing food, and then it goes straight to the compost bin on a daily basis.   Used tea bags, celery leaves, end bits of peppers, onion peelings, lemon rinds, everything that can be composted goes in!

Leaves are beginning to fall so I am carefully picking them up and adding to old compost sacks with holes in them to make nice, firiable leaf mulch for the spring.

Below a sleeping cat lying in my rockery area!!! 

This fig tree was growing way out of hand and so I have pruned it back and it now looks much neater!

An elephant bench in the shade of the fig tree

I sometimes come here to sit and view the lovely countryside below...

Rosemary bush growing rampantly.  There is more than enough here to use in all my cooking!

This bay leaf tree got cut in half during a windy storm and we thought we had lost it, but is is now growing back very nicely.  I think I need to reshape it by cutting off all the offshoots at the bottom of the tree.

Roll on Week 40!!!

Week 38 - jobs in the garden

I woke up unusually early on Monday and just caught this beautiful sunrise from the balcony. It turned out to be a very nice day and I got lots of gardening done, inbetween popping into the wikis, blogs and forum posts on the online course I am currently moderating.

I caught this kitten red-handed lying in one of the nesting boxes in the chicken pen!  Luckily Freddy wasn't around, otherwise there may have been a problem......

Lots more potting and repotting and planting of bulbs and generally tidying up in the orchard.  I try to give the fruit trees a boost by clearing away weeds, and then adding fresh compost around the trunk of the tree such as this olive tree: 

Pear tree below:
 

We have quite a few trees, comprising of plums, peaches, apples, pears, pomegranates, almonds, cherries, so it is a big job, and of course the 90 olive trees.  I can only tackle the smaller trees as it would take forever to spring clean all of them!

My cucumbers are still growing and this morning I made a cucumber and celery soup for supper tonight..

The peppers are also coming along nicely and I am picking them daily.

I have 5 tomato plants of a different variety growing very closely together at the back of the veggie plot. I made a mistake planting them so close together as they have now evolved into a huge mass with all 5 plants intertwined and linked and so they are too squashed and not enough light is getting to the fruits.  Mea culpa!!

The 'rockery' area is coming along well and I have interspersed false flowers amongst the sedum cuttings to give it more colour whilst the cuttings are growing.  A lot of weeds abound and it is a constant job removing them!

 

 A sedum cutting doing incredibly well below.

Below an 'Aloa Vera' plant growing really well from a cutting.  I used a part of its liquid sap to heal a cut on my hand and the effect was almost instant, with the balm soothing the pain very quickly.  I am happy to use what is in the garden as natural remedies....  One things though, this plant has very spiky edges and I have to be very careful when I am near it !!
 

Finally, for a bit of fun I created a certificate from a free online certificate maker that I had come across via Twitter a week or so ago.  Hard to believe I arrived in Madrid 35 years ago, ready to start teaching EFL at the Briam Instituto.  Where have the years gone?  How have I evolved as a teacher in all these years?  Do I still have what it takes to be an effective teacher?  Has my way of teaching evolved over these years?  I think I can answer yes to these soul-searching questions!!  I sometimes wonder how would my life have been different if British Airways had accepted my application to be a flight attendant....

Roll on Week 39!!

Week 37 - Time for planting bulbs..

I thought I was over the worst on Sunday and had had a good day, but Sunday night was sleepless and full of coughing, and I woke up on Monday feeling quite rough, so I had to finally admit defeat, and off I went to the doctor's in Civitaquana.  The very nice and sympathetic temporary female doctor listened to my breathing and looked down my throuat and told me I had a chest infection, and laryngitis.  She prescribed a course of strong antibiotics and I duly starting taking them.  This week has been full of restful periods, but also I have been trying to get to grips with a new online course and system.  Because I was still feeling under the weather, it was a bit of a struggle at times, but I think I managed to keep up with everything, thank goodness.

Inbetween working, my focus has been on planting bulbs!  I bought over 100 bulbs in the local supermarket and decided I would get them planted as soon as possible.

The bulbs included special trays, and I thought it would be good to see how they work out and so I treated myself to not just one but three trays of mixed colours and varieties.
 

 Below two of the planted up pots with green meshing and an ornamental cockerel on top of them to keep the cats away!

 Two curious kittens looking on...

This Fluffy look-alike kitten below in an old paint pot looks quite cute!  He seemed quite happy to be in there.  Maybe we should name him Max after the Max Meyer paint pot!

I also started repotting plants, and taking cuttings of sedum, which always 'takes' beautifully.

I gathered lots of fruit, including plums, grapes, apples, pears and figs and then made lots of bowls of fresh fruit salads for puddings, with icecream.

Finally, to finish off this post, an image of a souvenir of a San Gabriele souvenir jug I bought for my beloved grandmother many years ago, and which I was able to keep after she passed away.  I now keep it in the kitchen and put my basil in it....

The past couple of weeks have been very quiet, but I am now finally looking forward to being back to my normal self, ready for Week 38!
 

Week 36 - Under the Weather

 On inspecting all my collection of Bombonnieri on Monday, I found that most of the sugared almonds had gone off and were of a very sticky and inedible nature, so I disbanded all of them and will use the bits and pieces for craftwork and hence recycle things.  The little flower stems have been added to my tub above which now contains lots of parsley seeds.  I am not sure if the seeds will grow as it is unseasonally wet and a bit cool at the moment, so we shall see.

Below a motley crew of furkids, at one point 5 of them all squashed together during a bad thunderstorm.  Raymondo is the prominent white kitten and he is very cute!!

As of Tuesday things didn't go too well.  I wasn't feeling too good, just generally under the weather.  I had Samantha and Victoria lying side by side on top of me when I was resting on the couch.   All of a sudden a mega cat fight broke out between them and I ended up being bitten on my index finger on a very soft part of the skin.  It hurt a lot!!  I noticed that my finger had become all red and swollen and very painful.  I decided I didn't want to reach out to Dr Google to see what it would say about being bitten by cats and the consequences.  I vaguely remembered reading an article about someone who had died after her pet cat had bitten her, but I really didn't want to think about this, so I ignored it.....

Wednesday and Thursday I had to do a lot of preparation for an online course starting next week and I simply overdid it on the computer and my eyes got very tired. In addition I had come down with a very bad cold and an annoying cough, so I took to a bed in the spare room.  I whiled away the hours listening to the Italian radio and a parade of cats peering in from outside the window checking to see if I was ok, kept me occupied.

I also managed to read a few chapters of a book called Stay Positive!

It helped me to put things in perspective about my temporary 'down period'.  In life, we all suffer minor setbacks and we just have to deal with them!

On Sunday (today) I feel much better and I have decided to venture out again into the veggie plot that has been totally neglected for the past few days.  

I received a beautiful Jacqie Lawson ecard from one of my dear colleagues and this really cheered me up and spurred me on to get back to normal.  Thanks, Carol!!

http://www.jacquielawson.com/

Cat bite update
I have just succumbed to my curiosity and looked up 'consequences of cat bite' on Google and as I feared a cat bite could lead to a severe infection, hospitalization, many courses of antibiotics and ultimately and occasionally, possible death!!!!  I still can't bend my finger properly, but I think it is definitely getting better and is not so red and painful now, thank goodness, so I will monitor the situation and go to a doctor only if it gets worse.....

I am keeping positive, so I am sure my bite (or puncture wound) will go away of its own accord......