Glad the heatwave is over.

Goodafternoon everybody!

Oh my, we had a couple of days of very, very hot weather here!specially two days were crazy. There were temperatures reached of 40,5 C and even a bit more!! No, that isn;t fun anymore. It draines out all your energy, all you can do is stay calm, not moving around a lot, stay indoors and sit it out.
You know i am a lover of warm weather and sunshine, but this was too extreme.
Glad yesterday is already was a lot cooler, we even had some rather severe rainshowers, not too long ones, but still.... there was water from heaven LOL.
The temperatures dropped a lot, I think around 25-28C or so. And that is much more pleasant I can tell you. Today it is cloudy, every now and then a bit of rain, not much, but that helps it cooling down and the plants just love it.
Coming week we will have more usual summer weather here, temperatures will go from 22-28C( depends on which side of the country you live). Perhaps with some rainshowers wevery now and then. All together I think it will be nicer and like that it can stay for me for longer time.

As you can imagine with that heat, I didn;t do much. I almost didn;t go out, just did the shopping for stuff really needed and that as close to home as possible. Also didn;t do much at the computer, even for that it was too warm, LOL. So I didn;t do any designing. Even didn;t make preview and download for clusters I received from Arlene, made with the last kit. Now how lazy is that?
I will have some ready next week for you, I promise.

So not much happened around here, although I had some plans for this week. Like looking for a new laptop for me and for Jan. Then we will have to look for a new oven, cooking plate and possibly a new fridge. The cooking plate is still working, LOL, but the oven died and my fridge is so very old, it needs to be replaced. But finance wasn;t that great lately, now we have some more "stretch" in it, now that we are pensionados. With that heatwave on, well, you can imagine it isn;t fun to go to shops for those kind of things, or for anything.
So I hope we will be able to do that next week. I learned to cook without an oven, but i would be soooo happy to have one again! You can do so much more and have more variety in food. Well, we will see if we will succeed soon.

Just yesterday I bought two new plants for the garden. I went to the market(the weather was just good for it after that heatwave) so I took advantage of the lower temperature and made a quick visit to have some fresh veggies mostly.
Then I passed the stand where I buy every now and then some new plant of bulbs and I saw a beautiful rose and couldn;t resist. It is a bushy one, not growing to hight just about 80 cms., but with a lot of lovely flowers. I will try to have a photo of it next week. And I also bought a Rudbeckia-species, with lovely brown, gold, flowerpetals. Photo also next week. I am already glad I managed to plant them yesterday afternoon. (And just good, that evening and night we had some lovely rainshowers!).

Good, that's it for today. I hope there will be a little sunshine today, just to make the day a bit more happy looking. Clouded weather is nice for a shorter time, but then I like to see some blue sky again.
Take care of yourselves, and be happy with every new day, although now every day might be a happy day. Hmmm, strange kind of ending a blogpost, isn;t it?
But... I think there is some truth in it.

Awaiting a heatwave!!

Goodafternon everybody!

Sooooo late today. Seems to happen a lot lately LOL.
First little weather report. Last week it wasn;t too bad, although ...... no, not really good either. Temperatures stayed rather low for time of year and we even had a day or even 1 1/2 day with quite some rain. The garden loved it.
But..... weather is changing here again. Today already lovely weather with nice temperatures of around 22C our part. Graduately it will go up this week to really hot weather, expected temps around 30-36C! And that is really hot for our country! We will see how we survive that. It never can be more or less "normal"here. That is to say temperature around say 25-26C with a little breeze every now and then. And that for several weeks, and best with sometimes a little rainshower during the night.
No, we do in roller coaster-weather nowadays, or so it seems.
Okay, I am not complaining, I wanted some warmer weather and so we have it. Oh well, we have to pick the times to do the shopping and further on probably not moving around too much and some icecream at times can do wonders LOL.

Jan wasn;t feeling really great on Friday, he stayed in bed almost all day. Guess he catched a cold of some kind. Happy to say he is much better today , already yesterday he was feeling much better. So it was a one or two day story only.

I didn;t achieve a lot this week. I know I did several things, would have been mostly small jobs, not worth reminding. Perhaps useful, but not more either. Hahahaha. No, I am not loosing my mind, I just cannot remember anything really specific that is worthwile mentioning.
But somehow I had very busy days! How did i accomplish that???????No idea.
That sometimes happens, you know. You do all kind of things, all necessary, moost of the time, but at the end of the day or week, looking back, all vanished from the memory.

My friend Heidi went on holiday on Friday, they are in France now. They will stay there for about 3 weeks. This time they didn;t take theri doggy with them, because there are other dogs there who aren;t too nice for little doggies. So they left him behind and the parents in law are taking care of him. He will have a good time there, they will take good care of him.
When we still had our cats and we did go somewhere I always found it difficult to leave them behind. But we always had someone who took good care of them. Still I was glad to come home again and see them again.
We mostly left them in the house, so they felt safe and then someone stayed in our house or came once or twice a day to feed them etc.

I really should go this week on search for a new laptop. The one I am using now, is getting so very slow and I am afraid one of these days it will not even start up anymore.
I took a look in a store for computers and such this week(see, that i did too this week LOL) and saw a few very nice ones but I didn't like the prices. I think this time I will go another time for a good second-hand one. The one I am using now also was second and served me well during a few years. So then I will have to learn how to use Windows 10! Hmmmm, I will have some trouble I guess, but first I will have to get my usual programs on it(like Firefox, and the photo program I use with my camera, and of course PSE elements). Then I should consider what to use for virus program. I now have the free version of AVG, but lately it annoys me and I've read that for usual use Windwos Defender is doing not bad at all. Okay, payed ones do somewaht more, but I have to be careful with the finance, so as long as a free version is doing quite okay, I will use that.
Probably it will have to reconsider when I will install internet banking. (yeah, I am still very old fashioned, I don;t do that till now). But slowly you are almost forced into using that, and yes, it is easy and quick, I know.
First of all I will see if I can find another laptop, then Jan will need another one too. His laptop is somewhat quicker still than mine, but is copming to an end too soon I guess And also has Windows 7 and that will not be supported anymore next year. Oh my decisions, desicions.... hopeless! Wished I had someone who could install all nedded on the new laptop, get it all ready for use and safe and also some around every now and then to check on it. But that is just ishfull thinking, so I'll have to do it myself. I will get there, slowly, it always takes some time to get everything installed again.

Good, I think it about time to finish this post, it is already mid-afternoon9arund 15.14)so I would like to sit in the garden for a moment and read in a book I already read long ago, but started again. it is Shogun, of James Clavell.
Started again I love the book again(there also was made a TV serie of it, great!).
And I have here the second part of the Mysteries of the Woods kit.
Have a wonderful week!

Download    part 2 HERE

Proud of our football ladies team!

Goodafternoon everybody!

Oh boy, I am really late today. Well, I did already did some things before I started this post.
First I slept a bit later today. Then I woke up very slowly, took a coffee, then took a shower, and then first made our dinner. That is a kind of stew(well, we call it a stew) from mashed potatoes and mixed in fresh small cut endive, also mixed in a bit of crushed fried bacon. It is easy to warm up in the oven or au bain marie.
Here is a link with english translation
 https://www.holland.com/global/tourism/information/traditional-dutch-food/recipe-endive-stew.htm
Just a few additions: don't add salt to the water for boiling the potatoes, you mix first the little pieces of fried bacon, then add some salt)fried bacon is already very salty). I also add some black pepper and I do mix the mash with a bit of milk and some butter and don;t add the boiled potatoe-water.
I think the recipe will be for 4.
Most of the times I make it for two days, and even then I don;t use as much potatoes and endive(but we are small eaters!)

So when that was ready, I had to wash up the pans and such.
Then i thought it was time to have a sandwich and I had one with salted herring. Yummie, we love that fish in ths way here. Lots of people don;t like it, because it is raw fish, but layed in salt.

Then  had to read a few blogs, because during the week I didn't take the time for it. When I was at the computer I had to do other things.

Well, how about the weather here. It is on and off you could say. We had a day or a day and half with rain, quite some rain, still here at the coast we were lucky. We had a nice amount of rain, but in the middle and eastern part of our little country they had an overload!!
Yesterday it was almost dry, even some sunshine for short periods. Temperatures are not too exciting here yet(although there is quite a difference between our part and east-south part), we reach around 19-21C. Later this week it could be better, then the wind will turn more to west or even south west and that will bring higher temperatures, around 23-24 yeah!

Last week we had the final of the WC women football and that was between the USA and The Netherlands. Pity I have to say our girls didn;t win, so congratulations to the USA team! Still I am proud of our girls, thay did a great job and silver is a very good result.

Our garden is thriving I can say. Some things just grow as nuts, like some dahlia's they are soo hight this year, I think one reaches about 1 mtr easy.
Some other plants also do very well, but although our tomatoes do give sign of life(we have some starting tomatoes already) they do perform a little bit low. I don;t know if I will try them again next year. Perhaps I should try another species of tomatoe, I dont know yet, or may be I will try something completly different.


And I spent quite some time at the computer making a new kit. And I totally overdone it, LOL! So I splitted the kit in two downloads, easier to download, doesn't take so much time. I named the kit Mysteries of the Woods. Hope you lie it.
Good, now it is time to finish this post, I can do a little game of solitaire and then time will be gone already and it will be time to prepare the dinner(well, warm up the endive mash and fry two sausages) and cut some strawberries and make the cream for the desert.
Oh, we girls always have to do so much things, ROFL!!!
Have a lovely week ahead and I hope everyone will be safe, despite some nasty weather around the planet.
Till next week.

Download   part 1 HERE

Parakeets like to destroy things LOL!

Goodafternoon everybody!

After a few tropical days here temperatures dropped a lot and now we have days of around 20/21C with some clouds and some sun, yesterday and this morning we even had a little bit of rain.
The drop of temperatures mainly comes because of the wind that blows from wrong direction, something between North/North-West sometimes just West so that doesn;t bring the higher temperatures to us.
Still if you have the sunny moments it is nice to be outside, and even sometimes wearm in our garden. Somewhere next week it might be that temperatures will rise slowly a tiny little bit, well, let's hope so and then hope it will stay steady for a much longer while.

I started the post with the parakeets, hahaha. Well, they are lovely little birds but they really do like to destroy things at times. I guess it is because they are curious and also rather smart. I have little nets hanging on the rosebow, where i put the slices of apple in. I hang them with little strings of binding for plants, you should say it is stronger stuff, but no, they manage now to unwind the little nets and they hold the nets into their claw and then pick out the applet hrough the holes. Ready and done? just let them fall unto the ground, Kyra will pick them up again and fill them and hang them, ROFL.
Last year they also destroyed gradyately the birdseed feader. Okay, it was made of plastic but still! It was meant for the seed for the little birdies but the parakeets liked it too. But this year I was smarter. It is a simple system you can put together, but this year I glwed several parts with quick drying glew and it helped till now. It still is holding and even the sparrow get some seed from it from time to time.

Last Wednesday our women football team had to play the semi-final agains Sweden and guess what??? They did win it. It was a rather difficult match, but with a wonderful goal they won it and now, today they are playing the final. And guess against who??? It will be the United States. WOW! That will be really a difficult match and I really cannot and will not predict who will win it.(But of course I hope they might win it, hey, that is normal).
We will see it happen this afternoon at 17.00 a.m. our time. No idea at what time that will be in the US(and even there you have different timezones.).
Be sure Jan and I will sit on the couch watching the match!
 And even if the girls will loose the match we all will be very proud of them to have reached the final of the World Championships!

Oh, Jan had the ct scan of his heart arteries on Friday, we will see what the outcome will be. I must say they take a long time for it. He is busy with it I think already from March.
Worst of it all was we had to wake up real early in the morning. And I know what happens then the night before. Jan always is going to sleep real late at night, but with such an appointment, so early, I just know he will not of hardly sleep at all. With consequence I will not sleep really well either. So on Friday after he came back(on luck there was, he didn;t have to wait for the appointment, so he was ready in about 15 minutes) he took a cup of coffee and then went to bed to have some sleep. I also didn;t feel all to energetic , so in the afternoon I took a little nap of about half an hour and went to bed a bit earlier in the evening than usual and then had a good sleep.

Oh, I did some designing this week, can you believe it?? The kit isn;t ready yet but perhaps I will finish it this week and offer it next Sunday.
Yes, I suddenly got some inspiration and within no time had some papers done and already a few elements. No, I am not telling you the theme or colors, that will stay a mystery for you till I post it. I know, I am a bit a bad girl(writing this with a little smile on my face, haha!)

Good, time to have a little bite, and I think a cup of tea, may be even I can have that in the garden, it seems to be not so bad at the moment, we have longer moments of sun and we can do with some of the vitamine of the sunlight.
Have a wonderful week, and stay safe.