This morning sat here eating my breakfast, looking out onto the terrace I saw one male pheasant, lots of squirrels, rabbits and a pair of muntjacs!

Nice to see at the beginning of a day in this beautiful countryside location. Unlike the unreal view of a bright red double decker bus that managed its way up this narrow lane on Saturday!! How it turned round is still a miracle to me! Such a bizarre sight I couldn't believe my eyes!!

I am still also worrying about the wasps in the attic! I can hear them buzzing through the night, (drilling their way through the wood of the hatch right over my head..) They may not actually be drilling!! And memories of the horrendous seven stings in one hit I received about five years ago plays on my mind in my dreams...

Just a thought, I'm often saying in Spanish 'there, yonder' allí, 'there' ahí, and 'here' aqui, are so similar.

And only just realised the only difference between here and there is a 't'!!! 'T'here Lol!!!

Is that it for today? Let me see what quotes have caught my eye in the last few days... I go through phases don't I, quoting this or that... Other people's mainly, my own I don't usually write here.. I file them away on Twitter to get lost amongst the billions of other posts.

This is beautiful, I purloined it from somewhere...

There are some beautiful places to live in this world but none compare to the beauty of residing in the heart of someone you love...

"Step out of the pressure cooker and let things take their natural course instead of trying to force something or predict the unpredictable." Quote from 'Summer at the comfort food cafe.'

This can most certainly be me, this is me? I do rush headlong into life... But I have seen how life can be taken so suddenly I guess.

We only have today.

For all the support and caring I give at work, I struggle... I am not including the huge and amazing love of friends and family! So please do not shout at me, I mean I guess I feel I am doing all this... for nothing.

And now having re-homed Pippa the guilt is ripping out my soul, I actually cannot bear to think of her, I have to block her out, or like now, give in and let it out... Thank goodness you can't see me.

I went home before my flight, did I say? It felt like walking into a strangers house, I felt nothing, not even like it's where my heart is.

Lol I'll be okay, I have a temperature, and my always over thinking brain is making the usual mountain's out of a molehills!

Going to the docs later, more antibiotics, which is probably the actual cause of the problem!

And a  damn book, I'm highlighting on nearly every page! I should be reading murder and horror not a stupid  story about a young widow!!! Fffff!!!

This, or me!  Should come with a government health warning!

Messy!

Made two batches of plum jam already since my return to this placement... And as they say, all the best things in life are messy!

Picked them yesterday and made this morning!

No photographs on my kindle from whence I write, so will sort out later, maybe.

Oh technology! Why do I forget the cleverness of it!!

It's good to be back to work; but I never get used to not having my things with me, and feeling alienated from everyone, cut off... Always feels like a different time zone or somewhere between the cracks of real life somehow...

Today when I wanted to just be, and remember the awful events of 9/11, being in Crete at the time with Sarah, and our embargoed flight... Unable to reach my mom, my family back home in the states... The unreal feeling of it all from being so far away.  We were eating  in a restaurant and I went up to the bar to ask the guy what was happening, it looked like a disaster movie from where we were sitting, I remember it so clearly.

Instead I was driving to a hospital appointment!

In the rain! Making use of my new coat!

Lol! I knew I should have kept my old trench coat from twenty years ago!!

So! I was going to repeat a story I've told before about when we had the three minutes silence the week after 9/11, how I was on the phone to my mom outside the dealership, at Mercedes, and when I turned round to go back to my desk, all my colleagues were standing behind me in the showroom, showing their support...

Plums still on the tree, now some of which is jars... And my stash of chocolate! Under guard!

This photograph does not do what I have just seen justice! On my Facebook its at least able to move to give a better idea...

I was sat here, Blogging, and the room turned red... well, Sahara red... I dashed upstairs onto the terrace and wow! What an amazing view!!! Incredible!

Apocalyptic! Crazy skies!

I am a very lucky person in so many ways; I don't thank everyone enough... Thank you to the people in my life who make me smile, who lighten my life and heart...

Cod, from the Crispy Cod

I've just run up onto the terrace, the light in the house is red, Sahara red red! I've taken some photos, next blog now!!!

Photograph taken yesterday morning walking into town... sunlight and shade...

The purple church.. bit misty? AKA rubbish photograph!

A photograph of Alhaurín Golf in the distance...

Today I went down to the coast to spend some time with friends, the third and final time in the last week, they are back to the UK and I am of course back to work soon!

Been good spending time with them, out and about and just chatting and catching up on whats been going on... Today we went to the Crispy Cod in Fuengirola, we usually do, but I didn't think we would this time, the town being so busy, but we got a space nearby for the car, no problem, even seemed a bit quiet down on the coast.... The food great as always.

Okay, posting this and then getting the next batch on!! Amazing skies!!

After my strange start to the day I spent five hours with friends down near the old place...

Talk talk talking! Laughter and tears as always, always good to see my friends and will see them again before their holiday ends...

Went to Aldi on my way home, and came back to a beautiful cool house, I'd left everything closed and shut up, no sun no hot air! My skin is actually cold!! Lol...

Just watched a movie called I Kill Giants... It was good, just an easy to watch movie, nothing frightening like yesterdays choice!!

And I'm leaving now with a quote from the movie...

***

All things that live in this world, die.

This is why you must find joy in the living, while the time is yours, and not fear the end.

To deny this, is to deny life.

But to embrace it... Can you embrace it?

You are stronger than you think.

***

Dogwood

One of my favorite plants... The dogwood tree... I have a book from when I was a baby and this dogwood tree was in the story... Its an American book, and the above photo taken when I was back home earlier in the year... the last placement I was on he also had a dogwood tree in his arboretum!

I'm in that strange place now, a week before work, ready to go, wanting to just get back to it, and be busy... Yet not wanting to waste precious time here, it would be like working Monday to Friday and on Saturday morning thinking, oh well, I'll be back to work in a couple of days! Already thinking of going while I should be enjoying the here and now!

I am off to see friends on the coast shortly, but my head is stuck in a wedge! lol... that would hurt wouldn't it!!

I dreamt last night I was in a car, a passenger, coming down from Hemel Hempstead on the Two Waters Road, and at the T-junction at the bottom, there was a sign, numbers I can't remember, I was checking my phone to work out what they meant... I said, we can't turn to the left, to Apsley! and then woke up! So I guess that was telling me to take the right road! Lol... the right road! the correct road? Wish I could remember the numbers!!

Did I mention I had a sore eye a couple of weeks ago? I did, my left eye in the tear duct, and I just bathed it with warm water and it went away... I got another sore eye now, the right, its a stye!! So I am guessing that's what I had in the other eye!! Whats that all about!! I used to get them all the time when I was child... Google says stress, or infection! Terrific! In either case! So I am bathing this eye now, I'd forgotten how sore they are... oh and I had a nose bleed too! a couple of days ago!?! after the neck ache I had last week!!!

So that's me today! Bloody, sore and a pain in the neck!

Cordoba

For all the photographs I take; like most people, my best and worse memories kept in photographic detail in my mind, my Kodak moments,  (other named brands on equal par!) flash sometimes through my mind at the best and the worse moments also!

This morning seeing something I have seen before, when I was 17, a dog in the aftermath of being hit by a car, the same spinning and heartbreaking screaming... I cried, while driving... It was awful.

Then as I drove to the coast this morning, both visions so far apart in years all but a blink apart in my memory!

I shouldn't have been in my car, I wouldn't have had to see it!

And I shouldn't, I had lent my car to my neighbor, but then my neighbor got let down, and I had the opportunity to visit friends I thought I couldn't see today, but did, but only after the above.

Funny how life is sometimes.

So I wouldn't just be home most of the day I took myself on a longish walk up to the Mirador, on the far side of town, heading up towards Laura Golf.

Seemed further than the 1.1 miles it said it was!! So yes okay, that's 2.2 miles from my starting point!

And unfortunately, my backpack looks a bit like... strange!

A view not normally seen on foot from me! And at only 10 something in the morning! I had a cold cafe con leche at the bar on my way back through town!

Then learnt I could have my car, collected it, then saw the awful thing, before heading coastward!

On my way home I popped into the garden centre and found a little serenity walking amongst the fauna and flora! Listening and watching the waterfall, and the tortugas swimming and sunbathing...

To close, a poem I purloined from Twitter, sorry I'm not sure whose it is, I didn't intend to share here!