A Beach Walk.

The weather was quite grim in the morning, improved gradually over the day and there was even sun and warmth by the end of the afternoon.

I was up early and had to sit inside the door with my tea to avoid the frequent showers that I watched blowing in across the bay.

My plan for the day was to make some chocolate truffles for an upcoming birthday. For that I need to buy some cream at the shop which was the perfect excuse for a walk along the beach.

The tide was out far enough for me to walk under the cliffs and have a bit of fun rock pooling.

One large pool had an unusual number of periwinkles.

Further along on the wet sand were a lot of jellyfish.

There were the common moon jellyfish (about the size of a small orange) and the larger compass jellyfish, (the one below is upside down.)

And just a couple of blue jellyfish which though not as bad as a Portuguese man-of-war still sting.

Refreshed by my walk I made three kinds of truffle with almonds, crystallised ginger and salted caramel pieces. Usually I decorate each kind differently but this time they are all just dipped in chocolate. It will be like a lucky dip selection or Bertie Botts jelly beans ( Harry Potter) though of course there are no unpleasant ones. After dipping the truffles in melted chocolate there was enough chocolate left for me to experiment. I added a generous dollop of double cream and an even more generous splash or two of Baileys and then put the resultant ganache in chocolate moulds. - I've just tried one and although they haven't set hard enough to be called chocolates it still tasted very nice. I suppose I could put them in the freezer and buy more chocolate to coat them with or I could just eat them.

The beach walk wasn't my only foray out. First thing in the morning I had rung the surgery and been given an appointment for the afternoon. I just wanted some reassurance that the latest aches and pains along with more palpitations weren't something to worry about. I only got to see the nurse practitioner, she has a different title but I think that's what she is. I wasn't convinced by being told that the palpitations are probably due to me worrying but at least she took a blood sample to rule out heart failure and I will have a 24 hour ECG. That won't be for a couple of weeks as the surgery only has one monitor left and I have to wait my turn.

And of course being Wednesday I have spent the evening singing with the choir. More practising the songs for Sing For Water which we will be doing the weekend after next.

 

A Zoo Day.

Two photos from last night showing a brief but lovely sunset and the clouds that had been over us for most of the day.

The morning was grey and windy. With the northerly wind blowing straight into the RNLI shop Peter made sure he was warmly dressed for his stint in the shop while I wore my yellow workman's coat over a fleece to do my weeding at the zoo. Eventually I warmed up enough to take the coat off, it got cold and there were some spots of rain so the coat went back on. Three hours later I was walking round taking photos minus coat and fleece. 

At the zoo all the weeds had grown like mad so I wasn't sure where to start. In the end I cleared a number of narrow strips by the cages, half of one of the gravel areas and removed a lot of bindweed from some fuchsias and roses alongside an empty cage. That included digging under the matting to unearth those nasty roots. That was as much as I could do in three hours which was long enough for my back.

There were a lot of people at the zoo today, mainly families with younger children as it's still a few weeks to the school holidays.

Honey demonstrating that well known saying "There's now't so happy as a pig in muck."

When I came home I sat outside enjoying the garden and then reading for a while.  

After which I completed putting up the wooden swallows in our bedroom. I had thought that sticky gel tape would be the solution but that didn't stick to the wood at all so I went back to the plan of using white Blu-Tak. So far it seems to be working.

 

Rain.

It's the first of July and it's been cold and frequently wet here. In Mach it was at least warm and not quite so wet. The weather was so dismal that the osteospermum and mesembryanthemum on the terrace both refused to open their flowers.

We went to Mach this morning to meet our friends in the library to practise our Welsh. We have a lot of fun as we (or at least I) think up silly but grammatically correct answers to the homework we have been asked to do over the holiday. We were just about as noisy as the small toddler play session being held next to us. Afterwards, to celebrate the end of our third year of trying to get to grips with this complex language we went to have lunch in the old Parliament Building in what used to be Caffi Alys. (Can't remember what it is called now.) The new staff aren't Welsh speakers so we didn't get to practise our Welsh. That is a shame as I'm confident saying 'May I have ....... ? ' and of course 'he's paying'. The food there is the standard café fare, not the exciting food at the Royal House Café but not bad. Peter had a salad with breaded scampi and chips while I had leek and potato soup with a bread roll. I had my usual quick look around the charity shops but apart from a Spanish phrase book and a French dictionary for Peter didn't find anything to tempt me.

I felt quite tired when we got home, a combination of an unaccustomed lunch and spending several hours using my brain. After a break I then attempted to get on with my next small project. This is to hang 11 old carved and painted wooden swallows on our bedroom wall. Most of them have a nail sticking out of them but I need some way of attaching them to the wall. My first thoughts were to make a wire loop which to go round the nail and then hook over a nail in the wall but so far my attempts haven't worked. I'm almost thinking I can Blu' Tak them up as the wood is very light.

Then I had a go at making some raspberry macaroons using one of those box kits, something I haven't done since I was a teenager. I bought it because it was on special offer in Lidl, I like macaroons and it contains only natural flavourings and colours. Currently the macaroons are cooling as is the filling which looks and tastes just like the pink blancmange we had with school dinners. A good thing I like pink blancmange. Of course the macaroons look nothing like 'real' ones but having cracked rather than perfectly smooth shiny tops won't affect the way they taste. Making the macaroons fitted in well with Peter's plan to have scrambled eggs on toast for his supper as he was able to use up the two eggs yolks plus one whole egg (one in which the yolk broke before I was able to fish it out).