Happy Chinese New Year and Home
sshin-nyen kwhy-ler or “Happy New Year” in Chinese.
Wonderful dragons!
I had robe envy! The Lucky Man was giving children envelopes of money as is traditional.
Tai Chi Chuan – Kwong Tam Merseyside School of Tai Chi
Chinese lantern
Chinese Dragon – The Liverpool Hung Gar Kung Fu Friendship Association
In Chinese mythology the dragon is a creature of the air not of fire. This dragon looked as if it was flying.
Home
I have made some progress on my Winter cushion covers. I’m glad I did or they wont get any used before Spring!
I made the 2nd one a mirror image. The white fabric is silvery like snow. The red border looks a little like knitting. I used it on the roof too.
Such a cosy little house suitable for this room with the house tea light holders, and the fairy tale wood wallpaper. It will have some Winter trees either side of it eventually.
I’d like to show you another sort of home altogether.
This is Lyla, a beagle cross. She was dumped here but wasn’t coming out of her tyre home to be fed as she was so scared of the other dumped dogs.
A charity is trying to limit the number of puppies born dumped so is trying to spay as many as possible, while they have them they are worming and vaccinating them. This is all they can afford to do as resources in their shelter are so limited.
If you feel able to help the charity Animal Welfare Cyprus has set up a donation page.
Lyla has a video here. You can see how closed down she has become due to being scared and alone. It really reminded me of Angel when she first came to me.
I had to help.
When I said I could offer her a permanent home, she was taken from her tyre home within hours which may have saved her life and put into foster via a UK run charity, Jodie’s Cyprus Dog Rehoming. Jodie’s parents retired to Cyprus and are also involved in rescue, so both sides of the flight are taken care of. Lyla needs her rabies vaccination (21 days minimum) and paperwork putting in order for a pet passport before she can fly. She will arrive with us in March. All I need to do now, is get things ready for her arrival and meet the plane when it arrives with someone from Jodie’s Rescue taking care of the paperwork at the UK end.
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So my dear blog friends here is the scared little Lyla at the worst you will ever see her. Thanks to those charities working together for the good of the dogs she now has hope and a future. I hope to share her blossoming with you over the next decade or so. 🙂
gwor-nyen haoww in Chinese “pass the New Year well”.
Posted in Crafts, Travels by House Elf with 8 comments.
White Coppice in Winter
2 Tiny stitcheries from Nikki Tervo’s Quilting Mouse
We went to White Coppice on Sunday, safe in the knowledge that we would have a warm home to come back to no thanks to the 2 local heating engineer companies we had approached. The company who installed the Ariston boiler in 2005 and serviced it annually ever since, wouldn’t come out when the fault of it not lighting up was intermittent. So we asked a 2nd company to come. They changed a part but then it wouldn’t work at all and said it needed a new board. We then approached our original company. They charged us a call out fee and said it had the same problem. They quoted as astronomical £580 for the board to be put in. We asked the 2nd company for a quote but he never got back to us. Very odd.
Fed up with waiting and being cold, Lovely Husband opened up the boiler and took a look at the board. He sourced the part locally and fitted it himself for £180 including VAT. He then checked all the other electrical connections and the boiler started up again. Immediately it started to drip. It was then we noticed 3 nuts were missing! There was no sign at all of them and they had clearly been removed. Suspicious! As soon as we put 3 bog standard wing nuts on, the dripping ceased and the boiler started working better than ever. We think someone was trying to make extra work to be paid for.
Needless to say we wont be using either of those 2 firms again!
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I can honestly say I wallowed like a hippo in a long deep rose scented bath and didn’t care how long I stayed there! It was gloriously decadent! It was also the warmest I had felt all week. I told Lovely Husband that he could buy himself a bottle of plonk as a celebration. All hail the conquering hero! – wasn’t that from Disney’s Aladin?
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So let us go inland by Chorley to White Coppice, the Brigadoon of the Moors. It still feels surreal going over the hills, seeing the Moors and there is a cricket pitch! Who ever had the idea? There is something eccentric genius/ Port Meirion about it.
White Coppice cricket pitch in a light smattering of snow. I took you here back in August I think when everything was still green.
Lovely Husband wasn’t with us when we did the woodland walk to Brinscall last time so he was keen to see it for himself. It felt less like a cave without the leaves. I still kept thinking of Red Riding Hood and the wood path to Grandma’s House.
The snow accented the skeletons of the trees. Walking back I kept looking behind me thinking that someone (the Big Bad Wolf?) was following us, but it wasn’t foot fall, just snow from the branches falling in clumps.
The sun was almost down when we got back to the car, but the snow on the cricket pitch hadn’t melted. Snow is forecast tonight and we had -2c last night.
I fell asleep curled up with Squeak in the car on the way home. Greyhounds are so soporific and relaxing. After the week we’d had, this walk was much needed. We had a warm house and hot chocolate to come back to, and a roast chicken for supper. Sunday was a lovely day. I hope you enjoyed it too. What are you finding relaxing at the moment?
Posted in Crafts, Travels by House Elf with 8 comments.