What's Blooming This Month- Enero

Because we have something in flower on our land all year round, even if it's considered a weed or a pricker bush, we thought it would be good to keep a chronicle of these, the homely and the outrageously gorgeous. So here goes for January:

Mystery vine

Mystery vine closeup

Flor de Cuchillo

Gazania

Possibly argilara

The first two photos show a plant that we don't know the name of.  It's a succulent vine which bears lovely yellow flowers all winter just when everything else is going by. It must be terribly invasive in some areas, but I just pull it out when it becomes annoying. If anyone knows what it's called. let us know.
Third photo is the wonderful Flor de Cuchillo.  Another succulent, flowers all year round, great ground cover, needs no attention. Fantastic plant for this climate.
Fourth  is the gazania daisy which decides to pop open here and there around the property - yellow, orange, red, very welcome.
Fifth is another mysterious and very annoying campo weed.  This hyper prickly shrub spreads wherever it pleases and annoys the dogs as they try to cut across the property. You have to cut it at the base because if you try to cut it anywhere else it gets you right through your gloves! It looks like a relative to the Argilara bush or tree that our friend Enriq uses to make beautiful mallots or walking sticks, scraping off the pincers to reveal its lovely veiny and gnarly shape. 
And lastly, a sweet little blue cornflower that is not invasive, prickly or annoying. The shrubby globularia.

Globularia

 

 

The climate here in our part of Catalunya

Yes, it is a boring subject but I'm going to talk about the weather. Linda won't even care to read it. What's the weather like here?  We love it most of the time and have lunch out on the patio many days during the winter when it can be in the 60's.   There's an automatic weather station 2km away which allows me to keep track of our weather stats.  In general it does not freeze (3km from the sea) and summer goes up into the 90's but always with a sea breeze.  The season for swimming in the pool is late April to early October. Here's what I have recorded for 2010:
Sunny days                      282
Mostly cloudy                  27
Cloudy                             56
Rain                               49cm(20in.)
wind over 80km(50mph)         35days            
highest wind for yr                   132km/hr (82mph)
highest wind we've seen           148km/hr (92mph)  this is the one that blew the blades off the wind generator

We've been told that at the commercial wind generators in the hills, they recorded over 200km/hr(125mph) back when we had our highest wind in 2009.  There are several wind farms in our area with over 100 wind turbines.  One new tower is 3MegaWatts with 110M (360ft) diam. blades.  Spain, with 884wind farms(22,000MW) was no. 3 in wind generation capacity in the World in 2009 after the U.S.(46,000MW) and Germany(30,000MW),  but this year or next China will surpass all three countries. 

So the weather is great except when that Mistral whips down out of the Pyrennes.

a typical beautiful day

Winter wind blowing water out of our pool

sunrise and the sea under the old pine

Sunset looking across the Ebro Delta

Yes, we did get snow once if you can call it that

El Perello Festa de San Antoni continua

Our friend Andre competing in the Calmant contest

It's not over yet.  Tuesday night was Calmant, which included the 4th night of orchestras and dancing, plus a contest to make the best Calmant, a drink made from coffee, rum and sugar.  Setting the drink alight and ladling, ladling, with the fire rising higher and higher is all part of the allure of making a good Calmant.  Lord knows how it's judged.  After the judging, the drinking begins, and then anyone can get more ingredients and make their own. Since the judging began at 6pm, and the drinking soon after, it's a very early night for dancing, but it looks like the whole town is there for waltzing, disco, conga lines and anything else. Later on at midnight, another band takes over.

Some of the 30+ Calmant contestants

And the band played on into the night

  And last night -- the grand finale of  6 days of Sant Antoni, the Pirotecnica.  The Catalans love fireworks.  El Perello has 2 different fireworks at Sant Antoni.and more later in the year.

El Perello Festa de San Antoni

Today is San Antoni, El Perello's patron saint, therefore a Festa Major with a whole week of activities. Special for us too. Not only is it the first holiday experienced right after we moved into our house on Jan 11, a year later in 2009 we found our precious little Catalan dog cowering in the road after the blasts of the Correfocs. a San Antoni highlight.  If you come from the U.S. or most other places, you'd never get this close to fireworks. Guys dressed like devils dance around in the town square chasing the young people with tridents shooting sparklers and fireworks strung overhead go off continually.  It's eardrum shattering and totally exciting! And no one tells you to stand back.

Corre Foc, running devils

     There are dances, concerts, sports events, kids carnival rides, and today, blessing of animals outside the church.  People from all over come on horseback or with carts and carriages for the Tres Tombs or 3 tours of the town.  The rest of us bring dogs, cats, birds, or a turtle and all are blessed by the priest.  Its the third blessing for Wookie and Toni and the first for Sunny meowing loudly in his cage.

Fiesta de Los Reyes

Epiphany, Epifania, Los Reyes Magos, Feast of the Magi, Kings. Whatever name it goes by, today is a festa mayor or a pretty big holiday and the day when kids get their presents.  Our town, el Perello has a grand procession that starts in a restaurant parking lot, L'Ametlla de Mar, next town over has the Kings arrive by boat with everyone waiting in the harbor and then Balthasar, Melchoir and Gaspar mount horse drawn carriages to take them through town. Everything is shut down - even the gym, forget the planned workout. For breakfast or dessert there's the traditional Kings bread, a cake-like ring with candied fruit that holds a little king figurine for the lucky recipient or a fava  bean for the less fortunate.

I added a watercolor photo print of the Magi on camels to my holiday collection  (formerly only a Flor de Navidad or pointsettia ) and it turned out to be quite popular with Brits and Catalans alike. The photo above shows the card.  I was pretty full of myself and even gave one to our good friend, Catalan writer and illustrator, Mabel Pierola. Mabel in turn gave me her Kings card, one that was distributed by Unicef a few years back. Hah! There are always greater heights to scale!

Dia de San Esteban

Sagrada Familia, Nativity facade

Gaudi seat at Parc Guell, Barcelona

Toni on our Gaudi style seat

There are literally hundreds of Saint's Days here in Catalunya and in all of Spain. Today is special because, not only is it Boxing Day, an English holiday, it's Steve's Saint's Day(Esteban). It seems there are around 2500 Saints with John Paul II having beatified over half of them.  I wouldn't mind seeing my hero Antoni Gaudi receive that honor. Lots of people have been lobbying for his sainthood for years. His designs and architecture are one of the reasons we were drawn here in the first place. The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is the most nature-focused, innovative and breathtaking cathedral in the world. We have an homage to Gaudi''s Park Guell as the focal point of the terrace/entry way to our house (photo). We worked on this trencadis (broken tile) or mosaic project for three months - my design and Steve's engineering and more patient tile placement.

Noche Buena - Christmas Eve

caganer 

Toni, Sunny, Wookie

Astrid and Jon, December 18, 2010

Dates found in Reus

Linda's watercolor of Cal Viudo in El Perello'

The wind today is the strongest yet this season! (121 kph or 75 mph -hurricane force!!)    We've experienced some blows in the past three years that have shattered two sets of propellers off the wind generator, bent the solar panels, and crunched the solar panel tracker. On the upside, Steve now knows how to prevent or at least deal with these setbacks. At 5am when the wind noise woke me, I decided to run a load of wash rather than waste all the juicy overflow coming into our energy converter. 
Yesterday we drove to Reus (city where Gaudi was born) 30 minutes away. Some beautiful Modernista (Art Nouveau) style buildings, shopping and great restaurants.   On the drive we practiced English and Spanish with our Italian buddies, Gab and Dan (she Daniela, he Gabriele) using my fab Kindle that contains a mega sized Spanish grammar book. Before a visit to the city market (a smaller but no less colorful version of La Boqueria in Barcelona) and lunch at our newly found favorite 10euro lunch spot, Rosa dels Vents, we spied some public works gents cleaning street trees who had, in  the back of their truck, an early Christmas present we couldn't pass up.  Photo shows our haul of dates that, when mature, should be sweet and bountiful enough to last the year.    
Two weeks ago when we last went to Reus, there was a Pessebre market, a bunch of stands selling manger figurines and other holiday decorations. Though we don't have a manger scene, or a tree as a matter of fact, (we do have a cat safe decorated bough of pine, olive, and cedar) we finally have our own caganer (photo). If you don't live in Catalunya, you probably don't know about caganers. The Catalans love to celebrate the life of the peasant and believe there must have been an ordinary person seeing to his needs among, or behind, the stable denizens at the sacred event.
              As this post seems to be turning into our end of year holiday letter, we'll include a few photos of exceptional events of the past year:  
     Here is the first of Astrid and Jon's WEDDING photos we received (Mr & Mrs Hoyt of Chester Vermont celebrate their one week anniversary on Christmas day!).  We watched the ceremony via Skype and we'll post Richard's pix as they come in.
     Dogs and Cat:They sleep together but not quite friends yet: Sunny, our 5 month old male cat born in the Burga Valley at Eva and Robin's, Mas Cubano, has taken the place of departed, Lulu, in our menagerie. 
     My recent watercolor of Cal Viudo, the traditional old mill in El Perello where we take our olives to be pressed.  They now have postcards, tags, and prints of this available.