Learning new tricks

Hello, everyone. After figuring out how to use the easy parts of the Blogger app the other day, I got brave.

I have figured out how to add words to a picture! 

Here is the first one:



This is a photo of one of the new bushes we added to the yard. It is a native pepper plant in our area. For me, the best thing about it is the numbers of birds, especially mockingbird, that it attracts.

test post from phone with photo

Hello, everyone.  This is a test post using the phone instead of the tablet. 

This is our 40+ years old Golden Barrel cactus. It was in process to be planted in the ground.

New shoes for the Camino!

 Hello, everyone. We went to our local Fleet Feet store for their anniversary party and found our new trail runners for hiking the Camino.

These are Speedgoat 5 by Hoka. For a wonder, they aren't nearly the same exact color as my first two pairs were...don't know why, but that turquoise blue shad was the only thing available when we were shopping those years. This time it's more of a powder blue. The green second color is pretty dominant when you see them in person. The shape of the top of the tongue is different, it has a kind of dip just where your foot bends forward with the steps, and it's thinner.

As y'all can tell, we're looking forward to our next Camino walk: the Via de la Plata. (This was supposed to happen in 2020, but like a lot of things that spring, the trip fell.) This starts in Seville and goes either to Astorga to join the Frances or to the trail head of the Sanabres which goes through Ourense and joins with the Invierno (Winter) route of the Frances. We're planning to take the Sanabres option.

(On the blog maintenance front, the phone is still acting up on posts. I tried emailing Blogger and got an auto-reply from Google that "this email is no longer monitored" or some such. This though they're still peddling the Blogger app for downloads and giving that as the contact email. What is wrong with these people? And why did they break my app?)

 

Color play (edited)

 Hello, everyone. 

This started out to be a post from my Samsung phone, but the electronic mice ate it. I don't know why the blogger interface won't let me make posts with a photo from my phone any more, up until a few months back it worked fine.

Anyway, I emailed the photo from my phone to my email and here it is:

This is from a spring-themed charm pack. I'm making a charm pack apron for an Easter gift, as y'all can see it's a very spring-y color assortment.

The long strips between the many charm-pack squares are from a separate piece of fabric. (Don't faint, all of this was bought for this project!) The general appearance will be like the Christmas apron that was recently made, only in spring colors.

The progress on it is that the name strip at the top has been embroidered, and the layout is done, so tomorrow I will probably begin stitching together the squares that have been laid out. 

The pattern calls for dividing the charm pack in half, then one half is split into even parts and reassorted and pieced together, while the other half is split into three parts and reassorted and pieced together. These would be the ones with a small horizontal piece below a square in the picture. After all this piecing you lay out the two kinds of squares and then sew them together.

I am using the method developed by Bethany of Shabby Fabrics to make a fully lined pocket. It's very functional. I love my Christmas apron that was made after this method!

(After this was posted I found a HUGE blank space with  the scattered remnants of the lost text. And the failed upload of the photo, too. It's all cleaned up now.)

Reverted to "classic Blogger" and now photos work

Hello, everyone.

I tried again with the new Blogger setup. The photo upload was still not working. How these people managed to tangle up photo upload with google docs is beyond me. Maybe they should try proofreading their work.

I reverted the blog to the older format, which worked.

Now I can upload the photo of the two new Camino walking guides. They contain maps, suggestions for lodgings, brief descriptions of towns and areas of the path.

In this case, the path is the Camino Frances, which is the second-oldest of routes taken by pilgrims that begin roughly near the western Pyrenees. We walked it in 2014, going over the high route in the Pyrenees, called the Route Napoleon. (Blog posts from 2014 discuss this walk.) We would like to return to it and walk the lower route through the Pyrenees, called the Valcarlos route.

The very oldest Camino route to Santiago is the Primitivo, first taken as  royal progress/pilgrimage by the court of one of the Kings Pelayo when the relics were first rediscovered. It began in Oviedo, where his court was, and took a mountainous route to Santiago. We have not walked this route, but would like to in the future.

The oldest route from the Pyrenees (at least I think it is the oldest!) would be the Camino del Norte, which runs along the edge of the ocean. The villages are in little fjords and the path goes up and down a lot. Steeply up and down! (We walked this in 2017 and 2018, and blog posts from that time period discuss it.) The older routing connects to the French route at Arzua, and that is the way we walked.

I am not sure of the age of the Camino Portugues--interested readers can chime in their advice in the comments--but it used to run from Porto north to Santiago. Lately quite a number of people have been starting out in Lisbon. Like the Spanish routes, there are various walking options that allow one to either go inland or along the sea. We walked this in 2015, and blog posts from that time period discuss it.

Another old route is the Via de la Plata, the way of the platted road. (These days everyone remembers that "plata" means silver in Spanish and some call it the Silver Road.) This one is longer. We hope to walk it in the future.

As y'all can see, the go-slow retreat/pilgrimage on foot becomes an addiction. Also I have been privileged to visit Our Lady of Covadonga, the cathedral at Oviedo, and many other edifying churches.

It is not too much to say that I long for the days when we can walk the Camino again.

A wonderful mail delivery

Hello, everyone.

A couple of days ago we had a wonderful mail delivery: (Blogger refuses to allow me to upload the photo!)

Sadly I cannot show you the picture of the two new (current-year) Camino Frances guides. Blogger is messed up and will not let me upload a photo. It keeps hanging up in google docs...which is not where the picture is!

You know, the old Blogger worked fine most of the time. It never gave me problems with uploading photos. It never gave me problems with putting links in the posts either. And I didn't have to interpret strange symbols to begin composing a new post. 

It's ridiculous!

We got our new guide books for the Camino. These were new ones because the last time we walked the Camino Frances was 2014. (And with the China plague this spring, we had to postpone our Via de la Plata walk that would have begun right after Easter.) We decided to see if we could do a slightly shorter one later on, when Spain is again ready for visitors. We ordered the new Camino Frances guide books from Ivar Revke's shop in Santiago de Compostela. (Ivar is the proprietor of the wonderful, informative Camino Forum, which is linked in the sidebar.) 

We ordered two different books because, as with finding a new recipe, it's always good to read more than one and compare them. 

Perhaps in a few days Blogger will be working better and allow photo upload. I certainly hope so!

We have had two beautiful walking days in a row

Hello, everyone.
We have indeed had good walking mornings, actually for the mornings. I am coming to think that spring in northern Spain has daytime heating rainstorms. So if you are out walking just after sunrise and it's great weather, you should get your kilometers done before around three in the afternoon. After then, you might be caught in the daily drench.
Yesterday we walked from Villapedre to Tapia de Casariego, a smallish resort town on the coast.
I will admit that the online comments about the scenery blinded me. The municipal albergue at Tapia de Casariego does indeed have great views of the ocean, the rock beach, and the sky. It also has at most one washtub to do laundry. The clothesline is under the sky. Remember what I said about the afternoon rain? I ran like a crazy to get the things inside when it started!
Today we took a short day and are staying in Ribadeo.

No pictures today because Blogger put my pictures into limbo.
Tomorrow we turn away from the coast and begin angling southwest toward Santiago.
Ultreia.

Blogger: surprise! We ate your link list!

Hello, everyone.

As it says in the title, the favorite blog list has disappeared. The gadget is no longer in the gadget list. Who knows why? Now there is a different link collection gadget.

Why can't people leave what isn't broken alone?