Claudio, whom I call the bird man – waved from the other side when he saw my camera, came over and posed – pity my photo doesn’¡t quite do him justice. His wooden mobiles of flying geese or swans, are beautifully crafted, as I said in an earlier post. He carries a bunch in his bag over his shoulder, and when he’s sold them all he adjourns to the Bar Penguinos behind him…

The communications tower of the building which is the HQ of the national fleet, down in the port area, just across the road from mercado del puerto 

The front facade of the of the HQ of the fleet – Edificio del Armada Nacional – this is one of my favourite buildings here.

But instead of quilting, today I whipped up a couple of quick gourmet-from-scratch recipes and had some friends around to lunch. It went well, although the lead up included finding I’d bought strawberry flavoured yoghurt instead of plain for the dressing for the cucumber. Leftovers ensure dinner tonight is no problem, so I will do some more quilting later. There is still rain around – a wet saturday might see the whole thing finished…. but the Tree of Life thing hasn’t gone away after all, and I have to fit that in, and present it ready for hanging on the morning of monday 16th, ie barely 10 days away – and right now I’m wondering whether to ditch what I have done and re-do the surface design before quilting, or plough on, but not happily – there is about a 30 – 48 hour window of time in which to make this decision. Gut feeling tells me it would be a better thing to do a new surface design … and I will publish either one or two pics when done, I promise! One thing successful procrastinators like myself need to be able to do is pull a rabbit out of the hat at the last minute.

Not bad considering the several interruptions – 36 squares added to the total makes this the handquilting halfway mark. But it’s book club this morning, and that will take up to lunchtime, so it will be afternoon before I am quilting today – but on the other hand, DH is away for the night, so there will be more time without interruption later, too. I have just read Alexandra Fuller’s “Let’s Not Go to the Dogs Tonight” A white African childhood coloured by the alcoholic mother – a dysfunctional family in the turmoil of history – sounds terrible but is fascinating and really well written without maudlin longing for a doomed way of life – that of white farmers in black Africa.