Music

She started to play Guitar in September, here's her first Live Performance... "Leaving on a Jetplane - John Denver".

My daughter likes to Cosplay

Cosplay means you make a costume and dress up like your favorite character (movie,comic,anime,...). Nathalie likes that a lot and started two years ago with this Ten Ten (from 'Naruto').

Now THE place to be when you cosplay in Belgium is the annual F.A.C.T.S. convention (the biggest Comics, Sci Fi and Anime festival in the Benelux). So imagine you are 14 years old and you BEGGED your big brother to take you and your best friend with him when he goes to f.a.c.t.s. this year. You have been working on your costume for months (with a little help from you mam) and you saved all of your money because there will be lots of fun stuff to buy.  On the big day you are all dressed up as Hermione in your Hogwarts Uniform

AND THEN

YOU MEET

TOM FELTON

yes DRACO himself!

Coolest day Ever I guess!

Today was a brilliant fall day and we had lots of fun doing a photoshoot at Hogwarts school.

Dark Sky

When one day it's 15°C/59°F and the next it's 33°C/91°C this is what you get :

I am so happy the leak in the kitchen roof was fixed yesterday!

There will be storms all night and tomorrow will be about 20°C/68°F again which is much better when you have to sleep in a house without air conditioning. I'm getting so tired of this extreme weather changes, even the plants in the garden look stressed.

Wonderful Weeds 1 : Fireweed

The rains came back with wind and thunderstorms.  Everything started to grow like crazy, including the weeds and I'm thinking of writing a book about weeds.  But a book take's time, so in the mean while I'll do a series of 'wonderful weeds' on this blog.

The first one : FIREWEED (Epilobium angustifolium or Chamerion angustifolium), also called great willowherb or rosebay willowherb and the dutch name is 'wilgenroosje' which means little willow-rose, because the leaves look like willow leaves.

It grows espescially on places where there's been a fire, hence the name fireweed. The young leaves are edible (raw, cooked or as a tea).

This cute one is very interested ...

I'm Back!

I've been really neglecting blogger for the past 2 months. To my defense I have to say it took us some time to find our balance back. Our lifes now look like this : chemo, a bad week, a better week, and chemo again. Next week they will do a new scan to find out if it worked.

Outside Spring passed with more sun, higher temperatures and less rain then ever before. I couldn't keep up with watering the garden but my tomatoes and peas do well and there's still time to do some seeding again.

I tried some new plants this year like this Hopi Red Dye Amaranth, it should get beautiful red flowers, have edible leafs and seeds and be useful as a natural dye.

and Chichiquelite, similar to garden huckelberry but with a taste of liquorice is what they say about it. I am curious about these because they are almost the same as Black Nightshade (Solanum nigum) which is considered poisonous. Now I know that is not really true, the problem is they are easily confused with Deadly Nightshade (Atropa Belladona). I even tasted them onces to prove my right  (I know I'm a bit crazy sometimes...), they are watery and loaded with seeds so unless you're starving it's not worth it. To make sure no one eats the deadly ones by mistake I planted these in pots.

Just for the beauty of it : Small Tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) on thyme

A quick update...

JP is in the hospital. What started in December with a lung infection and copd now turned out to be esophageal cancer. But the good thing is it hasn't spread to other organs so we have hope.

Springflowers!

Winter blues and a very sick husband kept me away from blogland for a while.  I didn't take any pictures for at least a month. But today the sun was shining so brightly that I finally went for a walk.  We are having an early Spring this year but I was surprised to find so many flowers already!

Snowdrops in front of our town hall

Lesser celandine

Crocus

Primula

Viola Odorata

Looking for these little ones was almost like searching Easter eggs. I wonder how many people actually see these tiny flowers...

Crazy Amounts of Snow

Never ever in my lifetime did we have this amount of snow and we do not yet see the end of it. Good thing is it happened during Christmas holidays. My car is not prepared for these streets (there's no more salt left so the streets are very slippery). On top of that both of my children have the flue...

Somewhere underneath this whiteness are the stairs to our front door!

Now where is my ball?

Since when do we have a mountain in front of the garden shed?

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE

More Snow!

Winter has not even started and we already had more snow-days then in an average year! Another 10cm/4inches was added yesterday. Global warming ?!

 

Winter makes me Speachless