Boggle, Baking, Blogs, Blooms & Butterflies

LIFE:30th July - 5th August 2018

You  can tell from today's title that I like alliteration.

 
A dull start to the week, weather wise,  with grey days, but it brightened up a lot by the weekend  and we were back to the warm dry weather of this summer. - still very little rain.  

BOGGLE

Who remembers this fun word game?   We must have bought it for our daughter in the 1980's. Our granddaughter recently found it in an old  toy box I kept and we have had great fun playing it - a noisy rattling the box of letters  to see how they fall is as much a part of the fun!  

BAKING 
This was the other key activity with Nh.  this week, after she  borrowed  this cook  book from Melrose Children's Library.  So we made Chocolate Nests, Mini Pizzas and a two tiered Sponge Cake.

BLOGS
"Colour" was the theme of this week's "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks " blog prompt.  Tricky!  Then I came up with a look at "A Trio of Colourful Lives" , with short profiles of:

• My great grandmother, with an apocryphal family story of her being descended from ship wrecked Spanish sailors.  Do I have Spanish blood in me? 
• A 19th century step mother with an eventful past - not a widow as I first thought but a spinster with three illegitimate chidlren before she marrie my G.G. Grandfather.
• A very distant family link but a colourful story of a butler secretly marrying an heiress Maud Ward-Fox, and changing his name to hers.  I was delighted to find this photograph of him, looking very suave,  in the British Newspapers Online at FindMyPast.
  
  

The Sepia Saturday weekly blog prompt was tricky too, with a photograph of a man's profile superimposed on a street view.  My eye alighted on the subway station, so featured subways that I had been on across the world from Glasgow and London to Paris, Munich, New York and Washington DC - in Travelling by Tube.

 

Resting my weary sight-seeing legs,

 sitting against the mural at Bastille Metro Station in Paris 

The Bastille Metro  Station pays homage to French history, notably events of 1789. In the centre of this picture is patriot Marianne, wearing the Revolutionary tricolour cockade in her cap. The origins of Marianne  are obscure, but she became a prominent national symbol in France, a personification of the new Republic, with its principles of Liberty and  Reason.  Statues of Marianne appear across France at civic buildings  and law courts and her image features on French euro notes and postage stamps. 

BLOOMS
Delighted with the success of this tub in the garden - one of the best I have managed to do. 

BUTTERFLIES  
We were out on a walk and saw this budleia bush covered in butterflies - red admiral, peacock, cabbage white and small white.  

 

 

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Journal Jottings   

  Recording my everyday life for future family historians   

Developed from the "Genea-Pourri" prompt yon Randy Seaver’s blog Genea-Musings.  I decided to change his title for my own version of this weekly online diary.