Exploring Braga

It is always better to enter a conflict calmly, firmly, and respectfully, rather than with guns blazing.  Then you can escalate as required.  Gerrit is still working on this.  It was effective with MO the faulty pool robot though; the manufacturer was apologetic and offered a complete repair service paid for by them including shipping.  The repair will supposedly be done within three days of them receiving it, with the whole effort complete in a week or two.

It's interesting to see how different languages handle different concepts.  For example, in Portuguese there are at least three words for "there": close to the listener, far away but in sight, and far away and out of sight.  "This" and "that" are similar: the proper word depends on how close the objects are.  They have different expressions for something being above something else if the two things touch or are separated, and similarly for being below something touching or separated.  On the other hand, there is one word for the all the possessives "his", "her", "hers", "their", "your", and "yours".  This word varies, however, depending on the thing which is possessed: masculine, feminine, singular, or plural.  At least this is what we think we've figured out so far.  How do they keep it all straight?

Handyman Marcelo came by on Friday Oct 9 to take a look at three projects we have for him: replacing the kitchen faucet, installing three electrical outlets in the back yard, and assembling an appliance cart for the bulkiest of Pat's appliances.

We celebrated Gerrit's birthday with an overnight trip to the city of Braga.  His birthday was in April, but we're like the Ents from the Lord of the Rings: it takes us a while to deliberate before we act.  Anyway, on Wednesday Oct 14 we headed off.  We have been to Braga many times on business matters and have seen a bit of it with friends, but haven't really spent much time there.  This was going to be a holiday to see some sights.

Bom Jesus do Monte

Pat booked us a room and restaurant reservations at a beautiful 4-star hotel next to the Bom Jesus cathedral, which is on a hill just outside Braga itself.  Bom Jesus is a grand Catholic cathedral with a magnificent double zig-zag stairway leading up the hillside to it.  (Fortunately there is a road and also a funicular railway you can ride up, but unfortunately the funicular was closed when we were there.)  It is the major attraction in Braga, drawing in tourists from all over the world, all year round, and it was our first destination when we arrived.

We started at the base of the stairway.  There was a large crowd of high school kids there, all holding big pink rectangles of paper, sometimes over their heads.  Wha?  Some obscure Portuguese custom?  When we went up the steps a little and looked back down we could see that they were standing in the formation of the pink ribbon symbol for breast cancer awareness!  They were all set up for an overhead drone photo.  October being breast cancer awareness month, it all made sense now.

Looking up the stairs

The human pink ribbon

This was the high-school crowd, all excited at the foot of the stairs.  We didn't stick around to find out, but we suspect they ran up the stairs after their photo-op:

We took the hairpin road (not the bazillion stairs) up to the church itself and looked around the whole area.  There was a cathedral, gardens, and vistas, quite a sight, and even a lovely-looking little grotto.  Well, as long as you don't look too closely.  The grotto is fake, sculpted out of concrete, but it looks nice in a Disneyland sort of way.  Then we checked into our hotel, an elegant if slightly faded establishment with walnut doors, brass hardware, and hushed hallways.

At the top of the stairs	Looking back down the stairs
Garden and chapel	Sweet hand painted tile sign for the gift shop
The "grotto"	A cave-dweller emerges
Inside the cathedral itself, complete with Roman oppressors in 3-D above the altar	The idled funicular

Santuário de Nossa Senhora do Sameiro

While driving around we had seen a glimpse of an impressive cathedral a little further up the hill, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Sameiro.  Up we went to wander and admire another gorgeous Braga cathedral.

From the road

Up close

Arco da Porta Nova

With a little time left in the afternoon we drove to the Arco da Porta Nova, originally one of the gates into the walled city of Braga in 1512.  It was revised to its current form in 1772.  There is a popular tease in Portugal when someone leaves a door open: "Hey, are you from Braga?".  You can see where that came from.

Hey, you from Braga?

Just up the street a bit

Dinner

Sunset that evening was at 6:30, and there was a beautiful view of it from the terrace outside our hotel.  We retired to our room for a rest and to change into our fancy dinner clothes, then took our places on the terrace.  The sunset was extra-specially nice since today was the end of the summer burn ban.  So with pent-up demand there had been brush fires all afternoon, filling the air with particulates and contributing to the fiery red sunset.

The restaurant was like the hotel: elegant in a 1950s way.  Pat had scallops, one of her favorites, and Gerrit had Duck Magret with a bacalhau (cod) soup.  Both were excellent, and complemented by a bottle of a fine Portuguese wine.  Here is Pat's scallop dish, and Gerrit digging in, trying to look pitiful for some reason.  While chatting with our waiter afterwards, we learned that he lives in Ponte de Lima too.

Beautiful wrought iron and some smoke	A few minutes later
Lame food photo 1	Lame food photo 2

Sé Catedral de Santa Maria de Braga

The next morning we had a nice breakfast and checked out, heading to the Cathedral of Santa Maria of Braga.  Braga is known as "The City of Cathedrals", at least to Gerrit.  This one was founded in the year 1089 and has undergone Romanesque and Baroque renovations over the centuries.  We spent our time in the cathedral itself, which was spectacular.  The magnificent pipe organ and painted wooden ceilings were breathtaking.  It is marvelous that such grandeur has been so well preserved for over 900 years.

Three smiling faces outside the cathedral	And inside the cathedral
The incredible pipe organ	A glimpse of the painted wood ceiling

Palácio do Raio

And our final sightseeing destination was the Palace of the Mexican, within walking distance of the Cathedral of Santa Maria.  It was built in 1754 as the residence of the family of João Duarte Faria, and has served as a hospital and art gallery over the years.  The exterior is covered with individually hand-painted tiles, really stunning.  We came across a strange art exhibit inside, consisting of pictures of broken and damaged food and utensils.  The artist's statement at the end revealed that she is Ukrainian and has been agonizing over trying to feed her children in the chaos of war.  Our thoughts went from confusion to heartbreak.

Beautiful tiled exterior

Tile detail

More tile along the marble stairway

We had a little lunch at a street café, picked up some cabinets we'd ordered from the big Ikea store in Braga, and headed home.  We've really got to do more of these miniature vacations.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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Home & Towns

It seemed so simple, to just lock the pool railing to a supporting foot with a sheet metal screw to keep it from wobbling.  And it was simple.  It just didn't work.  Not even a little.  So Gerrit is back to the drawing board on how to stiffen up the pool railing.

Friday Oct 2 was a beautiful day and we headed into Ponte de Lima for some errands and exploration.  A fellow expat had told us about a nice little cheese shop nearby, newly open for business, so we stopped in.  The proprietor is a French fellow, and it turns out he was familiar with Gerrit's last name.  His family comes from the same Basque region in France as Gerrit's ancestors!  They figured they must be cousins.  The shop was delightful.  Jean gave us samples of some cheeses and charcuterie and we left with a bag of fresh cheeses, some familiar and some new ones to try too, and a dry sausage.  The shop is called La Queijaria, "la" being French for "the" and "queijaria" being Portuguese for "cheese shop".  A nice little blend of cultures there, just like the shop itself.

We also stopped at an artisanal bakery, À Antigua ("in the old style").  They were closed for lunch the last time we tried, but this time we got a heavenly loaf of seeded bread, a brownie, and a cinnamon roll.  Oh yeah, we'll be back.

We had dinner that night of our fresh cheese, sausage, bread, garden vegetables, tangerines, and some Portuguese wine.  Delicious!  And very traditional.

Our balky pool cleaning robot MO was working for a while, now failing again.  Time to do battle with the vendors and see if we can get our money back for this lemon.

Saturday Sep 3 we met some friends (Bernardo, Carolina, Rick, and Pat) in Porto for dinner at a seaside restaurant there.  It was a beautiful place, the food was great, and we had lots of fun.  Rick and Pat (his wife) had some port for dessert, and no, they had not gone through that enormous bottle already.

Rick & Pat (the other one)

Bernardo & Carolina

Monday Oct 5 was a beautiful and balmy day.  Pat gathered a basketful of peppers, sliced them up, and started them fermenting along with a jar of olives from our tree.  The peppers should be ready in a few weeks, but the olives may actually take a year.

Then the next morning a huge thunderstorm rolled in.  Rain and hail pelted down, and power went in and out.  It was a while before we even noticed the power dropouts though; our solar battery backup had been fully charged the previous day so it kept the lights and essentials powered up just fine.  We got 6.2 cm (2.4") of rain before about 11:00, when the storm passed completely and everything started clearing up.  Here's when the hail started:

Pat has been planning a kitchen appliance cart, going over it with Gemini and Claude AIs and scouring online.  It's been a long and difficult process, skeptically checking bonehead AI recommendations, but she has a good solution now.  We can buy the stuff and turn it over to handyman Marcelo.

AI has little common sense or aesthetics.  Pat was getting cheerful recommendations for casters that looked like they belonged on a mechanic's tool wagon, paneling of 3/4" plywood (far too thick and heavy), and an estimate of the final weight at 400 kg (882 lb)!  That's about the weight of a Smart Car.  For an appliance cart?  Get real.  (Not artificial.)  AI can be extremely helpful for finding items and information but you need to be very careful and complete with your prompts and should spend plenty of time checking its blithe, authoritative-sounding answers.

Here is how the backyard garden (near the pool) is shaping up.  Our horticulturalist Alex designed most of it, laid out the beds, got the custom pots, and planted the plants.  We have decided not to put in a walkway, we'll leave it looking much like you see it here.  (That green lawn-ish stuff you see is actually mown weeds.  We'll lay an actual lawn soon.)  Off in the distance to the right of the picture here is a beautiful view of the medieval bridge of Ponte de Lima.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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Fall Harvesting and Nesting

On Tuesday Sep 22 we mourned the upcoming days becoming shorter than the nights with some leftover ribs (this time with pesto), corn, and a tomato and julienned bean salad.  Mmm, we think we'll survive the equinox trauma.

Our handyman hero Marcelo was here the following day.  He installed the new house water filter, added lights in the downstairs workshop, and fixed the lock on the back door.  Everything was done beautifully.  Now our house water (direct from the water table) is very well filtered.  This will keep the irrigation filters from clogging and the pressure washer from having to pump fine grit, along with providing the purest drinking and cooking water.  Which was not a problem, but still.  The lighting in the workshop is brilliant: even and bright.  The back door was very hard to unlock and lock even when we moved in, and it suddenly became impossible about a month ago.  Marcelo found that the hinges had slipped slightly, so he jacked the door up with a crowbar and tightened the hinge bolts.  It works perfectly now, smooth and easy.

100 bags of pine bark mulch were delivered on Thursday Sep 24 for our gardener to spread over a couple of the front beds.  A layer of cardboard, a dusting of soil, and this bark should beautify the garden and keep the weeds at bay for a while.

Here is a view of the rising full moon from our balcony on the night of Saturday Sep 26.

Pat continues to harvest and prepare the bounty of the garden.  Her latest haul included almost 4 kg (8.8 lb) of tomatillos, baskets of tomatoes and peppers, a couple more strawberries, and a beautiful lush bouquet of basil.  She made the tomatillos and peppers into seven tubs of salsa for freezing, the basil into a couple ice cube trays of frozen pesto, and we'll enjoy the tomatoes sliced or in salads.

Gerrit got Pat's beloved weather station installed on Monday Sep 28.  We brought it over from the US, since it's such a nice one.  Now we can accurately report wind speeds, outdoor humidity, rainfall, barometric pressure, and daylight flux to our dear readers.  Wouldn't that be exciting?  Well, you can see for yourself.  Pat (aka Lilac09) is streaming all our weather data to Weather Underground, which you can watch in real time here.  There is historical data there, graphs, and everything a weather nerd could want. 

Here's a story our new friends Marian and Dave told us about when they arrived here in Ponte de Lima.  They live in a sort of suburban neighborhood a little west of Ponte de Lima.  Not long after they arrived Marian put flyers up all around, inviting neighbors to a meet-and-greet at their place.  The starting time came and went, and nobody showed.  Uh oh, had they violated some custom or norm?  Fifteen nervous minutes later the entire neighborhood came through the front gate.  They had been waiting to enter together!  A couple of the younger neighbors acted as translators, and everyone had a great time.  Marian had made a map of the neighborhood and asked people to pin their names and numbers to their houses on the map.  At the end a patriarch made a speech welcoming them to the neighborhood.  "We are a family", he said, "and now you are a part of it too."  This is the kind of warmth we see all the time from the Portuguese.  What a great idea that was of Marian's, too, for instant connection to all the neighbors!  She was a pastor in Pennsylvania before retiring here, so gathering people together comes naturally to her.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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Howling, Harvest, and Hand-holds

Boring alert: Pat got our way-over-complicated irrigation computers figured out and reprogrammed yet again, and Gerrit fabricated a little shelf for our network router to keep it cool and unshielded without having to prop it on a pile of bags like our prototype version was.  We warned you: boring.  But it's what we're doing.

Every culture has its own old folk songs.  They're usually simple, and easy to sing or dance to.  In the US, you'll find old favorites like "Down in the Valley" and "Buffalo Gals" for example, very simple with only two chords.  Portugal is no exception, they have a two-chord traditional folk song heritage which is played and danced to at almost every community event.  What is jarring to Anglo ears, though, is the singing.  They sound slightly out of tune and like they're shouting or shrieking, especially the women.  Some cultural barriers just can't be overcome.

Over the weekend after the big Ponte de Lima Feiras Novas celebration, which just wrapped up for this year, our little village of Calheiros stages its own festival.  They play music most of the day over loudspeakers at the church in the village center, filling the whole valley.  There are Euro-pop tunes, sentimental songs, and even the occasional march from John Philip Sousa (a Portuguese native son), but a large measure of it is the old-fashioned Portuguese folk songs.   Here is a recording we made from our balcony of some of the worst of it, amplified a little so it will make it through your speakers.  Some Anglos use this Calheiros festival as a cue to get out of town, but so far we're managing to ignore it.

Then the nighttime party begins, and along with the music comes the obligatory fireworks displays.  A huge one took place Saturday night Sep 20 at midnight, which Gerrit somehow slept through, and there were bursts of explosions marking the start of festivities in the morning, the lunch break, and the evening.  The Portuguese love their fireworks!  (Fireworks are called "fogos de artifício" here, or "artificial fire".)

Sunday Sep 20 was potato salad and rib heaven.  Pat harvested a bag of our homegrown potatoes in the morning, cleaned and prepped them, and made her famous potato salad including homegrown onions and the super pickles from friend Maayan, and she sliced some homegrown tomatoes.  Gerrit had started some ribs at 7:30 AM, so it was feast time for lunch.  Gerrit thinks that Pat's Portuguese potato salad is even better than her classic.  Our potatoes are golden, creamy, and flavorful, and Maayan's pickles are crunchy and flavorful too, so the combination is really a gourmet potato salad.  Gerrit is using a similar rub and method for ribs that he did back in Seattle, and they continue to come out great.

Here is Pat's harvest from the day.  We have: Tomatillos  A leek Peppers (not sure what they are but they're not hot) Tomatoes - Purple Dragon, San Marzano, Yellow cherry, Red cherry  Strawberries  Cilantro seeds (aka coriander) Dill seeds  Potatoes She also got a nice little basket of apples and made applesauce and apple-fig crumble.

We finally got the pool rail and mounting feet which Pat had originally ordered in April, five months ago!  Orders were lost or mis-shipped, delayed inexplicably, or canceled due to no stock, but finally all the hardware was here in mid-September and Gerrit could start installing.  Which involved drilling holes in the granite.  Which is nearly impossible, even with a concrete bit and a hammer drill (granite is much harder than concrete, and it ruined several bits).  And which is made completely impossible when the impact drill literally falls apart.

A trip to the big hardware store in nearby Viana do Castelo resulted in a new drill and bits, along with a few other items we couldn't live without.  The following morning Gerrit discovered that his old hammer drill had been completely shot.  With little or no actual hammering going on (despite the sound effects), it's no wonder that holes weren't being drilled and bits were smoking out.  The new one glided right through the granite with just a concrete bit.  The railing was mounted, finally, and behold.  Unfortunately there is quite a horizontal wobble to the rail.  This is exactly how it should work, though, with the rail tubing sleeved over the mounting feet posts as it is, but we didn't see it coming.  The rail just swivels on the feet.  Hmm, we'll see what to do about that.  If anything.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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Pickin' Vegetables and Bluegrass

Folks need their computers just about anywhere they live these days, and we're no exception.  Pat's has been temperamental for a while, stalling and balky, and we've been trying to figure it out.  On Saturday Sep 9 Gerrit took the bull by the horns.  He found that our network router was getting rather hot in its little closet compartment with this hot weather, so he pulled it out into the open to cool it and also to eliminate any WiFi radio shielding being provided by the closet.  That improved things a lot, and he also scheduled a memory upgrade for her (from 8 GB to 32 GB) at a local shop.  She'll soon be flying through her computing.

Pat's been in a state of FigMania for a few days now, prepping and cooking with them as fast as our gardeners can pick them.  We have a cake-sized fig tart and lots more jam now, for us and for gifts.  Mmm, when's dessert?

She continues to tend and harvest the vegetables she's growing around here, too.  Here's an example, with a tempting glass of chilled vinho verde for accompaniment.

Our friend Maayan gave us a big jar of pickles she had made, and they're just about the best we've ever had.  They were from her homegrown cucumbers and gherkins of various types, and they were crisp, crunchy, briny, and rich with dill, garlic, and bay.  She's been embracing homesteading, reading and taking classes, and it really shows.

Gerrit got his parts for the enhanced house water filter and began planning and setting up for that.  On Wednesday Sep 16 our handyman Marcelo came by and scoped the project, plus some other jobs needing doing around here.  He will get to work next week.

Pat continues to make storage space and pack things away.  Gerrit built an Ikea narrow utility closet for her to go next to the washing machine, and she ordered and built a couple more drawers for the hall closet.  The corner in the dining room was piled high with stuff, and now it's completely cleared out and looks great.

She wanted three more glass shelves for the cabinet we have in the kitchen which holds dishes and glassware.  She found a glass fabricator very nearby, about a 10 minute drive.  We took an existing shelf in there on Tuesday Sep 9 and the following day we got a message that the new ones were ready to pick up!  They required some cabinet drilling in order to position them where she wants, but they are beautiful: exact copies of the original, done in one day for less than 40 € ($46) total.  Nice!

On Sunday Sep 13 our friends Maayan and Dan came over for a birthday lunch for Maayan.  Pat prepared a vegetarian feast for vegetarian Maayan, and Gerrit made a frittata to go along with it.  We all lounged around the pool and paddled around in the hot afternoon; it was so refreshing and such a relief from the heat.

And we cheesed out completely on the Feiras Novas celebration in Ponte de Lima this year: missed the whole thing.  We're becoming so jaded already.  But with good reason.  Parking is awful, crowds are like being in a sardine can, and it has been so blasted hot.  We had enough reason to stay home and cool off in the pool, and we did.  Saturday night Sep 12 was a huge party; we could hear the sound stage music and fireworks all night long, till 3 AM!  A few hours later, at 7 AM, the church bells rang, we guess to mark the end of the party / sleep four hours / repent cycle.  The following day there were more huge celebrations much of the night, too.  The fireworks did sound like they were pretty spectacular, but the comfy bed was pretty spectacular too.  OK, maybe next year we'll drag our aged and lazy carcasses down there.  Until then, you can see last year's blog post here, or search "youtube feiras novas 2026" for plenty of video of this year's celebration.

The Portuguese take their fireworks seriously.  There are several actual manufacturing plants in the country (surprisingly that's not all done in China), and the displays are really spectacular.  Here are a couple from past displays in Ponte de Lima by Pirotecnia Minhota, who does all the town's big shows (including this year's Feiras Novas).  You can check out their Portuguese shows (in English) here.

On the evening of Tuesday Sep 15 we did venture out, to a house concert of bluegrass music.  It was a great, fun evening of excellent music in an intimate setting and great to meet new people and catch up with old friends.  The band was Erica Brown and the Bluegrass Connection, from the US but on a European tour.  Here's video of one of the tunes they performed:

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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Life at Casa da Rocha

We put together those temporary Ikea cabinets we got as an interim solution for cabinets in the front room, and darned if they don't look okay.  We think we're going to live with them for a while and maybe keep them that way.  Life's too short to keep chasing perfection (we keep telling our perfectionist selves).  

On Sunday Aug 23 we had two couples over for dinner.  Our old friends Bernardo and Carolina brought some American expats here to meet us, and we clicked immediately.  Rick and (the other) Pat moved to Portugal from North Carolina just a few months ago and are now living in an apartment in Porto which Bernardo found for them.  We all had a great time together, talking and laughing, and realizing our shared values and experiences.  Gerrit slow-smoked some ribs and Pat served her famous potato salad, coleslaw, and a Mediterranean tomato and chickpea salad.  There was a fair amount of Americana in that meal, but instead of barbecue sauce for the ribs we offered Pat's homemade pesto.  It's a very nice touch, not as sweet or heavy as many BBQ sauces and it lent a nice Mediterranean touch to the ribs.  Sure wish we took pictures.

Alex, our horticulturist and irrigation installer, has been seeing mysterious pressure fluctuations in the lines.  He and Gerrit have been puzzling over it, and to investigate they took apart a manifold for the irrigation system.  They found that the water filter looked pretty clogged.  When Alex rinsed it out the pressure bounced back up.  So, Gerrit has a new project: to improve the whole-house water filter.  We already have one filter which catches sand, grit, and some sediment, but he'll follow it with another which has smaller pores.  Parts are on order.  And meanwhile, we'll clean the irrigation filters weekly.

Pat has been busy cooking up our figs, which are ripening on the tree outside.  She is drying some, making jam from some, and using others for fig cake and tarts.  The whole house smells wonderful while she's working.  Not only is she preserving the figs, but she's busy with our other crops here too:  basil, leeks, tomatillos, cucumber, jalapenos, and squash now, and the tree fruit when it is in season.

She is also continuing to unpack and store.  We have a little more storage space now with the new cabinets, so she is using that and also optimizing other areas to make more room.  She is consolidating, organizing, and winnowing out things to give away.  Slowly the piles of stuff on the floor are dwindling.

It was rainy and cloudy with occasional dramatic thunderstorms all during the last week of August.  Very uncharacteristic!  It's a good test of the new skylights though, which are staying dry and watertight.

One of the new vegetable vines we planted this year was watermelon.  All the vines suffered from too little watering since the irrigation system has been erratic, but we did salvage a few pumpkins, squash, and one wee watermelon.  Despite its difficult upbringing, the watermelon was delicious.  The little thing gave us just two dessert bowls of fruit.  Now that the irrigation system is up and running we should have a better harvest next year.

In Portugal the "mini" beer bottle size is popular.  It is only 200 ml (6.8 oz).  Gerrit thinks they're the perfect thirst-quenching size, but Pat misses her 12-ouncers.  On the plate here you can see the remnants of a Waldorf salad Pat made with our home-grown apples.  We only got a couple of them from this tree this year, since the tree had been traumatized by uprooting and moving this spring, but they're really good: tart and crisp.  Next year the harvest should be bigger, and we do still have apples from the other tree coming.

The annual Ponte de Lima Feiras Novas celebration is coming up next week, and this year is the 200th anniversary.  We'll send our ace reporters (us) to cover some of the event.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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The Heat and the Power

Through some references from friends we found an excellent auto car glass replacement shop with a branch right here in Ponte de Lima.  On Monday Aug 10 they installed a nice, temporary plastic film to cover the gaping hole where our rear window used to be, gave us a quote within minutes, and ordered the window minutes after we gave them the go-ahead.  The film held up fine for our eclipse trip to Spain (see previous blog post), and then on the morning of Tuesday Aug 18 they installed the replacement glass beautifully.  Pérola the car is now un-disastered, good as new.

Here's a stunner for you: when you install solar power here in Portugal, the default is for the electric utility to bill you for the power you generate and consume yourself!  What??  You can provide all your own solar power yet the utility bills you as if they were providing you the power.  You need to register with a government agency as "self consuming" to avoid being billed for the power you generate and consume yourself.  Unbelievable!  We, of course, were not told this by our unhelpful solar installers.  We found it out several months after getting the system installed.  We weren't seeing our monthly bills being reduced much during winter and early spring, but the weather was mixed so we figured when the sun really came out we'd start to see the big savings.  Nope.  So we started a long and confusing investigation leading to the conclusion here.  We registered, and now we are not paying for our own solar power.  But at least all those months of being overcharged are refundable, right, since they have all the data for exactly how much solar power we generated?  Wrong.  They're very sorry for any inconvenience though.

The spare bedroom in the garage has now been converted to a storage room.  There was a built-in platform bed there which we removed, so now the room is a big box of space waiting for shelves and boxes of stuff.

About Wednesday Aug 12 the temperature started rising, and Europe braced for another heat wave.  As of Aug 16 it's been tolerable here, getting up to about 34 C (93 F) at the worst of it.  We keep the sliding doors wide open most of the time, dress lightly, turn on the fans, drink plenty of water, take dips in the pool, and use A/C at night running on solar batteries to keep the bedroom down to 25 C (77 F).  All in all, we're doing fine.  So far this season there have been many fewer wildfires in the area, too; hardly any in fact.  We're not sure why that is, but it's welcome.

...aaand the day after that paragraph was written fires broke out all around us.  Fortunately most of them were several kilometers away but one was concerningly close.  A couple of the distant ones were visibly blazing as we went to bed on Sunday Aug 16 and took a couple days to get under control.  We're so thankful for the bombeiros (firefighters), who put their lives on the line and their comfort on hold all summer long.

The weather over the next few days got hotter, too.  On Tuesday Aug 18, we resorted to A/C in the front room and kitchen.  That kept it at 28 C (82 F) indoors while the heat scorched outside, and made it tolerable.

On Monday Aug 17 the roofer came to redo a small section of the roof, which finishes up the new skylight project.  It all looks great up there and should be nice and snug for the rainy season.  We'll need to face up to a new roof soon, though.

We have decided to buy some cheap Ikea cabinets for the front room for now, rather than wait the months it will take to get our custom pieces made.  They will be temporary, and will be moved to the garage or workshop when they are no longer needed.  This will allow us to get a lot of the clutter which is all over the floor here out of the way for now.  We have found some cabinets which are about the same volume as the available space, so we can also see just how much stuff we can put there.  That will help us decide how much overall to keep or to give away too.

Just to keep this post from being entirely photo-free, here are some dramatic clouds we saw recently from our balcony on a beautiful clear day.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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The Big Eclipse

Early Wednesday Aug 12 we started off for the Palencia region of Spain, which would be right in the heart of the path of the total eclipse that evening.  We would be treated to about a minute and a half of totality, with the sun low in the sky about an hour from setting.  We had a fun trip there, about 4-1/2 hours of driving, stopping for a delicious churrasqueira (barbecue) lunch just across the Spanish border.  We got to our hotel about 3 PM, in plenty of time for the scheduled 8:30 PM eclipse.

The weather all the way from the Portuguese border had a moisture haze because of the heat.  We hoped it would just add color to the eclipse.  It would also diffuse the sunlight so the surroundings wouldn't get as dark as they would have otherwise during totality.

We had no idea what to expect.  At lunch we had seen TV news footage of throngs of people choking highways, flocking to see the eclipse.  Gulp.  Were we going to have to deal with that?  We hadn't seen anything like that on the way to our hotel, so we were cautiously optimistic.  The first thing we did after checking in was to take a quick drive around the area to investigate.  About five minutes after we left we found a very nice secluded place just above a solar farm with a completely unobstructed view of the western horizon and nobody anywhere to be seen.  Well, that was easy!  Pat pinned the location on the map and we set off to see if there was anything better.

We found our way onto a nearby wind farm plateau with plenty of unobstructed western horizon.  It had a little altitude, so we thought it might be even better.  The plateau was huge, and crisscrossed by dirt roads to access the wind turbines, and again no one was around.  It was totally deserted.  We were struck by the two uses of the land: for a wind farm and also for grain growing.  All the fields were dried and mown, very conveniently for us eclipse-parkers.  So where were these throngs?  They must have been going to the beaches.

We still had a couple hours to kill before showtime.  Pat had made us a picnic dinner, but we had not yet purchased our celebratory Spanish wine.  She googled a couple likely places in nearby towns, so we drove down off the plateau to some lovely little towns and came back with a nice bottle of Rioja Tempranillo.

Back at the plateau, we found it had been discovered.  There were about four cars a hundred meters (yards) from the field where we parked.  Oh my, there goes the neighborhood.  We parked so our windshield faced the setting sun, left the car idling, and sat in air-conditioned comfort and solitude while we enjoyed our dinner.

About ten minutes to eight we thought the eclipse should be coming up before too long so we popped on our eclipse glasses to make sure they worked, and saw that it had already started!  About a quarter of the sun was already covered by the moon.  We gazed excitedly at it for a minute, then set up our lounge chairs and moved outside.

The setup	Geriatric eclipse watching in the wind farm
Pretty excited	Reserving judgment

As we sat watching the moon slowly slide over the sun, Gerrit was reminded of the long slow nights he'd spent babysitting his telescope back in Seattle.  You slow down.  You begin to appreciate the serene majesty of astronomical events and how puny you really are.  Gerrit had adopted a screen name for his astronomy forum posts at the time: TinySpeck.  He was amazed that no one had taken it already.

Slowly the moment of totality approached.  The sun slipped toward darkness, and it began to look like twilight all around.  Even the windmills slowed and stopped without solar heat to drive the winds.  At the moment of totality, when the sun completely disappeared, we pulled off the protective glasses and stared at one of the most spectacular displays in nature.

The sun had become a black disk, with a huge flare surrounding it which you normally can't see.  It doubled in apparent size because of this.  For a short ninety seconds, the stars came out and the sun was a black lion with a great flaming mane.  A tiny, intense red dot appeared on the left margin of the moon, probably a little irregularity in the moon's surface which allowed a wink of sunlight through.

And then it was over.  The sun began to come out from behind the moon.  We spent a fraction of our short eclipse time trying to capture the event, but we're afraid the pictures don't nearly do it justice.  But we were there, we had a perfect view of the event, and now we're among the lucky ones who have experienced a total solar eclipse.  The windmills began to turn again, light came back up to sunset brightness, and when the sun had set far enough toward the horizon we could look at it without glasses and see the last bit of the moon's eclipse on it.  We packed up, happy and awestruck, and made our way back to our room.

Totality and a turbine	See Venus in the upper left?
The black sun at totality	Still a nibble afterward, at sunset

 The next day we found a DIY car wash to rinse the thickly-caked wind farm dust from the car, and a nice breakfast restaurant to fuel us for the trip home.  We took a new route for part of it, stopped for another nice lunch on the way, and got home about 3 PM.

A solar eclipse is a truly remarkable natural phenomenon.  Our sun and moon are exactly the right size and distance from Earth for the moon to to exactly cover the sun during an eclipse.  That's all sheer coincidence.  As the eclipse happens, the shadow of the moon crosses the Earth.  The darkest part of the shadow results in a total eclipse and is only about 200 km (124 mi) wide, so it traces a pretty narrow stripe across the Earth.  This happens every year and a half or so somewhere on Earth, but a given location only sees a total eclipse about every 400 years.

And the human wonder of it is that modern astronomers have calculated the size, position, and movement of the Earth, Moon, and Sun with such exquisite precision that they can predict years in advance exactly when and where this stripe will happen, to the second and to the kilometer.  Imagine the terror of primitive people when a total eclipse occurred.  They had no warning and no explanation when the sun died and then came back.  Now we understand what is happening and can enjoy the spectacle instead.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

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