Of Cuisinarts and Family

We shipped Pat's beloved 1980's top-of-the-line Cuisinart here to Portugal, because it was an irreplaceable beauty.  Cuisinart has not built them like that for a long time, and Pat was clinging to hers.  But alas, the Cuisinart didn't quite operate properly with the US power converters Gerrit built.  It has a monstrous electric motor, suitable for a cement mixer, and when Pat pulses with it the power surge overloads the converter.  It works okay with regular running, but pulsing must also be supported.

So there were two options: come up with a more surge-tolerant power converter or find a new Cuisinart which runs directly on European power.  The beefier power converter options were a few hundred euros and/or big and noisy, and Pat didn't trust the newer versions of Cuisinart.  She had a good reason for hanging onto her big beauty: Cuisinart didn't come close to making them like that any more and she knew of no alternative.

But Gemini AI to the rescue!  It turns out that the French company Magimix, who actually invented the food processor which inspired the original Cuisinart, still makes big gorgeous professional-quality home food processors to the same specs as Pat's old Cuisinart.  And a new Magimix is actually less than a beefed-up power converter, quieter, and much less work for Gerrit.  It's a no-brainer, and Pat has placed her order to a huge kitchenware supplier in the Netherlands.

We took a trip to Andorra to visit Gerrit's youngest son and his family, from Jul 20 to Jul 27.  We took three days to get there through northern Spain along the Bay of Biscay, three days there, and two days home on the more direct route we took on our visit in Nov 2024.  We'll let the photos do the talking:

View from our hotel room in Jaca, Spain, on the way	In the Catedral de San Pedro in Jaca	Gilded cathedral
Pipe organ in the cathedral	Lunch in the town of Tremp, Spain: cuttlefish with meatballs, and lamb	Entering the Pyrenees, where Andorra is nestled
We are pleased to report that the Pyrenees are still spectacular	Precipitous cliffs	Gerrit & son Ian. That's Gerrit there on your right.
On the way to lunch	Scene outside our lunch restaurant	Lunch spot: L'Ovella Negra Xiringuito restaurant
From the chairlift up to the ridge between France and Andorra, near Pic de Creussans	Pat and granddaughter Liberty straddling two countries	From the pass, looking toward the French side
On the way back down the chairlift	A pensive moment at lunch with Ian, Orson, and Liberty	Happy diners on our last night, at Borda Xixerella restaurant
Massive 1 kg (2.2 lb) steak for Ian and Gerrit. Rubia gallega: best beef ever.	Pat's meatballs & cuttlefish redux (this one was better)	Oona's shrimp and rice

There is one embarrassing incident we should report.  About two hours after we left home we stopped at a gas station and Gerrit discovered to his horror that he had forgotten his keyfob and wallet!  No driver's license, no cash, no credit cards, no Portuguese residence permit, no insurance card.  He had been inadvertently using Pat's keyfob to enable the car the whole time.  After a little hyperventilating, we decided he would go ahead as Willie the Walletless Wonder rather than add four hours to the trip by going home to pick it up.  Pat had cards, Gerrit had pictures on his phone of the important documents, and we gambled that we'd be able to bluff our way through Andorran and Spanish customs.  As luck would have it, we sailed through entry and exit to Andorra, didn't even have to stop, and we did fine with only one set of cards.  Good grief...

We have some maracujá (passion fruit) vines in our back garden, and they are prolific this year.  Slicing the plain-looking fruit reveals an interior which resembles intestines or fish eggs, but wow is it good!

(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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Fiascos, Fun, and Failures

Furniture fiascos: both pieces we ordered from different sellers on Etsy turned out to be scams.  Both sellers disappeared from Etsy not long after our orders.  One of the orders looked like it was actually shipped by FedEx but it was delivered in the Azores, 1500 km (930 miles) away.  Shippers can change delivery addresses with FedEx unbeknownst to the recipient, and this may be what happened.  A front for smuggling contraband somehow?  The other order didn't ship at all.  Fortunately Etsy has a return policy which refunded our money right away.  I think they realized we'd been scammed too.

So we lost a couple months but gained a great appreciation for our local custom furniture dealer Rachel at Móveis Santa Comba.  We went back to her and got the ball rolling for the next couple pieces of the several we'll want.  It will take some time, but they will in fact be delivered, with high quality, and just to our specifications.  That's worth a lot.

The evening of Friday Jul 10 Pat went to a Renaissance Fair with a friend, in the nearby town of Arcos de Valdevez.  It was small, but hosted lots of fun events like jousting, sword fighting, falconry, and dancing.  The town looks very authentically Renaissance, with the medieval castle in the background.  It is customary at Ren Fairs we're familiar with to speak in Renaissance style, like "Good morrow, my lady, how fare thee?  Pray proceed, anon!", but Pat couldn't tell if they were doing that in Portuguese.

A Ponte de Lima bombeiro (firefighter and emergency responder) came to our place on Saturday July 11 after Gerrit had reported a nest of Asiatic Hornets.  The morning of their visit we had a different visit from a genuine Asiatic Hornet, right inside the house, which we captured and showed to the bombeiro.  They're huge, about 2.5 cm (1") long, dark, and nasty-looking with their yellow "socks" and orange face.  They can be quite aggressive and their stings can be very painful, put you in a coma, or even kill you.  They decimate the local honeybee population.  They are all over the world now and they spread rapidly.  Gerrit showed the bombeiro the nest and she injected it with poison (after donning some thick rubber protective gear).  As she left her radio crackled with news of a nearby wildfire, which she zoomed off to.  The bombeiros here in Portugal are community-supported, they perform such vital services so well, and we are enthusiastic members of their support team.

When we answer the phone with a Portuguese number showing on the caller ID, we usually say both "Olá?" and "Hello?", since "olá" means "hello" in Portuguese but we also want to encourage the caller to use English if possible.  This usually results in a puzzled pause.  We learned that the Portuguese normally say "Estou?" or "Sim?" when answering the phone.  "Sim" makes sense, that means "yes" in Portuguese, but "estou" means "I am".  No other definition.  So they're asking "I am?" when answering the phone.  Maybe they're just unsure about their philosophy: "I think?  Therefore I am?".

Gerrit's first video Portuguese tutoring session was on Thursday Jul 16, and it was a disaster.  The tutor didn't remember much about their introductory visit a week or so prior, and began throwing new material at Gerrit way too fast without getting a feel for his level.  He seemed a little annoyed too.  Gerrit was flustered and performed poorly.  It was depressing.  The deluge continued even after Gerrit explained that it was too advanced and he'd had no time to absorb the new material.  So, not a good fit.  Gerrit is now thinking to go back to book learning and hire a simple conversation partner a few times a week instead.

The weather has cooled off for most of July now.  After the heat wave of late June and early July it's been temperate and lovely, below about 28 C (82 F) with mild breezes.  It's been a very sweet month so far.

(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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Controlled Clutter, Computing, and Constellations

Here is a photo of the stunning passion fruit flower, from a vine near our swimming pool.  Ain't nature grand?  The fruits are not ripe yet, but the blossoms are breathtaking.  Plus, putting this photo first in the blog post prevents the next one (see below if you dare) from being the headline photo for the post.

As of Tuesday Jun 30 we are down to about 30 boxes of our US stuff left in the garage to unpack.  That is a great achievement, but it has pretty much just moved most of the stuff into piles in the house.  Pat's been finding homes for some of it, but the reckoning for the rest will soon begin.

The hot weather has returned here on Jul 2, and it is sure to get hotter.  It is cool in the morning, giving welcome relief, and the pool is ready and waiting in the afternoon so we're staying comfortable.

Our computer table is in the front room, facing the back yard through the big glass sliding door.  The view is gorgeous and it is a great place to spend time, except when the sun is bright and backlighting the screens.  We have tried a couple fixes for that and then found these atrocious huge swivel visors, apparently used by vampires to hide from the sun.  The ads showed them rotated completely down over the models' faces, which made them look like Darth Vader wearing metal death masks.  However, they are perfect for blocking glare while allowing Gerrit to adjust his head position so his glasses are in focus.  They work even better when you make the visor fully opaque with, say, a piece of paper and blue tape.  Pat thought it would be funny to sneak a picture of Gerrit in such a compromising position, testing his visor.  He begs to differ.

Tuesday, Jul 7 was a big milestone: we have unpacked all the storage boxes from the garage!  Now it's just strewn around the house, but that's actually progress.  We have found many goodies but also some duplicates of things we've bought here.  Let the triage begin, as we divide between "keep", "donate", and "throw out".

We have been testing our low-tech white tarp for protecting the solar water heater panels from overheating, and it's been working fine.  The hot water tank gets plenty hot enough, so we know we're not covering too much of the collectors, and the temperatures stay well within their safe regions completely unattended.  This is the worst case, too: on long, clear, hot days.  As the days grow shorter and the sun moves lower we can roll back more or all of the tarp and take advantage of the reduced solar input.  Easy, cheap, reliable, low tech.

Back in Seattle Gerrit was way into astrophotography, taking beautiful pictures of stars and galaxies.  It's perfect for him because you need to be extremely picky and fussy, so he was able to let his inner neurotic take the reins.  He had the whole complicated arrangement working really well, despite being in a cramped light-polluted back yard in Normandy Park.  All the telescope gear got shipped here and our rural lot is much bigger and darker, so astrophotography should be faster and better quality while more targets will be visible.  Gerrit is beginning to unpack the gear, reading over notes he can hardly believe he actually wrote those years ago, and trying to blow the dust off the equipment and his brain cells.  We'll see how that goes.

The fruit trees are much happier and better tended this year.  We had no plums last year (along with no pears), but this year there is a nice bounty.  Lots of little green oranges can be seen on the orange trees too, which will be ripe around next February.  And here's a shot of a very strange chicken egg which we bought at a farmer's market a few weeks ago.  It is bumpy, looks like a ball of twine.  It looks like it was painful for the poor hen to lay.  We'll send it to Ripley's Believe It or Not.  (Look that up in Wikipedia if you are under 50.)

Gerrit has finally screwed up his courage and contacted an online Portuguese tutor.  It's time to get serious about this language thing.  He was all set up early on Thursday Jul 9 for his first trial session with Marco, and... Marco messaged that he was in the hospital with some kind of muscle distress.  They did get a video conference going the following day (today) though, and it went well.  Gerrit signed up for a dozen lessons.

(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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Bugs & Bounty

In our last post we described our annual pilgrimage to the Ponte de Lima Vinho Verde Festival, always a good time.  Afterwards the organizers of the event put out a great video of the whole affair, much nicer that we could have done, and about two thirds of the way through there's about a tenth of a second shot of our Gerrit!  All by himself, a genuine Ponte de Lima movie star.  Check it out here.  And don't blink, you'll miss his cameo.

The news is reporting that western Europe is suffering a "scorching heat wave", and we can attest to that in our little piece of it.  Here on Sunday Jun 21 it is now almost 33 C (91 F) at 5 PM in the shade just outside our window.  Whew...  It's much hotter inland and further south, too.  It's just about time to go jump in the pool.  We've been doing that every afternoon for a while now, in this heat.  The pool cover is warming the water nicely with the sun, it's now up to about 31 C (88 F), which sounds too warm but is refreshing when your whole body is immersed in it.

This August 12 a total solar eclipse will sweep across the Arctic and down to northern Spain and even the very northeastern tip of Portugal.  Totality in the area near us will be just before sunset, so it could be quite dramatic.  We missed out on the total eclipse in Oregon a few years ago, so it's time to start planning for this one.

It is early summer and everyone's garden is bursting.  Our gardener brought us some of his organic bounty (see the picture at right) when he came to do some work on Tuesday Jun 23 and he left with some cucumbers from us.  He also found what looks like an Asiatic Hornet nest on the property, so we need to report it to the authorities for destruction right away.  That's a really aggressive and dangerous hornet, it decimates the honeybees, and the government takes care of destroying nests when they are reported.

Our long-awaited garden project next to the pool is finally underway.  On Wednesday Jun 24 the crew was here mowing down the weeds, delineating spaces, hauling up soil, and prepping.  This is what the area looked like at the end of the day.

We found about the last available hotel room in Palencia, Spain for the night of Aug 12.  We'll retire there after the total solar eclipse which happens at almost sunset.  Palencia is in the middle of the path of totality, so we should get about a minute and a half of total solar blackout.  It is about a five hour drive from here, so we'll have a nice Spanish meal and bed after the eclipse rather than trying to get home afterward.  Gerrit figures he'll be falling to his knees and weeping with awe anyway, so that makes it hard to drive.

Gerrit found the hornet nest which our gardener had flagged, and brought some field glasses down to observe the little monsters from a safe distance.  Boy, that is really difficult.  The hornets only come and go every once in a while, so you're standing there staring intently until your eyes sting and your arms start to tremble and then the little buggers just zip in and out.  They don't pose for identification, unfortunately.  He didn't see the telltale "yellow socks" of the Asiatic type and there were conflicting characteristics of both the Asiatic and European hornets.  The European are at least as big and scary-looking as the Asiatics, but much less dangerous and not aggressive at all.  More observation is called for.

On Sunday Jun 28 we took a mattress and some clothes we no longer need to a charity which services new immigrants and people in need.  We had a boisterous conversation with Jackie, the proprietress, who is native Portuguese but spent 25 years in New Jersey.  Her English is great, with just a little of the "Joisey" sound to it.  Many immigrants came and went while we were there, and Jackie (her name adopted in the US) knew and was friends with them all.  There were many happy and grateful faces, from children up to the elderly.  Jackie showed us her stock, all nicely displayed there in a big basement room of a community house as people milled through, and we told her we would be having much more for her as our winnowing out from unpacking continues.  While we were there we saw Andy, a friend and fellow expat from the UK who had originally told us about Jackie's operation, so that was a nice coincidence and we got to thank him in person.

Marcelo the handyman was here on Monday Jun 29 to move the washing machine from downstairs to up.  He put in water, electricity, and drain taps, hauled the thing up the lift with Pat at the controls, and installed it next to a bathroom up here.  Pat ran her first upstairs load of laundry the following day and all was well.  No more trudging up and down the stairs with laundry for 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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Nesting Mania

Pat is tearing through the boxes of our Seattle stuff with gusto.  As of Tuesday Jun 16 she has been through about twenty five of them (out of 130 or so).  She's putting away what she can and doing triage on the rest, separating the stuff into piles of similar stuff, to give away, or to throw away.  Once she's gotten everything segregated like this we can decide what to keep and where to put it.  Gerrit is dutifully hauling the boxes up from the garage two at a time.  Thank goodness for handtrucks and stair lifts.

Around here, Resende cherries are the basic brand-name cherry.  You see either "cherries" or "Resende cherries".  Resende is a region between the cities of Porto and Vila Real in northern Portugal, and they do celebrate their cherries with festivals and celebrations.

We have always figured that whenever you buy cherries you're getting Resende cherries but they just don't necessarily label them as such.  We figured wrong.  On Wednesday Jun 17 we stopped at a roadside cherry stand ("há cerejas", see this post) selling Resende cherries by name, and they are indeed in a class by themselves.  They're huge, juicy, and amazingly flavorful.  Washington cherries are great, but we have to say these are even better.  From now on, it's Resende or nothing here at Casa da Rocha.  Here is a snapshot, with the wine cork for size comparison.  We are going to make ourselves sick...

On Wednesday Jun 17 shortly after sunset we saw this beautiful conjunction of Venus with the Moon.  We read that the moon actually occulted a bit of Venus, seen from somewhere sometime, but we didn't catch that.

The Portuguese don't eat much corn on the cob.  (They don't know what they're missing.)  Most corn is grown for animal feed.  You can see sweet corn available in the supermarkets sometimes though, often shucked and trimmed and in vacuum packaging.  We picked up some cobs and grilled them along with some Scottish beef steaks, joined by Pat's fresh cucumber and tomato salad, and it was a fabulous lunch.  The corn is chewy, dark, and flavorful, just the way Gerrit likes it, but sweet too.  We both loved it.  Some of the best corn ever, and found right here in non-corn Portugal.  The best beef in the supermarkets here comes from Ireland (and now from Scotland too, we have just found).  It's a little more expensive than the locally grown, but really good.  Pat got started on her lunch before she remembered to snap the photo.

The house is a complete shambles now with unpacking.  There are categorized boxes of stuff all over, waiting to be filled and then put away, which we have to thread carefully around.  There are boxes in the house needing moving to the garage and vice versa.  But we are making progress!  We're now about a third of the way through the entire pile in the garage, much faster than Gerrit thought it would take.  Maybe if you include all the sorting and putting away his original one-year estimate will be closer.

After Gerrit hauls boxes up for Pat to start to unpack, he has been assembling furniture.  Here is a picture of our new bedroom ensemble.  It looks good and is solid wood, and we're happy with it.  Plus it's about the only tidy place in the whole house right now.

He is also getting a solar panel protection tarp installed.  You may remember that our solar water heater panels can overheat on clear sunny days.  Really badly, like to oven temperature (150 C, 300 F), and they can blow their pressure relief valve that way.  Gerrit had a way-too-high-tech solution all worked out which involved a microcomputer and thermocouples, until he realized that a plain old white tarp over one of the collectors should work fine for keeping the temperature safe.  He tried a prototype a few weeks ago which seemed to work, so now he is building an industrial quality version with precisely fabricated reinforced custom aluminum brackets and the perfect white tarp.  (He has been accused of being a perfectionist.  He doesn't know how people get that impression.)

The power converters Gerrit put together to get US wall power for the few appliances and tools we brought which need it were put to the test.  Pat unpacked her sewing machine and plugged it into a converter.  She stepped on the treadle and it went... bluh.  Half a second of operation and it died, again and again.  Gerrit felt responsible, checking specs and voltages on the converters for something he got wrong, when Pat discovered that the sewing machine bobbin winder thought it was full.  It won't start in that condition, and when Pat cleared it it jumped right up.  She has now done a fair amount of sewing and mending and everything works just fine, to Gerrit's great relief.

(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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Smoking and Drinking

On Friday Jun 5 we went to a demo of a biochar burning vessel, which can be used to burn agricultural waste with very little smoke.  The demo was put on by an organization we're starting to support which promotes smoke reduction in the Ponte de Lima area.  Biochar is the result of burying the charcoal, which then becomes carbon containment, soil enrichment, and remediation.

This vessel looks like a simple steel drum at first, but it's much more sophisticated than that.  The burning chamber is a simple inverted cone with no air intake.  Air is sucked into the drum at ground level, heated by the cone, and then forced through the gap around the top rim.  This produces an air blast into the rising smoke which burns the smoke cleanly.  This burner design was developed by a Stanford PhD for vineyards in Napa Valley to reduce the smoke problem they had there, and it will work for Ponte de Lima too.

The cost of the burner is only about €500 ($575), so it is affordable for individual vineyards or for sharing between a few farms.  Farmers won't have to change their habits much, they'll still burn their vine trimmings and agricultural waste but they'll use this burner instead of an open fire.  They will probably need to set their trimmings aside for a while to dry them before burning, which may be an additional step.  We're hopeful that we can help the idea catch on.

(The photos here were taken by a photographer friend of ours at the demo, since we got lost on the way and got there a little late.)

On Wednesday Jun 10 Gerrit finished the last of the three power converters and they are ready to go.  It was way too much time and effort altogether, but he supposes the pain will fade as they become useful.  The converters work just fine with a 120 volt 60 Hz load connected to them, but the fan noise when they start getting warm is a little annoying.  Too bad they didn't have videos with sound on the website where Gerrit ordered the components.

And we have both been spending way too much time and effort looking for a few items of furniture.  Pat finally found a bench and shoe rack for the bedroom which meets all our criteria.  It's surprising how hard it is to get manufacturers to admit that their products are not actual wood or wood veneer.  There is "oak effect", "engineered wood", "MDS with a smooth finish" which looks like printed wood, and various other evasive terms hidden in the fine print, but plain old solid wood or veneer is hard to come by.  Even Ikea, aka Veneer City, makes mostly the fake stuff these days.  We bought a buffet from them in "oak effect" finish a couple months ago and after a few weeks in the morning sun the plastic fake wood veneer had bleached to a bright lilac color!  Ugh.  We have found some good sources for real wood furniture though, including good old Etsy, so we have a few pieces on order and hopefully more to come soon.

On Friday Jun 12 we went to the annual Vinho Verde Festival in Ponte de Lima, like we did last year for the first time.  One vendor told us he remembered us.  We're regulars!  So we bought another bottle from our old friend.  We had a great time tasting and hanging out with English-speaking friends, both expats & vacationers.  Here's a picture of us with the original owners and builders of our house, Peter and Caroline from the UK.  They love the VV Fest and have been coming for 17 years.  We went Saturday and Sunday too, tasting and picking up some gems.  We did see a few more vendors who recognized us, too, as we did them.  Wine festivals are a great way to integrate with the local culture.  That's why we go to them, honest.

Last year we had no pears from our tree.  Zero.  The jays got them all, way underripe, and we didn't see a single one.  This year we put bird netting over the tree and we've gathered dozens of ripe pears already.  They're falling off the tree when they're ready, and many of them are landing in one pouch or another formed by the netting.  Perfect!  Birds can't get them (nowhere to light) and it's easy pickins for us.  We're having them in salads, diced on granola for breakfast, and fresh for some tasty fruit.  And we're even sharing with the birds: they get many of the ground-fallen and the few on the tree which are not covered by the net.  Which is way more than they ever did for us.

(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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Domestic Drivel

Get yourself a cup of coffee, you'll need it to get through this one.  

Pat spent some quality time with Gemini AI and found that our kitchen cabinets can be easily retrofitted for sliding shelves.  She made careful measurements and Gemini gave her the Ikea (pronounced that way in Europe) parts list for shelves, rails, and hinges, and even Portuguese installation instructions for our new handyman Marcelo.  We will pick up the Ikea parts on Friday May 29, Marcelo will take a look at the job and parts the following week to give us a quote, and soon we will have the convenience and efficiency of sliding shelves in the kitchen.  Good thing, because Pat is beginning to unpack kitchen stuff from Seattle and she'll need a place to put it.

She is getting pretty serious about this unpacking stuff.  At her direction we are rearranging, storing, and disposing of furniture to turn one bedroom into an unpacking area.  She is opening and unpacking boxes steadily now.  Gerrit hears a delighted "Ah!" or "Oh yeah!" occasionally as she uncovers a choice bit of buried treasure.

Cleaning the barbecue grill in spring has always been a dirty and difficult chore.  In Seattle Gerrit dragged the thing out to the lawn, took it apart, carefully pressure-washed the whole thing, reassembled, and dragged it back onto the deck.  He's got the same model BBQ here, and wasn't looking forward to cleaning it.  One of the great things about moving to an entirely new life, though, is you're always rethinking things.  Here he tried simply spraying on a local kitchen and grill degreasing product, waiting a bit, and hosing it off with a pressure sprayer on the hose.  Done!  This was plenty good enough (which is even better than perfect).  No disassembly, no pressure washer, little movement of the BBQ, quick, and easy.  If necessity is the mother of invention, then getting old is the mother of doing it as easily as possible.  We're ready for grilling now.

Gerrit has been trying to roast duck here.  It's pretty popular in the supermarkets, but his first two tries came out a little tough and rubbery.  So on Monday Jun 1 he got himself out to the BBQ grill at 7:30 AM and slow-roasted one at 150 C (300 F) for FIVE HOURS.  That did it!  Best duck ever, crispy skin and flavorful moist meat falling off the bone.  He made a nice sauce for it with cherries, wine, honey, vinegar, and Portuguese peppers (everything being local but the vinegar), and Pat made a lovely salad of cucumbers, herbs, and tomatoes.  She grew and harvested the herbs and cucumber, so they were as fresh as can be.  It was a delicious lunch, a nice treat.

FedEx is the worst company in the world.  Gerrit has dealt with them many times over the years, and they are always awful.  He is in FedEx hell again trying to get his pressure washer delivered, over a week late.  After hours of effort fighting idiotic website algorithms, links that don't work, a "wrong" address which was perfectly correct, trucks too big to get here, and calling in our Portuguese fixer Rita, the result is that he will have to drive an hour to Porto to pick it up.  Unbelievable.  Some delivery service.

On Wednesday Jun 3 our new handyman Marcelo was here all day installing sliding shelves in three kitchen cabinets.  Pat's and Gemini's Ikea parts were all here and waiting.  Marcelo assembled them all, remounted hinges on the cabinets as required, and installed them all.  He worked around problems and did a superb job.  He even fixed an ugly cabinet misalignment which our dishwasher repairman had left, so the kitchen looks clean and new from the outside too.  Pat re-packed the items from the cabinets and found that the new shelves have given her more usable room.  And check out these amazing hinges! They move the door to the side so the full-width drawers can pull out.

Pat is in full unpacking mode now.  As of Friday Jun 5 she's unloaded about a dozen big boxes.  Still 100-odd to go, but she's at full steam ahead.  She's finding some nice goodies in there too.

At long last, after driving to Porto to pick it up, Gerrit has his new pressure washer.  It's a Scheppack and it's very well designed, smoother and more powerful than his old Karcher with many clever features and attachments.  And it was less than half the price!  So he's back to his spring algae blasting, and hoping this washer will be more reliable than the last.

Pat found a donation place, apparently run by one volunteering household, which helps low-income new immigrants to Ponte de Lima with essential items.  On Sunday Jun 7 we dropped off a couple thick mattress toppers which could be used as beds.  We were hoping to meet the people running the show, but they weren't there so we left our donations next to someone else's bagful.

Gerrit finished serial number 001 of his power converter.  Hey, ugly is in the eye of the beholder, so just look the other way if you don't like it.  At least it works.  We'll hide them out of sight.  Pat has unearthed her sewing machine so she will soon be testing the converter out with a real load.  A report will appear in the next post.

(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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Spring Bounty, Rainbows, and Swims

We've found an excellent new handyman / electrician.  Marcelo was here Friday May 22 to retrofit all the concealed tubular fluorescent lights here with LEDs, and to replace the four bathroom fans which were clattering themselves (and us) to death.  He was able to get here within days of our contacting him, he was right on time, quoted the whole job very reasonably, and did a great job.  He speaks only a little English, so Gerrit got to try out his Portuguese with him.  Gerrit was told that his Portuguese was "very, very good", but he is sure that Marcelo was just being nice.  It's good to get to know tradespeople who can help like this, and we're sure we'll call on him many times in the future.

Saturday night May 23 a little after midnight we had a huge thunderstorm pass right over us.  Lightning flashed continuously, every couple seconds, and one very bright bolt was immediately followed by an enormous clap of thunder.  It must have struck just a couple hundred meters (yards) away.  The bedroom clocks stayed lit, though, and there was nothing we could do but drift back to sleep after the storm had passed.  In the morning we were relieved to see that the power was still up.  But on closer inspection of the solar system data, the power grid had failed during the storm and was still down!  We had been running on batteries since midnight, and then on direct solar power as the day dawned clear.  We're off the grid, as long as we get some sun!

On Sunday May 24 we saw an exotic hoopoe bird perching right up on our back garden wall.  It was flexing its magnificent crest a little.  By the time we got a camera up it was just turning away to leave, but it was a nice treat to see.  See this post for a little more about hoopoes.

You'd think good old Johnson's Baby Shampoo would be the same the world over, right?  Babies are, why not their shampoo?  Well, there is quite a difference.  There are ingredient restrictions and even cultural adjustments to fragrance and feel, viscosity, the way it foams, and how easily it rinses off.  It even stings the eyes over here!  Gerrit gets blepharitis (red eyelids) occasionally, and when he used the old remedy of washing the eyelids with Johnson's Baby Shampoo over here it smelled funny, felt funny, stung the eyes something fierce, and took a long time to wash off.  Gemini the AI to the rescue: there are indeed differences in Johnson's Baby Shampoo worldwide, this decades-old baby shampoo treatment is no longer recommended, and there are many excellent over-the-counter compounds for blepharitis treatment in Portugal.  Gerrit will take his now thoroughly bloodshot eyes into the pharmacy and try to convince them he's not a wino.

The cherries (which Pat says life is a bowl of) and strawberries are in full bloom in the markets, and Pat's zucchini and cucumber vines are producing by the basket.  She's been harvesting them while they're still young and tender (no bowling-pin zucchinis allowed), and they are so delicious.  We also have a few strawberry plants of our own, and we get a nice ripe one every couple of days.  

By the way, there are roadside stands appearing about this time of year with signs saying "há cerejas", which literally means "there are cherries".  Not "we have cherries", "get your cherries here", or "cherries for sale", but "there are cherries".  So many things don't translate word-for-word.  To say "we have cherries" in Portuguese would be "temos cerejas", but that would sound funny to a Portuguese ear.  Just like "we have cherries" would sound to them as they learn English.  "You have cherries?  Who cares?  Are there cherries?", they might ask.

On Sunday May 24 we had a rain shower late in the afternoon which resulted in this beautiful rainbow, seen from our balcony.  Not to get all picky about such a lovely scene, but why would the region under the rainbow be lighter than the rest of the picture?  It looks like a glowing snow globe bubble.  Maybe the rainbow marks the boundary of a critical viewing angle to the sun, below which the light is refracted differently.  Or something.  Or maybe we shouldn't have selected "Hallmark card" for the photo effect on the camera.

Gerrit took the season's inaugural swim on Tuesday May 26.  It was about 28 C (82 F) and Gerrit was beginning to roast by about 6 PM.  MO (our cleaning robot) has been keeping the pool nice and clean, so Gerrit retracted the cover and jumped in.  It was heavenly, and within minutes his feeling of being a human roast beef was gone.  The pool cover is doing a nice job of absorbing solar heat into the pool.  The top 30 cm or so (1 foot) was significantly warmer than the depths below.  Running the pump automatically for four hours a day mixes up the warm and cool water to an average of about 23 C (73 F) right now, which is perfect for Gerrit but a little chilly for Pat.  She'll be in there in another few weeks.

(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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