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 from our room 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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The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

Our lives have been filled with organizing, planning, and sorting out.  We have approved the design and quote for the fold-down bed and storage in one guest room, and are working out solutions for other furniture.  

Gerrit had a lesion on his left hand which was a little concerning.  Our English-speaking medical appointment service set up a dermatologist appointment within days, and Gerrit headed to the nearby city of Braga on Wednesday Aug 5 for it.  Backing into the parking space Gerrit hit an elevated box and shattered the rear window.  It was really not his day.  But as Garp would put it, Pérola our intrepid little car is now pre-disastered.

The dermatologist thought the lesion might be a carcinoma, so we decided she should cut it out right there after the appointment.  Gerrit is getting tired of these cancer scares.  She did a great job, and in a couple weeks he should be all healed up.

Pat's new Cuisinart substitute showed up less than a week from ordering, and it's a beauty.  It's just as powerful and capable as her old one, built like a brick, and much simpler to use and set up.  Here's the main workhorse, and she has some sets of accessories, too.  Our first test?  Grating some home-grown potatoes and onion for hash browns.  Worked great, and it was a tasty maiden voyage for the MagiMix.  Next Pat made a big batch of pesto with home-grown basil and froze ice cube trays full of it to enjoy when we want, and a nice batch of fresh salsa.  She is definitely bonding with her new food processor.

Starting on Wednesday Aug 5 we had tradespeople crawling all over the place for days.  Our skylights are being replaced, our garden project is wrapping up, and we are clearing out the spare room in the garage for a storage room.  Privacy was a fond memory from the past around here for a while.  But as Pat points out, it's better to get it all done at once.

On Saturday Aug 8 we took a trip to Vila Praia de Âncora, the small seaside town we visited some time ago for an expats lunch.  This time we wanted to look around the town a little more and visit a used and antique furniture store we'd heard about.  The furniture was nice, and some of it was gorgeous, but we couldn't visualize a place for it here.  We wandered around the three stories of merchandise though, admiring and considering, and then had a little drive-around.

Both Praia de Âncora and Moledo, its neighbor beach town to the north, were packed with beach-goers on this Saturday in August.  Every parking place was taken, and the wide beautiful beaches were filled with colorful umbrellas and swimmers.  We snooped around much of the area and found a central historical area of Praia de Âncora.  It was anchored by a nice church, a town square, and a cobbled main street lined with hanging flower baskets.  We strolled the street a little and settled for lunch in Hotel Meira, a shrine to the Beatles of all things.  The lobby and halls were filled with Beatles memorabilia, posters, pictures, album covers, drawings, and souvenirs.  Lunch was great: bacalhau (cod) in cream sauce for Pat and lasagne Bolognese for Gerrit.  Then the drive home was as beautiful as the drive there.

Beautiful scenery on the way	Bovine bliss on the road
Town square in Praia de Âncora	Street scene
Pat's bacalhau	Gerrit's lasagne

A total eclipse of the sun is coming to Europe on Wednesday Aug 12.  The path of totality will cross part of Spain and even a tiny bit of Portugal, but we will travel to the heart of the path in western Spain to see a whole minute and a half of totality.  Stay tuned for the next blog post to hear all about it.

(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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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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