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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Late May at Casa da Rocha

 OK, just to justify our existence over the past few weeks, here are some highlights: 

• Caulk showers and replace door gaskets 
• Organize and clear out closets in anticipation of unpacking 
• Fix sticking slider doors 
• Order power supplies for US voltage & frequency conversion where needed 
• Keep track of developments in the garden 
• Repair a broken granite paver in the patio 
• Get a new mattress and start design for a wall bed in a guest room
• Tether the thermometer and chlorine float in the pool by drilling the granite 
• Do weeding and garden maintenance 
• Coat the ipê wood pool cover bench with teak oil 
• Daily physical therapy appointments for Pat 
• Order and get the pool cleaner robot, configure and test 
• Start spring pressure washing the granite 
• Order a new pressure washer when the old one died for the second time 
• Order and install a little railing up a step to the pool 

Not really much to elaborate on, but if we can make it entertaining we will.

We are both practicing Portuguese every day and slowly getting better.  We can both understand about a third of normal speech now, Pat is getting bolder with her exchanges in shops and Gerrit is too, even making small talk sometimes.  When messaging or emailing, Gerrit usually comes up with the Portuguese in his own words, slowly and incompletely, typing it first into the DeepL translator to check that the resulting English is what he intended.  He is sure it isn't fluent native-quality text, but he's getting better and quicker at it.

Here's a bucolic scene of the neighborhood sheep grazing on our middle property level.  The shepherdess is off to the left, out of sight.  Every few days they all come through, and we wave hello.

And here is MO, our new scrubbing pool robot, shuttling across the pool bottom and up a wall.  It does that wall trick by suctioning water in from its underside.  We sat and watched MO's maiden voyage for far too long, hypnotized.

Gerrit now has the main components for producing real US electrical power (120 V sinusoidal, 60 Hz) for use with some of our appliances we brought with us, notably Pat's beloved sewing machine and serger.  He needs to get a few more assembly parts and tools and soon Pat will be stitching again.

On Thursday May 21 we went to the little beach town of Vila Praia de Âncora, about an hour northwest of here, way up in the very northwest corner of Portugal.  We had been invited to an expats lunch with about 20 people there at the Casa dos Caracois restaurant.  We had grilled swordfish and sardines, both excellent, and sat next to some folks from Portland who have been here in Portugal for about three years.  We enjoyed their company, made WhatsApp connections, and will see them at another expats lunch soon.

The town itself is a little fishing village with a large fortress, the Forte da Lagarteira, probably built around 1650.  There are sweeping long sandy beaches, with hardly anyone on them on this lovely May day.  You can see some Camino de Santiago pilgrims or walkers here, on their way to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia (northwestern Spain).  We saw many of them passing through town, and we see them in Ponte de Lima too.  They are each on one of the many routes to the cathedral.

Entrance sign at the town center

Detail of the intricate laser-cut iron fisherman

What, you expected a "before" picture?

(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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Our Domestic Adventure

More home improvements are underway here at Pat & Gerrit's Domestic Adventure.  We have our garage door on a battery backup system now so we'll be able to get into the garage even in a total blackout, and we ordered a keypad to mount on the outside so workers can get in there any time too.  We ordered a pool cleaner robot to liberate Gerrit from that big vacuuming job.  It is a little rotary brush tread-driven thing like MO (Microbe Obliterator) in the Pixar movie WALL-E.  MO's favorite expression was "foreign contaminant!" as he scrubbed furiously, and it's what we're naming our robot.  It is battery powered, and crawls around on the pool bottom (and walls!) scrubbing the surfaces and scooping up junk.  And we have our painter and construction guy Rui lined up to replace skylights and re-do a low part in the roof.  That will happen late this summer.

We were so busy nesting that we forgot about the Feiras Novas 200th anniversary celebration in Ponte de Lima on Tuesday May 5!  There were fireworks and a live band, and we slept right through the whole thing.  Here is a post about last year's actual Feiras Novas festival, a huge party and the 199th anniversary, and we plan to attend this year's event this fall too.

Rachel, our furniture sales contact and interior decorator, paid us a visit on Thursday May 7 to take photos and measurements for a couple more pieces of custom furniture.  She did a great job with the main beds, which are now installed, so it will be great to see what she comes up with for the bookshelf and fold-up beds.  We drew up some sketches and dimensions for a couple chests of drawers too.

Pat has had a bad right knee since a serious mountain climbing fall in high school.  She's been putting up with it and reinjuring it ever since, but now she is preparing for a knee replacement procedure this winter.  She went to our favorite hospital in nearby Viana do Castelo on Thursday May 7 for an MRI and X-rays.  High quality modern imaging equipment, both knees, both exams, total €180 ($212) out of pocket, paid for there at the hospital with a credit card just after the procedure.  Health care done right.

As of the 12th it has been rainy and cloudy for most of May.  April was beautiful and clear but May so far has mostly been wet and dark.  We're eager to get to our projects outside, but not in the rain.

On Wednesday May 13 we celebrated our anniversary at an elegant Ponte de Lima restaurant called Pimm's.  (We've never been very good at celebrating our anniversary on our actual anniversary.)  The restaurant is in a renovated farmhouse with thick dark timbers, a huge fireplace, and thick stone walls.  The grounds are beautiful, tasteful and park-like.  They have an extensive Portuguese menu and an even more extensive fine wine list.  We ordered Pernil de Porco no Forno (roast leg of pork) for two, with a bottle of Touriga Nacional wine (a Portuguese grape, a favorite of ours).  The pork was carved at our table by one of the friendly and attentive wait staff, and it was delicious.  By the time our mixed fresh fruit dessert arrived we could hardly eat another bite.  We went home happy.

Earlier that day we had heard a chainsaw nearby, sounding like it was in the grove of eucalyptus trees which our property borders on.  We were hoping the owners weren't cutting the grove down; it's a lovely part of our view.  After a couple dead trees on the end came down, the logging stopped.  They had removed the only obstacle to our view of the medieval Ponte de Lima bridge from our living room!  It was our anniversary gift from the neighbors.  The photo here is the new view from our living room, zoomed 2x, and you can see the bridge and the river Lima serenely off in the distance.

(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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A Gallimaufry of Miscellany

It's pretty easy to take things off the wall so you can paint, but much harder to put them back.  Drywall anchors get damaged during take-down or start to spin on reinstallation, things need to be checked and adjusted for levelness, and mounting hardware gets lost or mixed up.  Gerrit was chipping away at all that for six days after the painters finished, in addition to disassembling beds in two rooms and moving the parts out of the way for the new furniture.  We're all back to normal now, except with new paint.  And it is beautiful!  Our embarrassing wine stain on the ceiling and walls is a thing of the past.

On Thursday Apr 23 the delivery truck from the furniture store arrived, right on time, and a couple energetic young men carried several packages of pieces for two storage beds and two bedside stands upstairs and into the bedless bedrooms.  In about an hour they had them all assembled beautifully, and we now have some lovely new beds with nice storage under them.  Any day now we will start digging into the boxes in the garage containing all our stored Seattle stuff.  We haven't seen the stuff for over three years.  It will be interesting to see the stuff we thought we couldn't live without.

With the help of our intrepid handyman Andrew on Friday Apr 24 we got the disassembled beds and a large heavy bookcase hauled from the house to the garage.  Andrew can use one of the beds himself, the bookcase will work nicely as storage right where it sits in the garage, and we'll find a good home for the other bed.  Andrew also hauled a few of our boxes from the garage up to the front room and we broke into a couple of them.  Gerrit's crowbar!  Pat's Tupperware!  It's like Christmas in April.  Now where are we going to put this stuff...?

Day after day of unbloggable life.  Honest, we're quite busy, but it's just not the kind of stuff that makes exciting copy.  A photo of the newly-mounted vacuum cleaner on the wall?  A blow-by-blow account of Pat's email finally working again after three days and hours of frustration?  We'd lose our dear readers in droves.  Well, there are a few photo-worthy things, like the new beds and Wall Clock 3.0 with its special Summertime Mosquito Fumigator accessory.  You can see a little of the new bedroom paint colors here too.

Makes you wish it was bedtime all day long	Wall Clock 3.0
Bare naked storage bed	Look at all that space!

And yes, it does rain here now and then.  Tuesday Apr 28 we had some thundershowers and drenching rain for a little while.

Pat and our landscape designer Alex continue working on the garden.  The irrigation is almost all installed and is working fine.  Alex has proposed a beautiful plan for what used to be the lawn area next to the swimming pool, and he and Pat have worked out what should be a stunning arrangement of shrubs, vines, and plants there.  Alex roughed it out for us while he was here, with cobblestone markers so we could visualize the paths and flower beds, and it will look gorgeous.

On Friday May 1 our friend Maayan was part of an art exhibit we attended in the big city of Braga, about 45 minutes away.  She showed three drawings she had made, and many works from other artists were shown in the gallery too.  It was well attended by dozens of people, and we had fun seeing her work on display.

Pat and Maayan next to Maayan's art

Her drawings and collages: Woman, Man, and Child

You may recall that our garage cannot easily be entered, in any way, in a total power failure (meaning that the power grid is down, it's dark out, and the solar batteries are empty).  This makes shopping for groceries (or getting to a hospital) difficult.  We decided that a battery backup UPS for the garage door only would be a way around this.  Gerrit bought a UPS a while ago (which was the easy part) and finally got around to actually installing it on the weekend of May 2 and 3.  He used Portuguese (European?) wiring techniques so it looks very professional, and it works great.  No longer will we be trapped here during extended total power failures.

As of Sunday May 3 we have enough home-grown lemons for another batch of Pat's famous limoncello.  She peeled lemons and started the elixir brewing, and in a month we'll be sipping that liquid sunshine.

Our long-staggering bungalow project has finally done a face plant.  In mid-January we engaged a real estate lawyer to see whether we could actually build on our lot, what with fire regulations and zoning, and months later we still don't know.  The lawyers point to the Municipality of Ponte de Lima, who still haven't responded to them, but we're sure the lawyers have not exactly been proactive about this.  We do know that land in Ponte de Lima has recently been re-zoned, and it seems like it's now a snarled mess with nobody willing to take a stand.  If it's this bad to just find out if the construction is possible, think what actually getting a building permit would be like!  We're giving up.  We have two bedrooms in the house we can prepare for guests, and for big crowds we can even put them up nearby.  The 50.000 € ($58,000) cost of a completed, fitted, and plumbed bungalow would buy a lot of Airbnb time for our guests.  We do want a little pool changing room where the bungalow would have been, but that is small scale enough that we can just build 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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More Mini Vacation

On Sunday Apr 12 we took a back-road drive about a half hour to the city of Braga, to the southwest of here.  We followed a route we'd never taken before, and it was a beautiful slice of the Portuguese countryside.  We browsed a pottery outlet and had lunch in a big, boisterous restaurant next door called Pó d'Arroz (entry shown at left), which served tasty basic food to a throng of locals (and us).  The name literally translates to "rice flour", and we can't find any cultural significance for that, so I guess the restaurant is just named after rice flour.  Their favorite ingredient?

Back in Ponte de Lima there was a big line at the grocery store, and we took our place at the end.  A minute later a store security guard came up to us and motioned to follow him.  Oh no, were we suspected shoplifters?  No, he took us to a self-check register and checked us out, item by item.  What a nice thing to do!  We also found that you don't put your self-checked-out items directly in a bag, you put them arranged on a shelf next to the register.  There may be cameras above to keep an eye on the self-check items.  Anyway, it was a very nice gesture from the guard; we jumped the line with his help and were soon on our way.

Pat's shoulder ultrasound a few weeks ago has led to a series of daily appointments at a local, modern physiotherapist.  She has gotten TENS treatments, other electro-stimulation, massage and motion stretching, and they are successfully improving her range of motion without pain.  The first week of hour-long visits have been beneficial, and we hope for more like that along with some home exercises.  The co-pay for her 15 visits is € 12 ($14) each.

On Wednesday Apr 15 we took the afternoon off for a trip to the town of Ponte da Barca and some lunch there, pork loin at the Emigrante restaurant.  Ponte da Barca is a nice little town about a half hour due east of us, also on the Lima river like Ponte de Lima.  It has a lot of the same character as Ponte de Lima.  On the way back we followed some signs to a viewpoint, capped with huge rounded boulders.

The restaurant (stock photo)

Mmm, lunch

On the way to the viewpoint

Where the road ended

And the view from there

And the following day we took another trip to Ponte da Barca, to take some more photos and have some more lunch.  This time we found the Roman style bridge (built in the 14th century), the "Ponte" part of "Ponte da Barca".  "Barca" in Portuguese means "boat", so the town is named "bridge of the boat".  Why do you need a boat if you have a bridge?  Apparently they named the town after the boat that used to ferry across the river before the bridge was built.  There's a little rowboat monument in town.  Here is a video of the Lima river and the Ponte da Barca bridge:

Mmm, lunch	Statues and a hospital on the town square
Ponte da Barca street scene	The famous bridge

Here is a surprise about Portuguese income tax: you don't know how much you owe or will be refunded when you submit your tax form, unlike the US form 1040 where the total is shown.  Here, the Fiscal Authority computes your tax from your form and lets you know.  Our form was just submitted, but we won't know what we owe or will be refunded until as late as July 31.  There is apparently no way to reliably estimate the amount from the form.  With the 1040 you can juggle things around to affect your tax before you submit it, but not here.  Maybe that's a good thing: they want you to just report your income and expenses without trying to jigger the books, and they just give you a fair figure computed the same way for everyone.  At least we hope it's something like that.

On Friday Apr 17 we checked out of our Airbnb mid-morning and drove around some more while the painters finished up and cleaned up.  We visited a local attraction, Mesa dos Quatro Abades ("Table of the Four Abbots"), located just a few kilometers from home.  The sign says it is "A place where four parishes converged, where the abbots would gather to discuss their problems".  It looks like a nice picnic area now, with a dark little shed holding summer chairs and tables.  We had tried to visit the site some time ago but the road looked impassible.  When we arrived at the head of the road this time, there were three workers just finishing up their lunch.  Gerrit asked about the Mesa, had a little conversation with a worker, and they hopped in their truck to escort us.  Their truck was much larger than our little car, but they made it down the narrow cobbled "impassible" road just fine.  We waved thanks as they drove on, hung out at the Mesa a little while, and then followed the truck's route through narrow and winding roads back to the highway.  We're learning how to navigate the narrowest passages with confidence.

Storage shed and tiles at Mesa dos Quatro Abades	Admiring the view from MdQA
"Bem vindo" means "welcome", and here's the welcoming committee	The countryside as we left MdQA
A charming little chapel on the way home	A soothing rest stop on a small river

Back home, the paint looked just beautiful and the painters had done an excellent job of finishing.  There had been little flaws and patched holes before painting which we can't even find now; they're patched perfectly.  The colors are very nice, similar to the original light pastels but with a "silk" finish rather than matte.  Marks clean off very easily.  (Don't ask how we know this.)  We spent the next few days cleaning and restoring, and we'll send some photos when it's presentable.  We have already unwrapped Pat's china hutch, the biggest and most fragile item we shipped from Seattle, and it's in beautiful shape, not a mar on it and all the glass pristine.  It's really nice to see that symbol of Amish craftsmanship from the US standing proudly here.

And immediately after the painters left the furniture store messaged to say our beds and nightstands are ready!  They will be delivered and assembled on Thursday Apr 23.  Maybe we'll wait on photos till that is complete.

As if this post didn't have enough photos, here are a couple more which fell through the cracks and should have made it into our last post.  There is a beautiful country scene with an old house and grazing sheep from our Apr 7 drive, and a nice view of the tiles and wisteria at the Ponte de Lima garden we visited on Apr 11.

(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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