Domestic Doings

The pool perfection quest continues.  The pool is actually great now, it looks beautiful and all the chemicals are balanced, the new chlorinator is working just fine, and we're enjoying our swims.  But imperfection lurks.  There is a large sand-filled filter in the equipment room (about 190 liters, 50 gal), and it is showing signs of being clogged up.  System pressure is on the high side, and some actual seaweed-type greenery can be seen through the transparent plastic cover, waving in the current as the pump runs.

Filters apparently need to have their sand changed every few years, and this one doesn't look like it has had that for a while.  The access cover won't budge either.  Time to find a new cover, break the old one out of there, suck out the sandy sludge, and pour in some new sand.  Uh, maybe this winter.

We have a fig tree along our driveway by the main entrance, and we gathered our first crop ever.  Almost 3 kg (6.6 lb)!  We sliced some up and heated them over grilled turkey breast, and Pat separated the rest for drying, keeping fresh, and freezing for future jams and sauces.

Pat took a few photos of the view from our balcony, slightly zoomed in, on a nice clear summer day.

The Ponte de Lima bridge and river

A little closer view

The neighboring village of Arcozelo

The contractor we interviewed for the wiring and wall demolition near the pool (as preparation for the automatic cover installation) has given us a good quote so we have them on the calendar for the second week of September.

We have been accumulating the raised garden bed kits which Pat and her Israeli landscaper Alex have decided on.  This involves picking them up at big box hardware stores in bigger cities, but we make a nice drive out of it.  Alex and Pat have worked out an automated watering scheme involving water timers and in-ground piping.  Alex is an expert in organic gardening, horticulture, and plant health.  He and his crew are also going to revise the areas around the trunks of our existing trees to give them nice big organic "mouths" for nutrients and water, and a little softer look too.  All this starts Tuesday August 19, so much of the garden will shortly have a facelift and dependable watering. 

Gerrit has been wondering what his first electronic project after retirement would be, and here it is: an automatic solar water heater protector.  We've mentioned how the solar collectors here can skyrocket to alarming temperatures.  Well, there's a way to avoid that automatically by bleeding off a trickle of hot water when the hot water tank starts approaching its maximum temperature.  He is putting together a design, writing software, and ordering parts to build a little gadget to do just that.  It will protect the collectors whether we are home or not, and no matter what the weather.  We can leave it running year-round.  Pat has suggested a product name already: The Collector Protector (TM).  In the process Gerrit is lining up suppliers and sources for his future Portuguese projects too.

The gardeners were here on Tuesday and Wednesday Aug 19 and 20 and made great progress.  They got a beautiful new timer-controlled irrigation system installed and built big organic soil beds for the backyard trees.  They removed the buried concrete boxes around them to give the roots more room to breathe, and surrounded them with cobblestones we picked up at our neighborhood quarry which match the same ones in the front yard.  Our little Honda Jazz has been a real trooper for hauling stuff like that.  Here is how some of the garden is shaping up:

And now it's Gerrit's turn to be all swollen and infected.  He got a wasp sting on his hand and it became infected.  Late summer is the worst time for this, the wasps are very protective of their brood of new larvae and they get angry when you get close to the nest.  After a day of antibiotic salve and bandages it was no better, it was actually starting to get worse, so on our medical consultant's advice he went to an emergency room in the nearby city of Viana do Castelo.  There is no "urgent care" here, if you need to see a doctor or nurse right away you go to the hospital emergency room.

There was only a 15 minute wait, and he was seen by a compassionate native Canadian doctor who spoke flawless North American English.  She prescribed antibiotics, antihistamines, and an NSAID.  The evening after the first dose he was feeling better and his hand was starting to deflate, and three days later his hand was almost back to normal.  Costs?  After insurance, 40 € ($46.60) for the consultation and 11,50 € ($13.40) for the prescriptions.

A sweet note about the pharmacy: only one employee spoke English, and a little haltingly, but they found her for Gerrit after he attempted a little Portuguese and looked baffled at the reply.  She printed English labels for the prescriptions including instructions like "after eat something".  The kindness of people here, going out of their way to accommodate us ignorant immigrants, is continually touching.

And another example: we took the car in for its one-year service, and Gerrit was struggling with describing what was needed.  An elderly gentleman asked if we spoke English, and he stepped in to translate.  Such kindness!  We ended up chatting with him (in English) the whole time the car was being serviced.

On Thursday Aug 21 it was a nice day with no wildfire smoke so we decided to take the day off and go on a little day trip.  After fighting with incomprehensible failures in Google Maps and several wrong "solutions" on the internet, after lunch we headed on a counterclockwise loop almost as far south as the city of Braga.  We saw lots of beautiful countryside, churches, and the sobering aftermath of some wildfires.  We returned along the road with the miniature city and castles which we featured in this post, and Pat got a nice shot looking up the hill at it.

Wednesday Aug 20 we began to see festive road arches being put up in the center of Calheiros, our little village.  It looked like a festival was coming up.  Pat asked our housekeeper about it in a text message, and yes, it was a celebration.  When Pat asked what it was for, she was told that it was just for people to have fun!  What a great attitude the Portuguese have.  A couple nights later the arches were lit up as we came home one evening and we took this video.  It turned out that this was part of an upcoming weekend-long party in Ponte de Lima and Calheiros too.  We'll try to give a first-hand report.  We will certainly hear it right here at home!

We got home from shopping one day and jumped when we saw this monster grasshopper crawling up the lift control box.  Pat ID'd it as an Egyptian Bird Grasshopper, and it is indeed as big as a small bird.  Our gardener Alex said he has eaten them.  They swarm like locusts occasionally in Israel, and he and his buddies snagged a few and roasted them.  They taste like french fries he says.  We're taking his word on that.

(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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All's Fair

On Thursday August 8 we drove with friends to Vila do Conde about 45 minutes south of here for an Arts & Crafts fair which Pat had discovered.  The fair will be there for two weeks.  It is located in a beautiful downtown park with trees, lawn, and fountains, and everything was clean and neat as a pin.  It was arranged in four long aisles of booths.  There were dozens of booths, all representing towns and villages in the north Portugal region, with their regional specialty crafts on display.  There were embroidery, metal work, art and household ceramics, basket weaving, wood carving, leather work, paintings, fabrics, paper manufacture, papier-mâché and more.  Themes ranged from serious Catholic carvings to whimsical cartoon-like ceramic dolls and marionettes.  The crowd was light, and there was a sense of peace and happiness among everyone.  We had some dinner there too, sandes mistas (mixed sandwiches) of chewy bread, local soft cheese, and thin slices of Iberian ham.  We found several items we loved and brought them home to help feather the nest with handmade Portuguese artisan products.

Artistic woodwork	Sheet metal forming
Booths and fairgoers	Basket weaving
Lace-making class	Wood mosaics
Furniture using wood mosaics	Stringed instruments
Little people & sculptured faces	Glass blowing

Pat and friends also went to a medieval fair the following day, one of the largest in the Iberian peninsula.  It was in Santa Maria da Feira, a small town a bit south of Porto an hour and a half from here, in a wooded park at the foot of the town's castle.  She is an old hand at renaissance fairs, having worked them for a few years.  This one was colorful and had many authentic-looking immersive exhibits showing medieval life.

Falconry was big in those days	Kids' castle
Medieval life	A nearby church

And here is the royal procession

August is a terrible month around here, besides just being too damn hot.  Most of Europe shuts down and goes on vacation.  That means you can't get anything done requiring local help, and the country is flooded with French (and other) vacationers.  Roads, grocery stores, attractions, and festivals are jammed.  We have to just shrug and go along with it, and try to do our shopping in the fringe hours.  We're becoming grumpy locals.

(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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Hot Fun in the Summertime

We have been loving our pool in this hot weather but there is no shade out there, so when we climb out we start to bake.  We've been shopping for a big sun umbrella and got one at the local hardware store.  It does a beautiful job, has 84 kg (185 lb) of ballast in the base to keep it steady, and makes a nice big patch of shade in the late afternoon.  Until a good sized gust of wind comes along and knocks it over.  Good thing it fell the other way from us so we didn't get skewered by an umbrella rib.  Time to increase the ballast or batten that thing down.

We have had many wildfires in the area, including this one just across the Lima river valley which was awfully close to our friends Maayan and Dan. The air has been smoky and sometimes we stay inside huddled with the air conditioning on in the heat.  The firefighters (bombeiros) have been heroic in getting the fires under control.

Our solar panels are finally due to be installed, the second week of August.  Gerrit has been fretting about the sails they will act like in high winds and calculated that we might expect peaks of about 7000 newtons of wind load force (1600 lb) on them.  The plan has been to hold the panel assemblies down with concrete weights, but this is looking less reasonable.  He thinks we will have to anchor them into the poured concrete roof.  We'll be talking that over with the installer shortly.

On Sunday August 3 it was roasting hot.  We had a delicious fruit and smoothie lunch provided by our friends Christoph and Atena, after visiting their almost-remodeled place, and then after some chores we took off for a tour of the countryside in our nice air-conditioned car.  You can see the route here.  We met some free-range goats along one desolate high-altitude road (check out the grampa with the huge horns and beard), and saw some beautiful villages and farms.  Here is a valley view near the little town of Covas.  By this time it was 36 C (97 F).  We began to work our way home through beautiful winding roads and villages we had never seen (even though they were just a few kilometers from home), intent on hopping in the pool.

Did we mention how our solar water heating system can overheat?  Yes, it's unavoidable with our type of system.  When the hot water tank reaches the maximum (75 C, 167 F), the pump which circulates fluid between the solar collectors and the heat exchanger in the hot water tank shuts off to prevent heating the tank to scalding temperatures.  Good for the humans, bad for the collectors.  With the pump off in the middle of a sunny day the collectors can quickly get very hot and there's no way to cool them down.  Gerrit was inattentive one day and they got up to 150 C (302 F)!!  That's like chicken-roasting oven temperature!  We're lucky they didn't blow their pressure release valve.  We are now turning on a trickle of hot water in a bathroom sink on hot clear afternoons, and that seems be be enough to keep the pump circulating and the collectors from blowing their tops.  We are working on finding the proper trickle which we can leave on 24 hours a day during the summer so we have hot water and unexploded collectors without having to babysit it.

We finally found someone who looks like a knowledgeable, reputable, and available contractor for the major projects we have going here.  On Monday August 4 Hugo and his colleague Carlos came by to assess wall demolition, conduit installation for the pool cover, and connecting and fitting out the bungalow.  They grasped the situation quickly, and made some great suggestions for the bungalow and for simplifying the conduit installation too.

We do share our home with a fair amount of local wildlife.  Our housekeeper Inês found these Asian Mud Dauber wasp nests under a sofa cushion, for example.  (They look like like little turds, don't they?)  Good thing nobody sat on them.

(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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