On Saturday Nov 1 the pool cover installation technicians were here. Gerrit had asked for them to come as soon as they could after we got home from Seattle, and boy did they! Three days after we arrived, and on a Saturday yet. The company and the technicians are Spanish, so we made good use of Google Translate. They finished in one day, did a good, careful job, and the cover looks great and performs beautifully. It will be so nice to keep leaves, dirt, and insects out of the pool. (We even had a 20 cm (8 inch) long newt drown overnight in there recently.) The pool will also absorb and retain heat better with the cover during the swimming season. Here is our lovely model Pat sitting on the new
We have the itinerary for the shipment of our belongings now that the container ship is underway from Seattle. The route is through the Panama Canal, across the Atlantic, through the Straits of Gibraltar, across most of the Mediterranean Sea to Malta, then unloading in Italy and by truck or train through Italy, France, Spain, and finally to the
One of those gigantic grasshoppers we see around here occasionally was crawling around, high up outside a window. He looked like a rock climber carefully placing his footholds and rocking his body to test his balance now and then.
November is a lousy time to have a new solar power installation put in. We want to see gigawatts of solar power flowing in, but on thick cloudy days it's just not there. We can see when some solar power is being generated, but it's usually not enough to totally supply the house. It reduces the grid power usage to be sure, but we're not exactly off the grid during the cloudy times. When a clear period does occur we can see the house being powered by solar and our batteries charging up full in a couple hours, though, which is fun.
Pat has been chasing down Portuguese driver's licenses for us, and it's turning into a huge job. Since our residency was delayed for so long we exceeded the time limit to get licenses. Our fixer Nia started the process anyway to see if she could make it work, and she quickly found out that our apostilled driving records from the US have expired too, so now we're faced with getting new records apostilled. (Apostilling is like an international notary certification.) This needs to be done in the US and then sent here to be included with our license applications. We'll have to prevail on Pat's ever-helpful cousin again to take care of the US part for us. What a mess!
Sunday Nov. 9 was Pat's birthday, and we met our friends
 A typical vendor and his wares
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 The market was in the tree-lined promenade
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Birthday girl with a find
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 Mmm, German chocolate...
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If you want to track the exciting path of our goods from Seattle, go to https://www.marinetraffic.com/ and search for the vessel MSC Elisabetta. It's astounding to see the container ships from all over the world shuttling around the oceans on that site, too. As of Sunday evening Nov. 9 our container was off the coast of El Salvador, heading toward the Panama Canal. It's strange to think about most of our worldly goods chugging along on the open seas like this!
(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.)