The unavoidables: death and taxes. At least death only happens once. Gerrit's pastime these days is dealing with both US and Portuguese taxes. He finished putting together all the necessary documents for his dad's taxes and sent them off to our US CPA. On Friday Feb 27 we had a video conference with a Portuguese CPA who should be able to handle our Portuguese return. Portugal and the US have a reciprocal tax agreement so residents here are not double taxed, which is nice. We think we will need to file the Portuguese taxes first and then deduct them from our US taxes, but we'll find out.
On Tuesday Feb 24 Gerrit transferred his US driver's license to Portuguese. There was a little longer wait at the motor vehicle office than we'd had for Pat, but after that everything went smoothly and after a few days his official license appeared in the mail.
All of a sudden, our solar power system has been operating flawlessly for over a month now. What caused that? Nobody knows. It took months to schedule an electrician to install an automatic transfer switch, intended to fix some of the long-standing problems, and now it may not even be necessary. The electrician's truck broke down on Thursday Feb 26 so his appointment slid from 10:00 to 3:30. Then he didn't show, and at 5:00 we learned it would be Saturday at 11:00 when he could make it. We're finding that most appointments with Portuguese tradespeople go like this. Gotta stay flexible. And patient.
Gerrit came down with a nasty cold on Friday Feb 27, and we're still laying low while he recovers from that.
We had our horticulturist Alex and his helper out again on Wednesday Mar 4 mainly to do some pruning. The garden is looking very nice now and the irrigation system is almost in place for the summer. Our biggest problem now is a local cat who considers our lovely little ipê tree base as his everyday litter box. Fertilizer direct from the cat has got to be a little too concentrated for the poor tree.
You know that surreal feeling you get when you're not feeling well but it's beautiful outside? Gerrit had that, so he took a batch of close-up photos inside and around the home as something to do which was partly outside. It's a little different than our usual landscape panoramas. Then he scurried inside, blew his nose, and collapsed on the couch.
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(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.)