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.)

Read More