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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