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,
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.
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.)