The Heat and the Power

Through some references from friends we found an excellent auto car glass replacement shop with a branch right here in Ponte de Lima.  On Monday Aug 10 they installed a nice, temporary plastic film to cover the gaping hole where our rear window used to be, gave us a quote within minutes, and ordered the window minutes after we gave them the go-ahead.  The film held up fine for our eclipse trip to Spain (see previous blog post), and then on the morning of Tuesday Aug 18 they installed the replacement glass beautifully.  Pérola the car is now un-disastered, good as new.

Here's a stunner for you: when you install solar power here in Portugal, the default is for the electric utility to bill you for the power you generate and consume yourself!  What??  You can provide all your own solar power yet the utility bills you as if they were providing you the power.  You need to register with a government agency as "self consuming" to avoid being billed for the power you generate and consume yourself.  Unbelievable!  We, of course, were not told this by our unhelpful solar installers.  We found it out several months after getting the system installed.  We weren't seeing our monthly bills being reduced much during winter and early spring, but the weather was mixed so we figured when the sun really came out we'd start to see the big savings.  Nope.  So we started a long and confusing investigation leading to the conclusion here.  We registered, and now we are not paying for our own solar power.  But at least all those months of being overcharged are refundable, right, since they have all the data for exactly how much solar power we generated?  Wrong.  They're very sorry for any inconvenience though.

The spare bedroom in the garage has now been converted to a storage room.  There was a built-in platform bed there which we removed, so now the room is a big box of space waiting for shelves and boxes of stuff.

About Wednesday Aug 12 the temperature started rising, and Europe braced for another heat wave.  As of Aug 16 it's been tolerable here, getting up to about 34 C (93 F) at the worst of it.  We keep the sliding doors wide open most of the time, dress lightly, turn on the fans, drink plenty of water, take dips in the pool, and use A/C at night running on solar batteries to keep the bedroom down to 25 C (77 F).  All in all, we're doing fine.  So far this season there have been many fewer wildfires in the area, too; hardly any in fact.  We're not sure why that is, but it's welcome.

...aaand the day after that paragraph was written fires broke out all around us.  Fortunately most of them were several kilometers away but one was concerningly close.  A couple of the distant ones were visibly blazing as we went to bed on Sunday Aug 16 and took a couple days to get under control.  We're so thankful for the bombeiros (firefighters), who put their lives on the line and their comfort on hold all summer long.

The weather over the next few days got hotter, too.  On Tuesday Aug 18, we resorted to A/C in the front room and kitchen.  That kept it at 28 C (82 F) indoors while the heat scorched outside, and made it tolerable.

On Monday Aug 17 the roofer came to redo a small section of the roof, which finishes up the new skylight project.  It all looks great up there and should be nice and snug for the rainy season.  We'll need to face up to a new roof soon, though.

We have decided to buy some cheap Ikea cabinets for the front room for now, rather than wait the months it will take to get our custom pieces made.  They will be temporary, and will be moved to the garage or workshop when they are no longer needed.  This will allow us to get a lot of the clutter which is all over the floor here out of the way for now.  We have found some cabinets which are about the same volume as the available space, so we can also see just how much stuff we can put there.  That will help us decide how much overall to keep or to give away too.

Just to keep this post from being entirely photo-free, here are some dramatic clouds we saw recently from our balcony on a beautiful clear day.

(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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The Big Eclipse

Early Wednesday Aug 12 we started off for the Palencia region of Spain, which would be right in the heart of the path of the total eclipse that evening.  We would be treated to about a minute and a half of totality, with the sun low in the sky about an hour from setting.  We had a fun trip there, about 4-1/2 hours of driving, stopping for a delicious churrasqueira (barbecue) lunch just across the Spanish border.  We got to our hotel about 3 PM, in plenty of time for the scheduled 8:30 PM eclipse.

The weather all the way from the Portuguese border had a moisture haze because of the heat.  We hoped it would just add color to the eclipse.  It would also diffuse the sunlight so the surroundings wouldn't get as dark as they would have otherwise during totality.

We had no idea what to expect.  At lunch we had seen TV news footage of throngs of people choking highways, flocking to see the eclipse.  Gulp.  Were we going to have to deal with that?  We hadn't seen anything like that on the way to our hotel, so we were cautiously optimistic.  The first thing we did after checking in was to take a quick drive around the area to investigate.  About five minutes after we left we found a very nice secluded place just above a solar farm with a completely unobstructed view of the western horizon and nobody anywhere to be seen.  Well, that was easy!  Pat pinned the location on the map and we set off to see if there was anything better.

We found our way onto a nearby wind farm plateau with plenty of unobstructed western horizon.  It had a little altitude, so we thought it might be even better.  The plateau was huge, and crisscrossed by dirt roads to access the wind turbines, and again no one was around.  It was totally deserted.  We were struck by the two uses of the land: for a wind farm and also for grain growing.  All the fields were dried and mown, very conveniently for us eclipse-parkers.  So where were these throngs?  They must have been going to the beaches.

We still had a couple hours to kill before showtime.  Pat had made us a picnic dinner, but we had not yet purchased our celebratory Spanish wine.  She googled a couple likely places in nearby towns, so we drove down off the plateau to some lovely little towns and came back with a nice bottle of Rioja Tempranillo.

Back at the plateau, we found it had been discovered.  There were about four cars a hundred meters (yards) from the field where we parked.  Oh my, there goes the neighborhood.  We parked so our windshield faced the setting sun, left the car idling, and sat in air-conditioned comfort and solitude while we enjoyed our dinner.

About ten minutes to eight we thought the eclipse should be coming up before too long so we popped on our eclipse glasses to make sure they worked, and saw that it had already started!  About a quarter of the sun was already covered by the moon.  We gazed excitedly at it for a minute, then set up our lounge chairs and moved outside.

The setup	Geriatric eclipse watching in the wind farm
Pretty excited	Reserving judgment

As we sat watching the moon slowly slide over the sun, Gerrit was reminded of the long slow nights he'd spent babysitting his telescope back in Seattle.  You slow down.  You begin to appreciate the serene majesty of astronomical events and how puny you really are.  Gerrit had adopted a screen name for his astronomy forum posts at the time: TinySpeck.  He was amazed that no one had taken it already.

Slowly the moment of totality approached.  The sun slipped toward darkness, and it began to look like twilight all around.  Even the windmills slowed and stopped without solar heat to drive the winds.  At the moment of totality, when the sun completely disappeared, we pulled off the protective glasses and stared at one of the most spectacular displays in nature.

The sun had become a black disk, with a huge flare surrounding it which you normally can't see.  It doubled in apparent size because of this.  For a short ninety seconds, the stars came out and the sun was a black lion with a great flaming mane.  A tiny, intense red dot appeared on the left margin of the moon, probably a little irregularity in the moon's surface which allowed a wink of sunlight through.

And then it was over.  The sun began to come out from behind the moon.  We spent a fraction of our short eclipse time trying to capture the event, but we're afraid the pictures don't nearly do it justice.  But we were there, we had a perfect view of the event, and now we're among the lucky ones who have experienced a total solar eclipse.  The windmills began to turn again, light came back up to sunset brightness, and when the sun had set far enough toward the horizon we could look at it without glasses and see the last bit of the moon's eclipse on it.  We packed up, happy and awestruck, and made our way back to our room.

Totality and a turbine	See Venus in the upper left?
The black sun at totality	Still a nibble afterward, at sunset

 The next day we found a DIY car wash to rinse the thickly-caked wind farm dust from the car, and a nice breakfast restaurant to fuel us for the trip home.  We took a new route for part of it, stopped for another nice lunch on the way, and got home about 3 PM.

A solar eclipse is a truly remarkable natural phenomenon.  Our sun and moon are exactly the right size and distance from Earth for the moon to to exactly cover the sun during an eclipse.  That's all sheer coincidence.  As the eclipse happens, the shadow of the moon crosses the Earth.  The darkest part of the shadow results in a total eclipse and is only about 200 km (124 mi) wide, so it traces a pretty narrow stripe across the Earth.  This happens every year and a half or so somewhere on Earth, but a given location only sees a total eclipse about every 400 years.

And the human wonder of it is that modern astronomers have calculated the size, position, and movement of the Earth, Moon, and Sun with such exquisite precision that they can predict years in advance exactly when and where this stripe will happen, to the second and to the kilometer.  Imagine the terror of primitive people when a total eclipse occurred.  They had no warning and no explanation when the sun died and then came back.  Now we understand what is happening and can enjoy the spectacle instead.

(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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The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

Our lives have been filled with organizing, planning, and sorting out.  We have approved the design and quote for the fold-down bed and storage in one guest room, and are working out solutions for other furniture.  

Gerrit had a lesion on his left hand which was a little concerning.  Our English-speaking medical appointment service set up a dermatologist appointment within days, and Gerrit headed to the nearby city of Braga on Wednesday Aug 5 for it.  Backing into the parking space Gerrit hit an elevated box and shattered the rear window.  It was really not his day.  But as Garp would put it, Pérola our intrepid little car is now pre-disastered.

The dermatologist thought the lesion might be a carcinoma, so we decided she should cut it out right there after the appointment.  Gerrit is getting tired of these cancer scares.  She did a great job, and in a couple weeks he should be all healed up.

Pat's new Cuisinart substitute showed up less than a week from ordering, and it's a beauty.  It's just as powerful and capable as her old one, built like a brick, and much simpler to use and set up.  Here's the main workhorse, and she has some sets of accessories, too.  Our first test?  Grating some home-grown potatoes and onion for hash browns.  Worked great, and it was a tasty maiden voyage for the MagiMix.  Next Pat made a big batch of pesto with home-grown basil and froze ice cube trays full of it to enjoy when we want, and a nice batch of fresh salsa.  She is definitely bonding with her new food processor.

Starting on Wednesday Aug 5 we had tradespeople crawling all over the place for days.  Our skylights are being replaced, our garden project is wrapping up, and we are clearing out the spare room in the garage for a storage room.  Privacy was a fond memory from the past around here for a while.  But as Pat points out, it's better to get it all done at once.

On Saturday Aug 8 we took a trip to Vila Praia de Âncora, the small seaside town we visited some time ago for an expats lunch.  This time we wanted to look around the town a little more and visit a used and antique furniture store we'd heard about.  The furniture was nice, and some of it was gorgeous, but we couldn't visualize a place for it here.  We wandered around the three stories of merchandise though, admiring and considering, and then had a little drive-around.

Both Praia de Âncora and Moledo, its neighbor beach town to the north, were packed with beach-goers on this Saturday in August.  Every parking place was taken, and the wide beautiful beaches were filled with colorful umbrellas and swimmers.  We snooped around much of the area and found a central historical area of Praia de Âncora.  It was anchored by a nice church, a town square, and a cobbled main street lined with hanging flower baskets.  We strolled the street a little and settled for lunch in Hotel Meira, a shrine to the Beatles of all things.  The lobby and halls were filled with Beatles memorabilia, posters, pictures, album covers, drawings, and souvenirs.  Lunch was great: bacalhau (cod) in cream sauce for Pat and lasagne Bolognese for Gerrit.  Then the drive home was as beautiful as the drive there.

Beautiful scenery on the way	Bovine bliss on the road
Town square in Praia de Âncora	Street scene
Pat's bacalhau	Gerrit's lasagne

A total eclipse of the sun is coming to Europe on Wednesday Aug 12.  The path of totality will cross part of Spain and even a tiny bit of Portugal, but we will travel to the heart of the path in western Spain to see a whole minute and a half of totality.  Stay tuned for the next blog post to hear all about 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.)

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