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.)
