Home & Towns

It seemed so simple, to just lock the pool railing to a supporting foot with a sheet metal screw to keep it from wobbling.  And it was simple.  It just didn't work.  Not even a little.  So Gerrit is back to the drawing board on how to stiffen up the pool railing.

Friday Oct 2 was a beautiful day and we headed into Ponte de Lima for some errands and exploration.  A fellow expat had told us about a nice little cheese shop nearby, newly open for business, so we stopped in.  The proprietor is a French fellow, and it turns out he was familiar with Gerrit's last name.  His family comes from the same Basque region in France as Gerrit's ancestors!  They figured they must be cousins.  The shop was delightful.  Jean gave us samples of some cheeses and charcuterie and we left with a bag of fresh cheeses, some familiar and some new ones to try too, and a dry sausage.  The shop is called La Queijaria, "la" being French for "the" and "queijaria" being Portuguese for "cheese shop".  A nice little blend of cultures there, just like the shop itself.

We also stopped at an artisanal bakery, À Antigua ("in the old style").  They were closed for lunch the last time we tried, but this time we got a heavenly loaf of seeded bread, a brownie, and a cinnamon roll.  Oh yeah, we'll be back.

We had dinner that night of our fresh cheese, sausage, bread, garden vegetables, tangerines, and some Portuguese wine.  Delicious!  And very traditional.

Our balky pool cleaning robot MO was working for a while, now failing again.  Time to do battle with the vendors and see if we can get our money back for this lemon.

Saturday Sep 3 we met some friends (Bernardo, Carolina, Rick, and Pat) in Porto for dinner at a seaside restaurant there.  It was a beautiful place, the food was great, and we had lots of fun.  Rick and Pat (his wife) had some port for dessert, and no, they had not gone through that enormous bottle already.

Rick & Pat (the other one)

Bernardo & Carolina

Monday Oct 5 was a beautiful and balmy day.  Pat gathered a basketful of peppers, sliced them up, and started them fermenting along with a jar of olives from our tree.  The peppers should be ready in a few weeks, but the olives may actually take a year.

Then the next morning a huge thunderstorm rolled in.  Rain and hail pelted down, and power went in and out.  It was a while before we even noticed the power dropouts though; our solar battery backup had been fully charged the previous day so it kept the lights and essentials powered up just fine.  We got 6.2 cm (2.4") of rain before about 11:00, when the storm passed completely and everything started clearing up.  Here's when the hail started:

Pat has been planning a kitchen appliance cart, going over it with Gemini and Claude AIs and scouring online.  It's been a long and difficult process, skeptically checking bonehead AI recommendations, but she has a good solution now.  We can buy the stuff and turn it over to handyman Marcelo.

AI has little common sense or aesthetics.  Pat was getting cheerful recommendations for casters that looked like they belonged on a mechanic's tool wagon, paneling of 3/4" plywood (far too thick and heavy), and an estimate of the final weight at 400 kg (882 lb)!  That's about the weight of a Smart Car.  For an appliance cart?  Get real.  (Not artificial.)  AI can be extremely helpful for finding items and information but you need to be very careful and complete with your prompts and should spend plenty of time checking its blithe, authoritative-sounding answers.

Here is how the backyard garden (near the pool) is shaping up.  Our horticulturalist Alex designed most of it, laid out the beds, got the custom pots, and planted the plants.  We have decided not to put in a walkway, we'll leave it looking much like you see it here.  (That green lawn-ish stuff you see is actually mown weeds.  We'll lay an actual lawn soon.)  Off in the distance to the right here is a beautiful view of the medieval bridge of Ponte de Lima.

(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.)

Home