Flying solo

About a week after arriving we heard that Anne's visa was ready at the Boston consulate so, they said, she could come in and have it stamped into her passport.

Of course because we were impatient we had decided to come here rather than waiting longer in Massachusetts.  We didn't really know how long it would take them to get back to us with all the delays we have been hearing about and the house had been sitting empty for months.

It turned out that contrary to our expectations, getting flights back to Boston at short notice was going to be very expensive so we thought Anne should go to England for a few days and use a courier to get the passport to a dear friend who had agreed to take it in for her and courier it back.

Our little hamlet is known to be populated by a lot of Swedish retirees and I was invited to join them for a "thirsty Thursday" meetup on the night after dropping Anne off at the airport.  There are a number of Swedish people in the surrounding Hamlets as well and it was very nice to be welcomed so warmly by the groups of people who were having drinks down the road from us.  I know if Anne had joined me she would remember all manner of details about them afterwards.  I remember a few names and will be able to place some of the faces but it might take a couple of these gatherings before I get to know them.

View from the front window - the sea in the distance out of sight

One of the people there knew the people who did the first round of renovations of our house and she described them in such loving terms and told me how much they loved the house until they eventually split as a couple and she went back to England.  So it was very encouraging to hear people being so positive about the hamlet and about the house.

Meanwhile we had started to see cracks in our plan to courier the passport to America.  The waybill showing a UK address as the origin notwithstanding, the courier computer system registered the billing address as American and decided that the parcel (in England) could not be routed between an American address and another American address and so the parcel was sent to "Hotel California", which is a hub in England somewhere a little east of Birmingham and it had never left.

The tracking information however, was updated to show the package arriving two days later and so it wasn't until at least 5 days (with a weekend in the middle) and a 3 hour call, that Anne discovered that the parcel was still at the hub in England.

Luckily Anne did manage to get someone on the phone who cared and was able to update the source address to the one on the waybill.  I told a friend in technology that her parcel had been NATed to an un-routable return address which is pretty funny for a network person but I guess would fall flat everywhere else, including here.

So I was going to be left on my own in Portugal in our tiny hamlet in this new house for more than a week.

At first it was totally fine.  There are so many projects here and I made short work of a few of them on the first weekend.  Drilling holes into brick to mount things on the wall, assembling a wine rack and (shoot me now) applying coat after coat of white paint to a room that had one end painted dark blue with glow in the dark stickers of stars and moon.  

To be fair the moon and stars were pretty nice but we (Anne) did want to paint the room yellow and compromised with me to only paint two of the walls.  I suspect that all four walls might eventually be yellow in a process of attrition but in the meantime, white to cover the blue to prevent the yellow from turning green.

I picked up our new car on the day after Anne left.  It is a gasoline hybrid Toyota but an earlier model (2017) so it is missing some of the newer features, but has the advantage of having a fairly low mileage.

It allowed me to discover some of the shopping in our vicinity - we had already found the big specialist supermarkets that sell household electronics, or that sell hardware and tools, garden center and of course, the big general purpose supermarkets but there is a big shopping center about 30min drive from us that has cinemas as well.

We had missed seeing Dune before we left so I decided to treat myself to a movie experience.  In Portugal the English films are not dubbed, the original soundtrack is intact and there are Portuguese subtitles.  Of course, it didn't occur to me that the same would be true for any other foreign languages including the Fremen language.  The English subtitles of the original had been replaced by Portuguese subtitles.  The Fremen talk to each other a lot in this movie!  Fortunately the acting made a what they were saying more or less obvious but it was more than disconcerting as my eyes searched for some semblance of meaning when they talked only to find that I knew maybe one or two words in every twenty!

Our house has these occasional loud sounds - like a "clunk" that have sometimes been resolved by discovering that the mosquito mesh door in the front or back is banging because it wasn't latched properly and similarly the door on the "engine room" which doesn't lock because it is slightly misaligned.  We also have storm shutters that can bang if you don't properly wedge them into the guards on the wall that are intended to hold them open.

So we've gone searching each time we here a sudden noise and satisfied ourselves as some point that it was one of these offenders.

Sitting alone in a countryside house, watching TV at night, is another story though.  The sudden noise does come with a small chill up your back.  I'm pretty good at convincing myself that it was a crack from wood in the wood stove, or one of the above usual offenders so it wasn't until last night at about 1:30am that two bangs in quick succession woke me.

My ears have been blocked and have taken to ringing and I somehow convinced myself that I could hear talking outside in the midst of this.

At this point the chill wasn't small - all alarm bells were ringing along with the ringing in my ears as I padded down the passage to look out of the front window and padding back to my room to look out of the back of the house.    I had no idea where these two loud sounds had come from.

I had left the front outside light on so I turned on the back outside light as well and after peering out of the windows a little longer I turned them off and lay awake listening as carefully for more sounds as well I was able until I fell asleep again.

It has been getting colder and raining.  The photovoltaic system is pretty good as heating water when it is sunny, even during the cold.  Overcast is the enemy and so this morning I lit the stove again to get some hot water into the tank.  The water temperature has steadied at around 40°C with the sun but I know it won't stay there if I don't give it some help.

View out the back window

I double-checked the engine room door and the two mosquito doors and they were both tightly shut, so you can imagine my surprise after breakfast when I again heard the loud "clunk" that had woken me in the night.

I has been windy the last few days to be fair, but the sound appears so randomly.   I went outside again and waited and sure enough, one of the storm shutters was loose and blowing in the wind.

I was so sure that we had wedged it under the stay that keeps it against the wall but on closer inspection I saw that the stay has this little lever that you have to clip upwards to force it to hold its position - with the lever down the stay just gives way under pressure.

So.  Mystery solved.

Although it there is a clunk tonight, I don't know what I'll do.