June flights

 

I have one more mandatory trip to the USA, this time prompted by the end of my 3 month tourist visa. I ran out of time after our arrival here at the end of Feb despite interrupting it with my short month-long trip for the consulate appointment in Boston in May.

At the consulate appointment I had to produce proof of travel - a ticket to Portugal - but it is not clear whether this is used as a guide to the government department processing the visas.  The ticket was for the 4th of July so we were hoping it would be approved by then.

Our best hope is that I'll get an email from the consulate in the next two weeks telling me that I can collect the temporary visa in Boston. Of course I have been playing the "what-if" game with this because if the request to collect the visa doesn't come in time I'll have to change my return ticket without knowing how how far into the future to do it.

I bought the cheapest ticket combination I could find that included a flexible return ticket. This had us up at the ungodly hour of 3:20am to make the flight at 6:05am from Faro to Lisbon where I have a 10 hour layover.  Anne had an opinion about my life choices with having to get up at 4am to take me to the airport in Faro.

 

Faro and the salt marshes very early am

It would have been way better if I had time on the tourist visa to just wait it out in Portugal and fly when I knew for sure.

We are in the meantime progressing a little tentatively in Portugal. We have started to feel our way around healthcare and shopping and learning the language. Both Anne and I caught something that led to doctors' visits and, in my case blood work for diagnostics. We are both close to fully recovered after three weeks with thankfully the total cost of these visits (without health insurance) amounting to more or less the co-pay that we have previously paid in the USA for similar treatments.

 

Pheasant and its chick in the field behind our house

 We did get some health insurance which we presented to the clinic for my last visit and the consultation was half of what it had been for the previous visit.

We still have to do more research on private health insurance to figure out how big ticket treatments are discounted but have more or less decided in the meantime to use the private clinic located about 30min drive from our house at least until we get more comfortable with our Portuguese.  Most expats use the private hospitals but our experience of the public health is generally positive having used it in Porto on a previous trip.

The few weeks of not feeling great has made the prospect of us being forced to separate much harder.  So having to delay before I return while I wait for the email from the consulate will be hard for both Anne and me.

On my last trip to Boston I arranged to join our friend Kees on the West Coast.  He has been traveling around in his RV and is keeping us up to date with his blog. He is making his way up the coast and we'll be hanging out north of San Francisco for the week. So the trip to join him from Portugal was extremely long with the 10 hour layover in Lisbon, the long 7 hour haul to Boston followed by a single night and then another early morning flight to San Francisco which is about as far from Boston as Lisbon is!

I'll be returning to Boston after visiting Kees to do paperwork to prepare for our driver license swap in Portugal. We have to hand in our USA driver's license and wait for new Portuguese driver's licenses to be sent to us - but the process includes getting a specific drivers' history from the RMV in Massachusetts and getting it "apostilled"at the Massachusetts State department.

Apostille is a process codified in the The Hague whereby a person can get their home country to certify a document as a legitimate product of the origin country's bureaucracy.

My stop in Lisbon was uneventful.  I took an early morning arrival photograph of Lisbon from the window seat.  I keep getting window seats with these cheap tickets.

Lisbon arrival

Choosing a movie has also become a little challenging.  In days gone by movies were heavily censored on flights to avoid offending passengers sitting next to or behind you but that is apparently no longer the case.  On my previous flight from Boston to Lisbon in May I had watched "Poor Things" sitting next to a middle-aged Southern woman.  I started watching with her husband beside me but they swapped seats at some point during the night and more or less in the middle of my movie.  

In all fairness to me, I had not expected the the film be as sexually explicit (or as relentlessly so) as it was.  If you haven't watched the film, it is pretty surreal and very explicit with a very strange premise.  A brave movie for Emma Stone who has won accolades for her acting in the movie.

At first I thought - "ok, they are establishing some things about her and after that it will be a little more muted", but then there WAS more and the mute stayed off.  I was cringing, not sure whether to say something to my neighbor, stop watching or just pretend it was nothing (which was the path of least resistance).  At one point though, as I opening a seltzer water, it sprayed all over me and potentially over her.  There was no avoiding talking to her at this point so I said how sorry I was to be spraying water and by the way I'm so sorry about the movie.  She said something like "Oh don't worry dear, I watched something outlandish as well I ain't even a little bit wet!"

Window seats, for someone years over 30, is not a great experience. This time, the two women sitting next to me on the way to Boston from Lisbon were clearly pretty religious so I avoided watching anything with a screen rating above PG13.  I watched the "Barbie" movie which Anne and I had avoided when it came out.   Their bladders lasted all of 7 hours and they patiently made way for me each time I needed to go.

On the way to San Fransisco (another 7 hour flight) the two younger men next to me never went to the bathroom either and I had to go at least 3 times on the flight, each time waking the guy next to me who slept the entire trip.

My last arrival photo was over the sea coming into Boston.

It might be worth it to pay for the upgrade on the way back to get an isle seat.

Blowing in the wind

At several places in Portugal during our original trips in 2023 to tour the country we had heard people reference the wind.  When we were in Setubal our host told us that the weather and lagoon was perfect in this location for kite-surfing.  There were placards near the beach showcasing some international tournaments that they have there.

Our hosts in Aljezur mentioned when we stayed there that is very windy there too.

We kind of rode with that.  Both Anne and I have lived in Cape Town which has a just-deserved reputation for being windy.  I suppose you should take note when something like this comes up several times in conversation about a place.  Like for example, "it rains a lot in England"!

In Cape Town the wind is notorious, I've been stranded clinging onto a pole in the foreshore with little prospect of making it across the street without being blown along like a leaf!  Anne has a strong memory of both her feet lifting off the ground with her dad holding fast to her hand in a street in Cape Town.

The truth is that it is often very windy.  I suspect in Portugal people watch the weather forecast as much for the wind as we used to watch for snow warnings in Massachusetts.

I took a screenshot from windy.com which shows the wind situation over the past day and future few days.  The averages are about 14mph with gusts going up to 30mph.  The Beaufort Scale describes 14mph as"Leaves and small twigs in constant motion; light flags extended. Large wavelets on sea" (Beaufort Scale).

A few weeks ago - not long after I arrived to rejoin Anne and Nick, we had a night with winds that were strong enough to wake us. 

Coming in to land at Faro airport

It has been quite warm so we sleep with a window open but we have learned that having something on the windowsill (portable speaker, ornament) is asking for trouble.

We woke up the the next morning to find drawings and prints all over the yard, in the street on the other side of our 2m (7ft) fence and in the neighbors garden - the wind had whipped a heavy box of broken ceramic pieces off a table where it was doubling as a paper-weight and scattered the papers that were stacked there.

Anne and I spent 45 minutes wandering around picking up copies and originals of images that she had made on our travels and for a book she had worked on.

We are still gradually unpacking, which is why there was a box of papers on the rear porch.  We have more photos and paintings than wall space so the process of choosing what we want to hang has been fairly slow - made even slower with us both succumbing to a virus that laid us both low for more than a week.

I mentioned before how the wind at night has at various times lead to me making wild assumptions about what the noise actually was and yes, we are still having occasional WTF reactions to noises even though the wind has become the usual suspect.  

My first thought now, when it happens, is: "What's banging in the wind?" but unfortunately, when the sounds comes from inside, from the kitchen, at 10:30pm while you are watching a creepy TV show ("Dark Matter") all of our sensors go up.

When it happened we immediately started thinking it was a creature of some kind.  Anne went to "rat" and I went to "cat" - our first leaps of the imagination.

I go into the kitchen and there was nothing remarkable in there.  We have a pantry/under the stairs storage room which was crammed with boxes, paper and suitcases but the door was firmly closed.

I opened it and saw that one of the wall hooks uses double sided tape had pulled away from the wall.  The yoga seat that had been hanging on it was lying on the floor next to it.

"Whew,  the damn hook fell off, how useless are these hooks!?"

So we went back to the TV show until there was another very distinct clatter/scrabble(?) from the kitchen.

This time I was thinking there was a bird in the chimney (maybe) but as I inspected it, a sound, like a box rustling, came from inside the "pantry".

I opened the door again and took in the scene - basically clutter with boxes, cardboard recycling and suitcases and a small window that tilts inward that was open! 

"It's a creature",  I called out confidently.

Anne was still thinking "rat" so she wanted to know what I was going to do about it.

My plan was to get some storage boxes and line the kitchen to give the creature a wide corridor to the back door and then take everything out of the pantry and onto the back porch.  Anne kept saying, "but Tim, rats can jump!" and I was thinking "its a cat", because the idea of a rat leaping over a packing box was not where I wanted my thoughts to go.  "I'll encourage it along the ground if it is a rat", was my thought - a cat would have none of the corridor anyway but at least they are domesticated and may not immediately attack me.

After we had built this corridor, I found our ceremonial sword.  This is something that Anne has from her Highland Dancing competitions when she was a wee bairn.  I spent a few moments wondering what the hell I'd do with it if a creature leapt out of the box at me.  I don't want to stab a cat but I'm pretty sure Anne wouldn't mind me stabbing a rat.  Besides, quite frankly, there is nothing more unwieldy than a sword in a tight space and I was picturing myself, pierced in the leg by our own rusty sword.

So sanity prevailed and I grabbed a walking stick.  I would shoo rather than decapitate whatever was in there. 

I dragged the first box all the way out of the back door - it was filled with cut and torn cardboard that were use as kindling for the stove - an ideal home for a rodent.  No creature in there.

The same was true for all of the remaining boxes under there and the next morning when I went to close the window I was reminded by the wire mesh beyond it that it has a mosquito screen, so no creature could have got in there to start with.

I'm going with the idea that we should only use the drill and screws to set hooks and never use glue-backed hooks to hang things inside.  My other ideas, like what the F was that noise then after all, have been closed in the pantry for now.  I'll keep thinking it was either the wind blowing a calendar or a picture hanger that fell and leave it at that.

I have to go back to the USA by the 23rd because I will have used up my 3 months on the tourist visa by then.  Anne will be here with a promise of a visit by one of our daughters and a short trip of her own to England.  Hopefully my temporary residence permit will arrive soon enough for me to return at the end of the first week of July.

When I get back I'll make an album of photos of the house.  We have decided to hold off on doing anything in the garden for a few months and focus on getting our things properly situated first.

And we'll let sleeping cats lie.

Stalking

The few weeks that I have been in the USA alone have been a little tough despite the warm welcome of friends here.

Before I left Portugal, Anne suggested that we get a couple of cameras, partly for animal activity and partly as extra security.  In the USA we had been using a platform that has a base station that the cameras connect to and a monthly subscription.  I was not too keen to use something with a monthly recurring fee so I settled on a camera company that has SD cards and a mobile phone app with an optional monthly subscription if you feel you need to store information for later retrieval online.

So it was that my phone in the USA kept on pinging me when there was movement in the front or back of our house and I would regularly open the phone app and see Anne or Nick hanging out on the front porch. Once or twice I said something to them through the camera but more often, I'd send them a WhatsApp message to tell them that I was snooping.

In my last post I was so focused on talking about being hosted by people we'd met and befriended in America that I forgot to mention some old friends!

In 1999 we had decided that I'd look for work outside of South Africa and we had a couple of friends who had gone to America to work in the booming information technology industry during the dot com bubble.  One family who we'd known for years in Grahamstown and who's children and ours built an elaborate fantasy that they were cousins, had moved to America and offered to host me at their house for an exploratory trip.

In 2000 I planned to go first to England and then to America on a scouting trip.  Our friend in England was away for a conference once the dates were finalized so I switched the plan to start in America.  Before I left home I used a facility on one of our servers to send an email set to arrive while I was in the air.  At the time this was a trick that was not known outside of tech circles so was utterly unexpected.   The email said goodbye, and made some promises about a different future.  I discovered with some horror that this email coming over the ether from me freaked her out.  Suddenly the sweet message played out as somewhat sinister message saying goodbye to the living and reassuring her that despite this, her future would be different now.

My hosts in America treated me to tours, road trips and a ride up to meet a climber who knew a mutual friend of theirs.  It was on one of these climbing outings that I learned about a company that was looking for someone fitting my background.  It was also not the first time that "Rhodes University" in my resume was interpreted as "he was a Rhodes Scholar".  Technically I suppose I am a scholar from Rhodes, but I only learned quite a lot later that this false conclusion had helped to cement my credentials at the time.  

Anne had a similar experience with an item in her resume that listed her as having taught in East London.  It was on the morning of the day that she was introduced to the school that she realized, as the headmaster proudly announced that she had taught in East London, that he had assumed it was London, England!

We have had a standing tradition of a Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) lunch with these South African friends since we came over to America so our more recent visits have been a little sad given the distance to travel for a meal like that.  They also have the distinction of being friends that we have jokingly alternately blamed and then thanked for encouraging us to come to America in the first place.

I was able to take a trip down to Raleigh to visit a couple we grew close to over the first ten years in Boston.  I had worked with the husband at my first job.  He and his wife adopted a daughter who become our adopted niece.  She was a the subject of many of my attempts at child portraits before they moved down to Raleigh and is in her early teens now.  I was honored that she agreed to allow me to take a photograph of her while I was there.  Anne will no doubt use one of them as a reference for a new drawing of her.  I really enjoyed hanging out with them and experiencing the warmth of their company.

Their daughter has inherited her dad's sense of humor.  I told her the story of the fairy house and asked her if she thought the fairies would find the house that our granddaughter built for them and move in?  She said:

"Yes, they'll find it.  And they'll get you!"

After I officially retired at the end of April I have been going through these bittersweet steps to transition from full time work.  I have made myself available for some consulting to smooth the process of my exit so I expect to have increasing time at my disposal in the coming weeks to get started on the few projects that are lined up.

Last all-hands send off

I told a colleague that my daily routine would probably involve carting some wheelbarrow loads of stone from the yard, fiddling with technology to get our gates working again, setting up graphs to show the temperature trends in our hot water system and reading.  When I told Anne what I had said, she reminded me that I have a lot to catch up on in the cooking department so I guess there is that too.

My last stop was at Yale where Matt graduated on Monday.  He has a Masters in Nursing Science which makes him a registered nurse and a nurse practitioner, a career in the USA (and perhaps elsewhere) which allows him to consult with patients and prescribe medicine.  It is a role that is somewhere between a nurse and a doctor.  He specialized in Family Medicine (General Practice) and he will start a residency in Seattle in the fall at an outpatient community clinic.

The Yale campus is truly beautiful and I was proud to be able to go there and be with him for his graduation.

My flight back to our new home leaves in a few minutes and I won't be putting an email up to be triggered while I am flying over the Atlantic, though mostly because in all likelihood I'll have wifi and be able to message from my seat way up in the air.

I have one more month on my tourist visa to the EU after which I have to leave.  I'll have fingers crossed and be holding thumbs that my visa approval for the residence permit is approved in time for me to return to the USA, pick it up and head back home at the end of the first week of July.

News from Home

It has been weird not having a constant companion. 

We have incredibly generous and dear friends in the USA.  For the most part we have used Trusted Housesitters and AirBnb to find places to stay in Europe, England and here in the USA.  But some friends insisted that we stay with them each time we returned to the USA.  Mary, our first American friend, with her little King Charles Spaniel welcomed us and also took the “trusted house sitter” lead to have us mind her house and dog on a couple of trips that she took while we were there.  

Getting soft-serves in Swampscott with Mary

Our first (new) South African friends in America made their home and one of their cars available to us on multiple visits (including accepting our offer for some pet sitting on one occasion).  Other friends have offered to have us stay once they learned how we have been making our way since we sold our house.

I'm particularly sensitive to not imposing on people.  It's a delicate balance, because we are very aware that no matter how "chill" we are as guests, we are still there.all.the.time during our stay and it does make a difference in the house.  So we have kept our stay-overs (even with these close friends) to one to two weeks where possible.  We have promised to reciprocate when they visit us in Portugal, which we hope will be soon.

I am heading to Raleigh to see our friends there on my third week of this trip. They have a daughter who came into our lives in 2010 when I became her honorary uncle and portrait photographer until they left for Raleigh in 2015.  We haven’t been able to see them all since before 2020.  I’ll spend a week with them catching up before coming back to New England for our son Matt’s graduation at Yale a few days before my return trip to Portugal.

Anne had a "Mission Impossible" moment or two back in Portugal on the second week after I left. 

She had to take a trip to a city in the far North West, called Braga - a five hour drive to her appointment with immigration officials in Braga.  She learned on the weekend before they left that the furniture was going to arrive on the same day.  

She was able to move the furniture arrival to the day after they returned and she and Nick were able to enjoy their visit to what turned out to be an absolutely beautiful city which they both loved.

We had heard that the weather up there is pretty cold and wet in the winter - similar to English winters, so we had not visited it when we did our tour of Portugal in the months that we had been there in 2023.

After an exhausting drive back and not too much sleep she awoke to two men from Spain (neither of them young) arriving in a big truck to unload our storage stuff.  In Boston, 5 men had loaded the truck and it seemed absurd that only two older men should have to do this huge job. 

The truck driver decided that our street and the corner into our street was too narrow for their large truck despite the evidence we had in realty photos that a 40ft container had been parked outside our house before.  So they used a smaller van to shuttle between the large truck on a feeder road and our house for about 6 hours, unloading stuff that I know from residual pain in my back are very heavy.

I'm somewhat relieved that I was thousands of miles away - I suspect I would have been inclined to try to help them.  I joked with a colleague whose son had done some of the work helping me loading that we might be willing to pay him to fly to Portugal to help out.  The notion definitely appealed to his son I learned the next day.

Naturally the days following were filled with nostalgia as Anne started sorting through the boxes and unpacking things.  I really would have liked to be there because this is the part where the empty house becomes a home.

At our house near Boston we had found a hollow at the bottom of a pine tree that was just the right size for a fairy house.  We put furniture in it and found a little fairy door  for the opening.  Our grandchildren were enchanted by it and used to leave little notes for the fairies - the last of which was something along the lines of "dear fairies, granny and grandpa are leaving and going to another country.  I hope that you can find them when they find their new home and come to live with them".  

One of our granddaughters went to a ceramic class with Anne and made a  house of clay for the fairies to move into when we did find a new home.

Anne sent me a photo of the little house placed at the foot of our juvenile lemon tree.  

Anne asked me if I thought the fairies would find the house and come over and I said: "Never".  I hope that I'm wrong because the little girls might be disappointed if a pair of mice take up residence instead.

Before I left, we hung two swallows, which Jess had given us as a housewarming present, on the wall in front of the house, following a tradition in Portugal. We had learned that they are a much loved symbol representing love, loyalty, hope, and new beginnings which are all very appropriate.  They also mate for life.   

Next to the swallows is our happy gargoyle face that we have had hanging outside our homes since our daughters were little and Anne has added an elephant sculpture, another thoughtful gift from a friend,  showing her love for these majestic beasts.  

The house trim is now turquoise instead of dark grey.

In the meantime I retired from my job and started gathering all the remaining paperwork for the Portuguese residence permit, which included an FBI criminal check.  I'm not sure why there is anxiety involved in this process.  They take electronic fingerprints and your details and run them through their criminal database to see if there are any matches.  Despite never having been near to any crime or crime scene the moments between submitting them and the email where they tell you that you are not a criminal are filled with anxiety!  Luckily it takes less than thirty minutes to get the results emailed to you so it is more or less like begin pulled over by a cop and then allowed to drive on because your driver’s license shows you live in the same town as the cop.

Anne has this great attribute where she will reinvent how she thinks of ongoing experiences to make them positive, particularly if she has to live with them. She would often say to the children, "Change the picture in your head".

I remember years ago her saying something, like "the crickets are loud today".  I looked at her and said, "what crickets".

"Can't you hear them?"
"Nope... where are they?"

It turns out that Anne has tinnitus and because she decided that the sound was crickets, she has been experiencing these sounds as the somewhat pleasant, ubiquitous night sounds of Africa. 

So she told me one morning recently that the wind had sprung up one night as she was getting ready for bed.  Keenly aware of how the banging of the storm shutters had alarmed me when I was there alone, she carefully battened them down and got into bed only to be jarred by a loud whistling sound - like the movie sound effects of high winds in a storm.

In her sleepy mind these were the sounds of the wind whistling in our electricity lines along the side of our house.  She started thinking: "oh crap, this is something new that we are going to have to live with and its awful!"

And then as she lay there she decided that the wind was singing to her and she drifted off to sleep, feeling a little better about having to live with this sound in wind storms in the future.

The next morning when she went to open the storm shutters she noticed that the window was not properly closed and as she opened it fully the sound went away.

I think I said before that I've been waiting suspiciously to discover some bad thing about our house that the seller never revealed, so it is always a great relief when something that seems like a contender for this horror ends up being really easy to deal with.

Anne had an interaction with a grumpy man at the gas station where she stopped to fill the car and check the tires.  There is a machine the size of a petrol pump there with two more or less identical hoses on it and a sign: "Ar/Agua".  She grabbed one of the hoses and as she was about to apply it to the tire an old man behind her hooted and started shouting something unintelligible in Portuguese.  She stopped and looked at him and went back to the task at hand.  

So he got out and came over and said to her saying in English this time: "that is water that you are about to put in your tire, you need to use the other hose!"  He was trying to be helpful and was not grumpy at all.

My appointment at the Portuguese consulate went smoothly except that, because some of my documentation mentioned Anne, the official asked for our marriage certificate.  Anne was able to scan and email it before my appointment with them was over.  The official was the same one who had handled Anne's application and she said with a smile that she remembered Anne well - so we were off to a good start from the begining.  Anne was touched at the compliments she paid her about her appearance on that day.

Sorted and labeled documents for the residence application

I will have to make one more trip to America to collect the temporary visa late in June but I’m heading back to Portugal in two weeks where I expect I’m going to be hanging paintings and photographs, putting my own stamp on the home-making process.

Ghost stories

Anne was back in Portugal with hours to spare before our first guest (our son, Nick) was due to arrive.  The guest room was painted with a mattress laid out on the floor for him to use.

Nick has been living in Mexico City and has lived in central America for a couple of years now but his work prospects have been drying up so he will be staying with us for a few months to figure out what to do next.

Both of our daughters had planned to visit us soon after we arrived, so we met them at the airport a couple of days later.  There are plenty of holiday rentals close to where we stay and they were booked into a small farm house, about 8min drive from us in another of these tiny villages in the country.  

 

We wondered how much return business these rentals located in small towns have.  Our hamlet has a couple of holiday rentals that are popular with Swedish visitors who find a community away from home.  I think they enjoy a fair amount of return business.  On the whole for some of these rentals without a community, visitors might be disappointed if they expected to be a stone's throw from a beach and within walking distance of a local coffee shop or a bar.  We will probably make good use of them ourselves in the future for visits from our daughters' families or for friends who need more than the single room we have available in our house.

One grandchild asked if she could have our house when we died which I took as a solid vote of approval. 

 

Our family have a tendency to reach for the supernatural when explaining odd occurrences in the houses that we have lived.  In Grahamstown, our house was reputedly part of an early barracks of the British garrison in the town in the mid-1800s.  The house had the characteristically thick stone walls and yellow-wood floors of early structures in the town.

 

One day our twins, all of 5 or 6 years old ran in from the outside to report that they were afraid of the skeleton in the bath of the out-buildings.

 

Who would give credence to this?

 

I think now, that they might have seen the legs of a large spider protruding from the plug hole and reached the obvious conclusion that it was a tiny skeleton.

 

In America over our twenty years we rented two houses and bought a third.  The boys were afraid to be upstairs alone at our first house.  This is was a direct result of watching a TV show called "America's most haunted" where all the houses looked nothing like the houses in South Africa but uncannily similar to all of the houses in our new neighborhood with their wooden stairs and vinyl sidings.

 

Anne had her share of weird experiences at work in the old nunnery that was the St Peter’s building at Rhodes University in Grahamstown.  A book flew off the shelf of tightly packed books late one night and she felt a hand on her shoulder on a different night walking down a corridor to her office.  She decided it was something not to be alarmed about but the story alarmed everyone else.

 

The house we eventually bought in Essex featured an incident where one of our then very small grandchildren was talking in her crib at bedtime and my daughter asked her who she was talking to and she said "the lady in the corner",  which freaked everyone out!

 

So, inevitably when the family arrived at our house in Portugal there were reports of something supernatural.  A white cat was seen out of the corner of several people’s eyes walking across the floor at various times and inside the house.  To be clear there are stray cats around the neighborhood and two in particular that came looking for attention or adoption (in the street) but we’ve never let them into the house.

 

So I guess our Portuguese house is haunted by a cat.

 

Thank God these visitations don’t follow us around!  I have images of books flying downstairs, a skeleton in the upstairs bath and a little lady appearing in a bedroom with a finger on her mouth to silent us while the new ghost cat rubs its cheek against her semi-transparent legs.

 

Our daughters left after a week of exploring the towns and beaches near us with promises to return soon so I don't think the ghost cat is going to keep anyone away.

 

On the home front I discovered that the hydraulic gate openers were getting false triggers from the infrared sensors when they were closing.  On closer inspection I saw that the sensors had been installed upside down which let the rain in and the circuit was shorting as the gates were closing - which triggered them to open again.  I reoriented them, which was difficult because they were on short electric leads, only to discover a week later that one of the gates had pinched the electric chord repeatedly until the wires inside were exposed which caused a much more serious short that blew the circuit board in the main controller.

 

So now we are using the manual override on each hydraulic arm to swing the gates closed every evening and to open them every morning.

 

I have decided to wait until our container with all our goods from storage arrives before tackling this project again.  I have tools and a volt meter on the way to figure out whether the controller can be repaired.  Its a long shot, but I don’t want to spend more on the gates unless it includes refitting how the arms are bolted into the pillars.  Right now the pillars are gradually being destroyed where the arms are attached to them.

 

We have a couple of chairs out on the front porch now where we warm ourselves in the early morning sunlight with a mug of coffee after breakfast.  I open the gates first thing and we leave them open until the evening.

 

There is a minibus that drives by at about 7:45 and stops at the Portuguese family home a little further down our track. They appear to be taking a group of older people somewhere every day.  The driver has started giving us a small toot on the horn and a wave every morning which is a sweet, welcoming gesture.

 

We have also bought ourselves a pair of bikes and have taken a few rides around the villages near us.  They are e-bikes which have a motorized assist that make riding more or less effortless.  We found them a little intimidating at first, but we got the hang of them fairly quickly.

 

 We met a couple who also have these bikes and they took us on our first fairly long ride to our nearby town.  We wound through back roads, farmland and small clusters of houses through beautiful scenery and smells of orange blossoms.  Our next milestone will be to ride to the beach.

 

Anne has her appointment with the immigration authority to formalize her residence visa early in May and the lawyer helping us with the residency has advised me that it may take too long for us to go the originally intended route where I “reunify” with Anne as her spouse.  The reason is that there are some deadlines for a Portuguese tax benefit that gives us a much reduced tax rate for 10 years that we could miss if I don't start the residency process soon.

 

Since we naturalized as American citizens we are in a tax regime where we have to pay taxes in America on our worldwide income.  There is a treaty that the USA has with Portugal whereby whatever taxes we pay in America are offset against whatever we have to pay in Portugal.  The effective tax rate in Portugal is quite a bit higher than in the USA so a 10 year long break would be a very valuable benefit.

 

So I have an appointment with the Portuguese consulate in Boston in May and I have traveled back to America alone this time.  After all the trips with Anne over the past 18 months it feels very weird to be apart from her.  Anne has to be there when our container with all our belongings arrive from the storage unit - projected to be sometime in the middle of May - so she couldn't join me.

 

A large mural across from the Lynn post office where I went for fingerprints for my FBI background check

It will be an opportunity to see my friends and colleagues one more time before we settle in Portugal.  

 

I am retiring in a few days (April 30) so I'll have plenty of time to work on projects at home in the months ahead.

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.

Empty House

The trip from the airport to our new house involved a few stops that we couldn't avoid. We had to stop to sort out getting a Portuguese mobile phone plan and look into the internet, on our way to an appointment with the lawyer who handled the sale, to get the keys of the house. After that a quick trip to my cousin's house to pick up a bag that we left there after our last visit and then we had stop to buy a few necessities.

We have been using a small handle-shaped scale to make sure that our suitcases weren't over the aircraft limit. Anne did a great job in the last hour before we left organizing and balancing all the luggage weight. I had a duffel bag with all my clothing and a second suitcase with all of our important documentation plus whatever miscellaneous other items Anne chose to include. I also had a carry-on bag well over the aircraft limit with all my camera gear and my computer and iPad.

Anne had paid for one extra suitcase so that she could bring all of her "things of importance" (art studio in a box, creative writing, etc.) and a bunch of other things she described as "things to make it a home" including a small ceramic face that Jessica made at her preschool in Grahamstown when she was four. It has a big lopsided grin and a blob of a nose and had been hanging outside the door of all of our previous houses. This thing weighs a pound or two and looks to me like a face of one of the totems that scare off evil spirits.

One of the suitcases had sheets and a duvet for the bed that we had arranged to be left behind for us and also a few table cloths.

I was, of course, anxious about a few things. We knew what we had not been told about our previous home when we bought it and we have friends with horror stories about omissions in the details of the house that cost them a bomb to fix. I was waiting to see what we would uncover when we arrived here.

I was also worried about the airline wanting to check the bag with my really heavy camera gear and computer.

Amazingly the check-in at the air port was really smooth. I apologized for the 5 large suitcases and the person doing the check-in said "this is nothing!" I think because all of them were exactly at the maximum allowed she didn't think to check anything other than the dimensions of my bag - which she did by asking me to turn around to show it to her.

The luggage was checked all the way through to our final destination even though we had a 5 hour layover in Lisbon which meant that we wouldn't have trouble lugging it over long distances through both airports.

So the flights went off without a hitch. We were of course, exhausted. Neither of us were able to sleep on the 6 hour flight to Lisbon or in the airport.

Lunch on our way from the airport.  Albufeira shopping center

 

We landed at 5:20am in Lisbon after leaving at 6pm the previous night (+5 hour time difference) and finished the little shopping we had to do at about 5:30pm, arriving at the new house just around sunset at 6:18pm

We were absolutely exhausted.

The house is walled in by a high fence and a pair of gates with hydraulic arms. They opened beautifully as we pulled up and we edged in with Anne excitedly going to the front door to let me in while I stood at the gate pressing buttons to get them to close. They budged and locked up and budged again but would not close.

Walled garden and a flapping shade cloth on the list to fix

I gave up and we made our triumphal entrance into the empty echoing house - it has a few essential pieces of furniture - a couch, a large bed, a table with chairs and a small desk with a desk chair.

We did the tour, stopping in each room to turn on the heat (they installed a wall mounted unit that does both air conditioning and heat). The house was cold. We unpacked a few things and had late supper and made the bed but the water was ice-cold.

I went into the "engine room" where the photovoltaic heated water is circulated into a tank. The tank temperature showed 10°C and the pump that was supposed to circulate the water was making a weird buzzing noise.

The previous owner did not leave detailed instructions as promised, rather a quick video walk through that said something along the lines of "these dials should both be at 3 so make sure there is enough water in the system by using these two levers". I assumed that one of the levers reduced the pressure and the other increased it but when I tried them the pressure went to 3 and once I turned it off it slowly went back down to 0.

Resigning myself to fate I said to Anne lets go to bed and we can look at this again tomorrow, knowing that in addition to the poor instructions, the previous owner had also not left behind any contact information for someone that we could call to help with a service. How many days ahead with no warm water?

We went to bed at about 10 which took the number of hours since sleep up to about 42 and I woke with my alarm at 6:30am (1:30am EDT) got up dutifully and went back down to the engine room to see if I could trace the pipes to get a better idea of where the water went from those two levers.

I turned one of them back on and as the setting went back down to zero I heard the sound of water outside. It was an overflow pipe - which, ok, means that you don't need to release pressure as it handles that itself (maybe?).

I then decided that I'd light the stove that is supposed to supplement the photovoltaic cells in the winter.

AGA-type stove to supplement solar heating

Of course the previous owner had not left a helpful amount of wood for us but I found some scraps under a wheel barrow and within an hour there was a fire going and the dial on the insulated hot water tank started to rise.

He had said in his video that 30°C was enough for a shower but for the underfloor heating it really needs to be at least 40°C and so we kept feeding the fire after finding an expensive home improvement store that sells them by the bag. It looks like on the third night we'll be able to have a warm shower.

In the meantime the gates have been bothering me and when Anne drove off today to find out what had happened to the man who was supposed to get our internet connected, the bloody gates started closing all the way and then opening all the way over and over - as if they were waving her goodbye!

We also discovered that our basin leaks if you fill it up for what Anne calls a "Cowboy splash" and what I was taught in the army was some other unmentionable cleaning ritual. Luckily it doesn't leak if you just run water.

There are plenty of things that we know need attention but we decided after the first couple of days to take the long view on this and pick off each problem as we can.

Once we have internet I'll be able to research calibrating the gate hydraulics. The hydraulic arms look too strong for the wall and the gate and show signs that they have been hammering the concrete wall posts because they try to open or close beyond where they can.

On the plus side we have pleasant neighbors who took me to a local hairdresser in the next village. Her husband delivers wood by the ton (which is about half a cord - an American unit of measure for wood) so we should have enough wood to see us through the last month of winter.

The first week here was eventful. I found myself walking around a local supermarket wondering what we've got ourselves into before catching myself and pointing out that we have got ourselves into an adventure (which cheered me up no end).