And Then the Storm Came

21 September 2022

 

This place we’ve rented doesn’t have air conditioning. Yesterday the temperature hit 88 and the humidity was about as high as it gets. Fans help but…they don’t take away the energy draining nature of the swamp weather. Felt like swampy South Jersey in the late 1960s.

 

Went to sleep reading and I had to read a good long time in the clammy air to actually let lethargy take me into the wilderness of weird that is my dreamland. Somewhere between four and five in the morning the storm rolled in.  Perhaps, kicked up would be a better term.  According to Francie the lightning and thunder set upon us closer to four. When it arrived the light and sound spectacular began.  I know I saw a bright flash through my twitching eyelids and I opened my eyes.  The thunder lasted for a good fifteen seconds after that one and after the next one. 

 

I stayed awake for a little bit listening to the storm roll through.  Apparently my oldest got up and closed all the windows that weren’t protected by balconies. Must have been a good rain before and after my little waking moment (for I fell back asleep quickly), because here it is just turned ten and everything is still wet.

 

Ah but the best thing, the storm has wrung virtually all of the moisture out of the air.  All our windows are open now and a gentle cool breeze is filling every room in the apartment. Today looks and feels like the best possible of days.  Today I plan to explore a new neighborhood.  Looking for a used coffee table.  We will see if the search pans out.

 

Wishing you all a fantabulous day. 

Blue Sky Awaits

 Hello and I hope this finds you living your best possible life.  Right now, it is just 8:30 and the air is still cool, a mere 72 F.  By midafternoon it will be 87. According to the weather forecast between now and 1 am tomorrow there is a chance of a thunderstorm and possibly hail.  Looking at the map I think any weather will pass north.

 

Me, I have been up for about 45 minutes.  Before I even started in on my morning feed, I started a load of laundry.  Will get that out on the drying rack well before noon. By the point I am sitting before my computer I have had my cereal and rinsed out my bowl.  My reheated decaf with thick cream sits at my left side.  I have opened up the shades and windows. Need to get a breeze going. Still, when the sun moves to high noon and leans west, I will shut up a number of these windows and shades to keep the heat out.  

 

The weekend was low key. Saw my niece on Friday.  Fun times.  Hard to believe it had been forty years. On Saturday we did little shopping.  Also, there was a little poking around neighborhoods we did not know.  Ate a couple of meals out.  Hit a “Mexican” place on Friday.  While I enjoy various takes on veal and pork, I do get a hankering for a taco or a burrito now and then.  That being said most of the “Mexican” places just don’t get it right. However, this place had pork belly tacos.  They were amazing. Obviously with the high fat content these will not be on my menu often, but damn were they tasty.

 

Bought a carpet and a towel warmer on Sunday.  The carpet was the first stab at furnishing the living area. There is a little store down the block that sells furniture.  When we poked our heads in, they had a loveseat on deep discount. If it is still there, we may well pick it up today. Getting it up to our first-floor apartment may take some doing but these merchants are clever at such things.

 

I made my reservations yesterday for a quick trip back to the US to finish up my visa. Don’t really want to come back but in that the visa issuing folks demand our passports be mailed to them from a US address and then returned to that US address and that the passport shows an entry into Portugal after the visa issuance date, I really don’t have any other choice.

 

One good thing about writing at this hour is that the world is still moving slow.  Business cranks up about 10 am and continues until midafternoon. Then there is a short lunch break at which time the traditional shops close for an hour.  Then they reopen until 8 pm.  The subway will be alive about 9:30 teeming with salesclerks dressed in their particular business’s uniform.

 

When I talk about the early hours of the morning moving slow, I am not really talking about subways and businesses.  I am talking about dogs and children. The Portuguese love their dogs.  There are dogs of every size but small dogs abound.  The other day Francie opined it was amazing that we didn’t hear a cacophony of dogs at night being in a walled city of residences.  The next night the howling began. Apparently, a family returned home late from their August vacation and their solitary hound came back with them. It must be a midsized to large dog because its howl is deep and resonates echoing around these pastel buildings.  It doesn’t howl all night but it howls midevening.  Thus, while I am washing the dishes I can hear, “OOOOwwooooll.”

 

The child is for the most part happy and inquisitive.  I hear lots of question sounding phrases and lots of laughter.  But yesterday the child must have set a record for stamina, volume and duration of crying.  Probably 45 minutes straight the bellowing, the caterwauling, went on. In reality it didn’t bother me much but I felt sorry for all involved, the child and the parents.  But as they say, “Been there and done that.” Like I said the mornings are quiet, well until the jets get going.

 

Below you will find a picture of me in my favorite park. The aqueduct rises overhead and a 200 plus year old church is wedged in beneath. The shot was taken at dusk.  People were drinking beers by the kiosk and watching futbol.  Me I was just relaxing on a park bench. Enjoy the day.

Un-Coffee in my Rooftop Land of Dead Plants

 

3 September 2022

 

Sipping decaf this morning, the un-coffee.  I am seated at the little rickety table that we bought at Bricomarche.  The temperature is wonderful and has been for the past two hours. Had some muesli with apple slices and milk earlier. Trying to decide what to do with this long weekend.  

 

Thinking about what to do has reminded me I am a list maker.  Since I have gotten to Lisbon, I have not been making lists. Not jotting down what to do and when to do it has thrown me off my game.  Back in East Lansing I had a whole week scheduled out to review when I opened the computer in the morning each and every morning.  Here I end up making coffee, eating cereal and looking at the three plants out of 17 the previous tenant abandoned that have survived.  Then I have just been floating to where the day takes me.

 

I will have to create a list today, order not chaos but way more flexible than in the past.  I have to buy some airline tickets.  I have a furniture delivery scheduled that I have to remember.  I have some odds n’ ends to buy at the local grocery, just ran out of Listerine. My lists are usually pretty concrete but they always include the aspirational, eat less, exercise more. Oh yeah, there is the rest of that Ikea furniture to finish. 

 

As I sit here, I can smell the wood fired oven of the nearby pizza place starting up.  It smells of garlic, rosemary and olive oil.  There are some many hints of good times gone by in those smells, from camping to urban bistros in places like Toronto and Chicago.  Food memories of good friends. Guess I will have to try a pizza from the restaurant this weekend.  Gotta find out if it tastes as good and is as memory inducing as it smells.

A Blue Couch, Silver Keys and a Gold Piece of Whatever

1 September 2022

 

Ikea demands of its customers/victims both love and hate.  Take for example the blue couch. The most recent thing we got from Ikea was “the” blue couch.  It has some storge under it and it pulls out into a bed for visitors.  Like most things Ikea in comes in parts, a fair but not unwieldly number of parts.  The key factor at Ikea however is price.  You know that.  I know that. We love the price.  We hate what follows.

 

When you buy something from Ikea the model has been expertly set up.  All the parts are sure to have been milled to the right tolerances. If one doesn’t quite fit you can be assured that Joao can call Sven in the backroom and get a replacement part asap. The staff doing set up in-store use electric tools and have flunkies who lift and twist the item exactly the way it is shown in the pictographic instructions.  When you ask the sales rep, “How long does it take to assemble?”, he or she says (they appear quite committed to parity in sales staff), “Oh twenty or thirty minutes.”  What they leave off is that part that says, “If you are a highly toned underemployed mechanical engineer”.

 

I loved Legos as a kid.  On the Iowa Skills Test I always got the folding the boxes section 100% right, always.  I live with an engineer.  How hard could this be? Insert echoing cosmic laughter here.

 

Well, assembling the blue couch had its moments.  For fabric, batting and light colored wood, it was heavy. On top of that the couch had to be tilted on its side several times to accomplish the tasks assigned.  Again, I live with two big men so it was doable. But what drove me crazy was installing one long thick bolt that held the back of the couch to the seat of the couch.  There were four of these, two on the left, one on the center and one on the right.  The left and right ones went it without a hitch. The center one not so much. Seemingly the bolt would go in and start to thread into the approved slot and then just spin.

 

Apparently, and definitely not in the pictograms, this bolt was the prime bolt and had to go in first.  It took loosening the other three bolts and using a cardboard shim to elevate one side of the project to allow the bolt to catch and go in.  Every single freakin’ project from Ikea is like this.  There is always a hidden thing you have to do to get the bits and bobs to align. Twenty minutes of estimated set-up time was for an overweight, old, humanities orient retired ALJ nigh onto three hours to finish.  Sigh.

 

Did I mention this place is not air conditioned?  After I let the sweat dry, I made it my goal to get my Portuguese phone number up and running.  This would require me to go to MEO one of the providers of internet/cable/phone in the country. MEO has various sales offices everywhere. No worries my trusty app said there was a shop five minutes’ walk from here.  Don’t get me started on the five minute’s walk thing.  If Lisbon were perfectly flat it would be five minutes’ walk.  Lisbon I can say with certainty is not perfectly flat. Off I went for the five-minute walk.

 

Why did I have to go to MEO?  Two things.  First, I didn’t have a tool that would open the sim slot on my iPhone 12Max or whatever it is called.  Second, I wanted to know the fee structure for using my phone for international texting.  I didn’t really get an answer for the second one except that the sales rep kept saying, very expensive.  However, all the MEO reps have that little piece of wire to pop open the iPhone and the SIM was quickly placed in my phone.  

 

The serendipity bit was that the store we went to was next to a very neat/cool looking building with lots of frill and gimgacks and gogaws to ah and oh at.  And this building was right next to the Piscoas metro stop which for all the world looks like one of Paris’s art deco metro stops.  More aahing and oohing.

The keys thing was a truly typical Portuguese urban moment.  We had one key for four people.  I had inquired of our landlady about how to get extra keys.  She directed me to a shop several blocks away.  Thirty-six dollars later I had four new keys.  However, at 10 pm (22:00) a knock on our interior door came and a young woman was standing outside.  She did not identify herself but she handed up about fifty loose keys and said, “These are yours”.  There were multiple keys to the apartment, to a second entrance to the apartment, to our mailbox and to a couple of other things I have not figured out yet.  Yep, it was that kind of moment.  I am kind of thinking she was some kind of phantom because upon handing us this mound of shaped metal she was gone.

Oh yeah to insure I don’t blow my heart out I bought an American style coffee maker and some decaf coffee.  I have tried ordering decaf espressos and I think about 50% of the time that just say to hell with it and make me a regular.  I can tell it is regular when my fingers start tapping the table after my second sip.  If I drink it all my whole body become a techno rhythm section.

 

And that is all I have time for this morning.