Autumn.... ahhh!

How do you know autumn has arrived? Well the temperature dropped 10 degrees to a blessed 25 - such a relief after the persistent heat of summer and the vines are laden with the sweetness of grapes ready for picking.

I helped out with my first grape-harvest last weekend. Afterwards we were rewarded with a hearty lunch which included wild boar amongst other things. Given that I abandoned any notion of vegetarianism some time ago, I got stuck in -I ate so much it felt like I had eaten Christmas dinner!

I almost forgot to mention the grape juice.... so delicious. I decided that if I had vines I would just leave the grape juice as is and freeze it rather than make wine. It's so potent, a sensory delight for the tastebuds.

Onwards and upwards...

Summer is fading though the temperature refuses to drop below 30 degrees... the mornings and evenings are much fresher but it hasn't rained for such a long time which is causing water shortages in various villages around here. Sadly this is probably a sign of things to come as water will undoubtedly become more scarce in the future.

With autumn on the way it's time for another big push forward with the house. Since the last blog I finished taking out the bedroom floors, gave the walls a good scrub to remove most of the soot, shifted most of a seemingly endless pile of sand from the roadside to the house, and finally managed to get the electricity reconnected today after 2 months of being without it.

So as of tomorrow it will be all systems go. The first job is to lift up the flagstone floor in order to cut a channel into the bedrock for the plumbing and electricity tubes. After all the tubing is in we can start making a limecrete floor in the kitchen, bathroom and massage room and build a seating area in the living room. Joy of joys we have found a builder to finish the stone work so after that we can start plastering the walls.

Warley is super enthusiastic about plastering which is a relief as I have been dreading it. So thankfully I'll be in charge of making the mixes while he does the application. There is just soooo much wall but little by little the house will be transformed. Neither of us have any experience of course but enthusiasm goes a long way and Warley already has a great technique - the first coat on the test wall is holding up well even though I haven't given it any after-care since he harled it on.

Aside from the house, I've started to do yoga again. It is really fascinating to do yoga while I am doing all this heavy physical work as my body feels so different. Sometimes it's hard to fall into the state of yoga as my mind is often on overdrive thinking about the 'to do list' of the day ahead. This is also an interesting experience as I've grown accustomed to it being pretty quiet in my head, especially when practicing yoga, so now I know what it feels like to have a so-called 'monkey mind'. All good experience!

The waiting game is over

Right, I'm determined to move into this house before the end of the year. Life may have other ideas but sometimes it's good to challenge.... surrender can come later if needed! I'm tired of waiting for builders / electricians who say they will come but never do so I've found a new electrician who will be coming next week to help me put all the wiring in, assuming we can lift up the flagstone floor that is!

I have yet to find another builder to finish the rest of the walls that are missing and the lintels that need changing but worst case scenario there are a couple of people available september time though I might just give the wall a go myself, even if I have to pack it with cob rather than stone and clay.

In the meantime I've been slaking more lime and taking out the bedroom floors. A big thank you to Belita who came by to help me take out some beams yesterday. They were so heavy and 5 of them were being supported by little more than thin air.... we managed to take all of them out without any drama and only the last one fell out of its own accord. The worst thing that happened was 300 years of soot pouring down my back as each one came out. It was like having a shower except with dirt.

I'm off now to remove all the wood from inside and to shift a pile of stones from one place to another....

Slaking Lime.... A survivor's story

Not much to say except that it wasn't as scary as I had imagined. Sure the oil drum rattled around a bit, and gave off a fair amount of steam as the lime bubbled and popped inside but no explosions outside the drum so yay!! This is what I looked like when I did it - safety first! - I'm sure it will bring a smile to your face.

Delta Tejo Festival, Lisboa

I've been feeling a bit disheartened recently, mainly due to the apparent lack of progress at the house - one pair of hands can only do so much in a day - so when Warley suggested we go to a music festival in Lisboa I didn't hesitate to agree. So last weekend with the car looking like a gypsy caravan stuffed with stuff, off we went.

The festival had artists from countries that produce coffee, but the main presence was Brazilian music. The first night, Friday, opened with Monobloco, and I so wished I could samba because the rhythm was infectious but my body didn't really know what to do with it! I had fun improvising instead. Buju Banton was playing too, in his own unique style he spent most of the time on stage with his head between his legs.... but I prefered Natiruts, my first taste of Brazilian Reggae. After Natiruts came Nneka, a lady with as much presence as she has hair.

Saturday was ladies night on the main stage. Sara Tavares was inspirational, she just oozed beauty, sensuality and wholeness.... it's always great to see live performances but it's rare to experience an enrichment of the soul in the process.... I felt truly enriched as a person, as a woman. This all overflowed when the Kuduro Sound System started and we danced like we were possessed to heavy beats with lots of odd leg movements. Dancing wildly is food for the soul. Vanessa da Mata ended the night, another beautiful woman doing her thing.

On sunday we danced funk to Cidinho & Doca, kizomba to Irmãos Verdades (one of my fave discoveries since moving to Portugal, adoro dançar uma kizomba com Warley, o dono do meu coração) and calypso to Banda Calypso. This woman deserves respect for the fact that she can stand up in those heels, let alone dance with the energy that she does. I mustn't forget Alexandre Pires, the Brazilian version of Usher, complete with white suit and cane! All in all an amazing weekend, especially since there was lots of time spent kissing my man!

The Birds and the Bees

We have houseguests….. one bedroom is inhabited by a birds nest and the other bedroom is host to a bee hive. I don’t mind the birds nest so much but the bees are a different story. I’ve always had an irrational fear of bees and wasps which has dissipated to some degree through just being more relaxed about life in general as a result of yoga. However I would prefer to not have a bee hive in the house even though the honey delicious.

So I had to ask my neighbour Senhor Manel for yet another favour. He was already working in his veggie patch at 8am when I turned up to ask if he could remove the bees. Along he came with a wonky ladder that’s probably the same age he is if not older and a box made out of cork (I had always wondered what they were for) with honeycomb slats in the middle. No bee suit or anything like that, just a pair of gloves and the mask thing to protect his face. He managed to remove the nest which ended up falling to the floor rather than in the box then left the box wedged between the ladder and a pole to see if the bees would enter at night. Did they? No. Amazingly they built a whole new house for themselves in one day, this time above the crossbeam so it’s going to be impossible to take the hive away without destroying it. Nature really is spectacular.

I was joking with a friend afterwards about the bees building a new house in a day and how it has taken 9 months for us to have an almost finished roof. Unlike the bees, we don’t have 500 friends helping out. So I guess they will stay until we have a way to keep them out ie windows and doors as it seems pointless to destroy their home when they will return to the same spot anyway. Maybe they will have made some more honey by then – it really was delicious….

Latest Bee Update: I went to the house on Weds and arrived to hear silence rather than the continual hum of hundreds of bees..... i am assuming my neighbour took them away somehow though I have a fair quantity lying on the floor and some seemingly stuck to the roof, as if frozen in time.... all very odd....

Quick Update

Not much to update – we have a roof with tiles but lots of unfinished parts due to the irregular shape of the house and it’s leaking from 2 of the windows. The stonemason hasn’t appeared for the last month so the house restoration is at a standstill as a result. It’s so frustrating being dependent upon other people to do the work but unfortunately there are some jobs that need a minimum of 2 pairs of hands and eyes and I am blessed with just one pair each. And as yet no news about when we might be able to get water.

In the meantime I’m still in the process of taking out the old forno. I only manage a couple of hours a day because the work is so heavy but I’m making progress, albeit slowly. It was definitely the right decision to take it out as we will have an extra space to be creative with. It’s an odd space and although I have never considered myself to be the hands-on creative type I really want to make an interesting seating area out of clay. But that’s way down the To-Do List!

Life in general is peaceful and unhurried but even here it’s possible to lose perspective and get stuck in a rut so when that happens it’s time for a change of scene. We went to the beach for a day out in Figueira da Foz which was a bit overdeveloped for my liking but found a forested headland just a few kilometres north. So we walked along the cliff tops, took way too many photos, made a movie, laughed with the wind, and felt the sea air fill us with lightness and renewed vitality.