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just life weeknotes

weeknotes, 32/24

hoooooome! we returned south this week, to our home sweet home. the main train got delayed by some signal malfunction in alentejo, forcing us to catch the very last train connection home, which meant we had to switch to a bus in fuseta because of the nightly electrification works of the south line. it was a looooong ride, but we made it!

i read a lot on the train, and ended up finishing 3 books this week: wintering, the thursday murder club #1 and contos da montanha. they’re all so different, but all interesting in their own way. i don’t remember if i had ever read anything from miguel torga beyond loose poems, but contos da montanha was a fascinating (and depressing) trip into early 20th century rural portugal, featuring a lot of the stories and vocabulary one hears from their northern grandparents.

in other news, the tomato plants have gone wild and the big surprise is that we now have soybeans! we got the seeds in the netherlands, and i planted them just for fun, but it seems like we can do this! right now they’re tiny, and i’m curious to see if we can grow them to full size and eat a dish of edamame. that would be cool!

summer is the time when we end up seeing friends who are holidaying nearby, and this week we had dinner with 2 different groups of friends and their respective children.

i had forgotten we had booked tickets to david fonseca’s concert, which was this past wednesday! it was a retrospective concert, looking back on his 25 year career, and it was a whole thing, with quirky video effects and lots of dancing and shouting the lyrics of songs that we’re very familiar with. it was so much fun!

so it’s maybe hard to believe that despite all of these things, the week was mostly a quiet one, hiding from the heat and trying to catch up with work. this is the run-up to world postcard day, and there is so much to do. it was go go go!

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just life weeknotes

weeknotes, 24-25/24

the most exciting thing these weeks was probably bike upgrade. i’ve taken it on several rides, and it’s just pure joy!

because it’s the end of the school year, the chinese teacher thought it would be a good idea to do an exam on the last week of the course, and it was a disaster. i don’t know if she realizes the only reason i do ok in the classes is because i spend hours preparing for each of them, meticulously looking up every word in the lesson that i might not know. 😅 anyway, the class is now over, and in the summer ahead i want to try to focus on speaking practice, because i feel it’s the area where i am less good at. i can read ok at a basic level, and i understand when people are explaining things to me… but speaking is a whole other beast.

speaking of chinese, this week we were watching the 3 body problem on netflix, and i understood this screen that showed up!

i guess most of the time i don’t feel like i’ve been doing much progress at all in this language learning journey, because the process is just 99% work and frustration… but then, 1% of the time something like this pops up and it feels like magic!

also these weeks, the boy had the second shot of the miracle injection™, and it was my birthday too! i turned 42, had brunch with my brother, and then kidnapped niece LJ for 24 hours, so we could kiss those chubby cheeks to our heart’s content. 🥰

she’s still the most chilled baby ever, and loves tomatoes with a passion but can’t quite manage the tiny ones yet… more for me! :D our tiny raised bed in the backyard is now entering tomato season, and i’ve planted some soy beans after the last peas were gone. hoping to have some edamame at some point!

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just life

bike upgrade

i’ve been riding my bike more and more in recent years. even with a car that rides electric up to 40kms (which is enough to go into town a couple of times), and even with knowing the battery is charged with renewable energies, it still doesn’t feel right to drive it on a whim for short distances. plus, all the time it takes to remove the car cover, deal with gates, finding a parking spot… blergh. so, bike it is! a few times a week i take it to go swimming in town, or ride to cabanas for knitting club, and it suits me fine.

the ride into town though, while not particularly challenging, has a small hill that demands the lowest gears of my órbita, and is just… annoying. sometimes it’s annoying enough that i don’t want to go swim at all because of it. i’ve been hearing about electric bikes for ages, but the price tag on them was always a little too daunting for me to consider one. plus, it felt… lazy? in my head, only older people were allowed electric bikes, for some reason, and i barely knew anyone my age who had one.

lately though, i got over it. i tried a very basic electric bike in the netherlands for a day, and like craig wrote, “I went to climb a hill and it felt as if a giant had gently placed his hand on my back and pushed me forward.” YES, exactly! i realized that i wanted that ease every day, so that my head did not add this extra friction to the trips i wanted to do with the bike. i wanted to use it more!

i looked for one OLX for some time, but then by chance, i found out a friend had one in her garage that she wanted to get rid of… so i guess the universe was telling me to go for it, and i did! meet the new kid in town, a foldable conor maui:

normally, this wouldn’t be the kind of bike that i’d go for, as i prefer the comfort that curved handlebars and bigger wheels give… but it was practically new (a mere 180kms on the odometer, and barely a scratch!) and the price was a steal. plus, it’s kind of cool to try a small folding bike that i could potentially bring with me on the car or the train. for now, it’s just been such a joy to ride it, and i find myself picking longer or uphill routes just for fun.

i just realized this is the sixth bike i’ve bought as an adult — the love affair for this kind of 2-wheel transportation continues! :)

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just life weeknotes

weeknotes 50-51/23

on the last week before coming north, we cleaned up the house, made some last christmas shopping for the children, wrapped up the presents and ate everything from the garden — i even made caldo verde with the leaves of the broccoli plant! :)

on the first days in the north, i saw my niece LJ, the cutest 5 month old ever! she’s in a really nice phase now, laughing easily at everyone and charming us all.

then we drove further north to be with the parents for christmas… only to find them infected with covid. :( so it’s a bit of a lonely christmas this year, every branch of the family in its own home, and the boy staying with his own parents. my ears hurt from all the mask-wearing, but so far i’ve managed to stave off an infection. fingers crossed it stays that way and that everyone will be bug-free by new years!

because there’s not much to do, i’ve managed to do a bit of reading to wrap up the year: i’ve finished the sweetness at the bottom of the pie, bird by bird, check & mate and olive kitteridge, as well as a few children’s books. each one of these was great for its own reasons: some for the surprising format, some for being really well read by the author, some were just comforting in their predictability… it’s been a good year for books.

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just life weeknotes

weeknotes 49/23

a mostly quiet week, spent running errands and trying to get the presents for all the family. i finished 2 very short audiobooks: how to keep house while drowning and train dreams. the first in particular stuck with me, its compassionate advice applying to much more than just house chores.

we’re full on “pre-christmas mode” around here, and one of the things i must do is to use the vegetables i have in the mini plot before we head north. so today i took all the chard and did a nice stir-fry with it. it’s still amazing to me that i can grow these things with some seeds and a bit of dirt!

and on the same vein, sometime ago the town was offering some free 300L plastic composters, to those who wanted them. i signed up for it, and forgot about it until they emailed me last week! so this week we had a little workshop to learn how to work with them, and will soon be receiving the dalek-shaped contraption. i can’t wait!

and last but not least, this gorgeous hoopoe, just chilling. :)