Category: weeknotes

weeknotes, 2/23

– after much frustration with credit cards, finally WE BOOKED THE TRIP TO TAIWAN!!! i’m relieved and über-excited! the whole week, i’ve been floating in this happy haze of knowing we’re going to asia again, watching youtube videos about night markets and street food, and taking virtual walks through the neighborhood on google street view. the trip is still 10 weeks from now, but already i’m in a buzz of anticipation!

– the boy wanted to check out the cerro da cabeça, a small hill nearby, so we went for a tiny first hike of the year on a cloudy weekday. i don’t usually think of karst landscapes when i think of algarve, but they do exist!

– i got a delightful letter from my 9-year old cousin francisco, in response to the pintarolas i sent him last week! he told me about all of his christmas presents, and asked about mine, and to which countries i’d been to so far. it was unexpectedly sweet, so of course i replied back with another letter. :) i might get a new penpal!

– december rains gave a considerable bump to our local water reservoir, which is a relief. we’re not at the average level yet, but things are looking much better.

– we wrapped up our two weeks of eating “mostly potatoes”, which was an interesting experiment! i lost almost 1kg, and surprisingly, i didn’t even get sick of potatoes! interestingly, our favourite recipes all involved the oven and some form of dairy, and all had french names: the dauphinoise, boulangere and the tartiflette.

– i finished joe sacco’s first volume of palestine, which is like a punch to the gut. and we watched three thousand years of longing, which started well, and then turned a little absurd.

foooood weeknotes

weeknotes, 1/23

– what a difference a week makes! last week, there were no flowers anywhere, and this week, as if in tune to the movements of a silent maestro, the almond blossoms are here! still shy, still only starting to peek, but they’re here, and it makes me so happy. i know spring is still very far away, but this feels like a prelude, some hope on the horizon.

– the whole week, we’ve been trying to (finally!!) book some flights to taiwan, only to be foiled by my credit card company. researching and booking flights is already something the boy and i both dislike, but these recent hiccups (and watching the prices increase daily while we wait) make the whole ordeal extra frustrating. we’ve been waiting for this trip for years now, and i just want to get the flights booked, so that we can finally start making more concrete plans.

– i slapped some stamps on this box of portuguese smarties that i randomly found at the supermarket, and sent it to my cousin francisco this week. they arrived 2 days later and he was over the moon! :D now i have to try and find more, to send to my other small cousins. even after 70 million postcards, the postal service still feels like magic!

– i finished listening to joan didion’s audiobook, “the year of magical thinking“, which is about the year after her husband passed away. it’s a stream of consciousness, the kind of things that go through one’s head when a beloved person suddenly disappears — the giving oneself to grief and mourning and the irrationality of it. it’s hard, and heavy, and a bit clinical… but also frank and cathartic.

– we’ve still going strong on potatoes and this week we’ve experimented with a couple of recipes from this bbc list. the hasselback roast potatoes and the domino dauphinoise were clear winners!

just life weeknotes

weeknotes 49-52/22

– the end of the year is always filled chaos and anxiety, and a million tasks and errands to run. as i grow older, it feels harder to just relax and enjoy the holidays and the warmth of the season, which is a little sad. this year, the boy tried to push for us to do a lot of things earlier on though, which helped — i should remember this lesson.

– a highlight of christmas for me is just to spend a lot of time in a bookshop, looking for nice books to give to all the kids in our lives. “the wall” was a neat discovery this year. i helped my 7-year old cousin read through it before i wrapped it (it was not her gift), and by the end of it, she was hilariously indignant at how a king could be so clueless. 😂

– in some bad news, it looks like our water infiltration is back, which is infuriating because we’ve spent thousands of euros renovating the terraces in order to fix it, and we seem to be back to step one. :( it really rained a lot though, so it might have been an exceptional thing… but it’s hard to know with water stuff. sigh.

– the end of the year brought lots of acute back pain for me, and random chest pains for the boy (with a trip to the emergency room)… it’s been an eventful couple of weeks, health-wise. luckily, we’re both doing better now.

– i got lots of nice gifts for christmas this year, including a tiny light to read at night, a francesinha-themed t-shirt, a cooking class, a handmade key hanger with a map of our town, deliciously scented bodyshop products… and panties! underwear is my mom’s traditional gift to the boy, my brother and me, and she gives really good quality ones, so everyone is grateful for the yearly stock up. :)

– our christmas cards were really cute this year, and we seem to have sent them at just the right time. pffeew!

– how lovely are the mail-themed socks that my czech secret santa sent me?

– and speaking of socks, i signed up for the awesome socks club this year, since they now ship from europe. it’s a monthly sock subscription that sends all profits to charity. i’m looking forward to my first pair next month.

– our yearly visit to the dentist revealed zero cavities. hurray!

– so grateful that all my family was on board with getting tested for covid prior to christmas dinner (even if some probably thought i was overreacting)! it was a weight off my shoulders to know everyone was healthy, and it helped me enjoy our time together. plus, i’m kind of a pro at swabbing noses now.

and i guess that concludes 2022’s weeknotes! i’m still glad i’ve started doing these weekly recaps, and quite a few friends have told me throughout the year that they enjoy reading them — thank you for coming around!

algarving weeknotes

weeknotes, 47-48/22

– we took a couple of much needed days off these two weeks, to take care of some life admin stuff and christmas shopping (books for all the kids!). rest day included lunch in a new (to us) tasty thai place in town, and also brunch in a nice café. slowing down feels counter-intuitive and forced, but we need to relearn it slowly.

– visited faro for the annual christmas postcrossing meetup. it was great to see friends again, after 2 years away and catch up with them a bit… but i was exhausted by the end of it. it gave me the chance to do a bit of “#xtremedeltiology” too, which was fun.

– i finished the beautiful ballad for sophie, and also neil gaiman’s anansi boys, which was fun. at some point in the story, the narrator describes a group of flamingos as “a minefield of legs and necks”, and it’s just so perfect! i realized a bit late that this was the second book in a series… might have to go back and read the first one now.

– i’ve been rotating my swims with bike rides around the salt pans, in which i stop now and then to see some birds… at least, that is the idea. on one of the rides, the wind was unbelievably strong and i had to pedal so hard i hurt some tendon in my leg. and on another one, it had rained the previous day, and i really underestimated how much mud there would be… at some point, my bike was so crusted with mud that it just refused to continue. 😅

– it’s officially fireplace season, and i’ve sewn us a heavy curtain, to try and better trap the heat in the living room. it kind of works… but my toes and fingertips are still permanently frozen. :( sigh. the older i get, the more i dislike winter. please, someone teleport me to a warmer climate, or a country with efficiently heated houses.

– potatoes! paulo sent me down a rabbit hole of articles about a “potato diet“… and i promptly got obsessed with the idea of potatoes having some kind of metabolic superpower. i know it sounds weird… but i just cannot resist this kind of experiments, where you take one thing and run with it in the opposite direction of everyone else to test an hypothesis and see what happens. currently planning to eat about a third of our meals as potatoes until christmas, take notes and report back. i’m unreasonably excited about the prospect of more potatoes.

– and speaking of food, we stumbled on odeleite’s “brunch serrano” on the internet and had to check it out. the food offer was immense and to die for, from rabanadas to “migas” with pork meat, not to mention the warm bread and excellent jam. to repeat again soon, and bring friends! :D

weeknotes

weeknotes, 45-46/22

time feels really slow, now that we’re back home. 😅 the days blend with one another, nothing special about most of them, just the normalness of being here. still, there are things to do and they are getting done!

– i chopped a good bit of my hair off, because of swimming pool frustrations. the showers there spray a fine mist of water all over the place… except on your head, which, when you have long hair, is a nightmare. so, off the hair goes!

– through instagram, i heard about revista farta, a new portuguese magazine focused on food. it reminded me of my beloved (but long dead) lucky peach, and i ordered the first volume, which is all about francesinhas! <3

– we watched minari, a bitter sweet korean-american movie. and still on the korean theme, i’ve been reading pachinko, a story set in ww2 times in korea and japan. it’s long, but quite good so far. i’ve also visited the library and came back with a arm full of graphic novels. the first i’ve read, comer beber, was short and focused on one of my favorite subjects: food!

– the weather was nice last week, so we took a couple of days and walked the stretch between lagos and portimão, with a stop in alvor to enjoy the ria. the mosquitos were crazy, but the views around the river were brilliant.