Quinta das Abelhas

8am: wake up far to early after late night when Mick & Stuart arrive for 2nd day of mammoth retaining-wall building. Lovely husband brings me coffee in bed and heats me up some water for a wash.

8.30am: groggily get out of bed & wash. check emails and i’m still not awake enough to deal with them so half-heartedly play ‘civilisation’ on the computer while i drink 2nd cup of coffee.

9.30am: go down to old kitchen (started moving into new kitchen yesterday - chaos & mess). empty compost bin. check on my garden and pick lots of ripe giant tomatoes. make big pile of rubbish & recycling ready to load into car. try to prise andy off his computer (he’s installing linux) so we can go into town. try to do some work on the computer - saving important stuff cos i fear computer is in its death throes - i am right because it keeps crashing so i give up and turn it off before it totally expires.

10.30am: load up car. get builders to move their car so i can get out. go into tabua. dump rubbish & recycling. do some shopping - bought a mini chest freezer the other day and the local mini-preco has 45% off all frozen goods! eat some biscuits & yoghurt we just bought cos i haven’t had breakfast yet. go to builder’s merchants and buy more paint to finish new kitchen (ran out with only a tiny patch still to paint - typical!). go to bank to get dinheiro for builders to buy materials but arrrggghhh money not transferred from uk yet. clean out all 3 bank accounts and manage to come up with 500 euros. order more cheques.

11.30am: back home. give builders 1/4 of money they were expecting and they go off to buy more sand & gravel - they’ve already put 2 tons of cement into foundations for wall. unload shopping into spanking new gleaming white freezer in horrible messy dirty old kitchen soon to become slightly cleaner store room. take rubbish & recycling bins down to the spring and give them a good clean. finish painting in new kitchen. builders come back and i make them tea. kids appear briefly for lunch and then disappear back up to the village with their friends. i eat another yoghurt.

1.30pm: check & answer emails. upload photos of new property for sale to server so i don’t lose them before i can resize & rename them and put them in a gallery page. make tea for builders. move more stuff into new kitchen.

builders say no water coming from well and pump won’t turn on from house so andy goes next door to get dave the electrician to help sort it out. i make tea for builders with last of bottled water in kitchen.

get andy to help me move cooker, fridge & table. argue a bit about what’s going where and andy retreats to his computer leaving me to sort it out how i want.

dave sorts pump (was a loose wire) and builders get back to work.

i get on with new kitchen - put up hooks & hang saucepans. do lots of walking back & forth between old & new kitchen putting stuff in its new place. clean fridge.

6pm: make more tea for builders & phone uk to find out when money will be here. drink tea & chat with builders.

6.30pm: go with andy for a walk around neighbouring land that we want to buy.

7pm: start making new property listing. portuguese woman phones to see if she can come round to look at properties on computer. frantically shove dirty clothes etc under bed as computer now in bedroom until we get new office room finished. she arrives - scrambling down treacherous slope where steps now destroyed by wall-building - but we don’t really have anything suitable. she likes the new property i’m just putting on website but it’s a bit further from here than she’d like as she wants to be in or very near to tabua/povoa de midoes. she goes off with phone number for someone who has lots of places nearby for sale and i get on with doing the new property listing & answering more emails. kids come home about 9pm, raid the kitchen, andy yells at them that dinner’s ready soon and they disappear down to the yurt.

9.30pm: new property listing uploaded to website. eat lasagne (cooked in spanking new oven). whinge to andy that i’ve overdone it last two days and now my glands are up and i’ve a headache and worried i’ll be ill tomorrow. back onto computer to update pure portugal blog with new property. read acl forum. update this blog.

11pm: off to bed!

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