Quinta das Abelhas

get up, drink cevada (barley coffee) & check & answer emails. boys go to bread man (he stops his van at top of our track every morning) & bring me back an estrela cake for breakfast.

drive equipment (press, big buckets, wine bottles, corks, corking machine, huge boiling pan) for grape juice making over to our friend’s place. get shouted at by her neighbour, antonio, for turning my car by driving onto his track - the only place to turn, and his track mind, not his land where he grows stuff, the very same bit of land that last time i went down there he came over all smiling and hand-waving saying ‘park on my land, park here, it’s ok’ … aaarrggghhh. probably he hadn’t drunk enough wine yet thismorning. then to make matters worse our dogs have followed us over and start barking at him on his own land … thought i better make a quick exit.

get home and continue the tedious task of updating the pure portugal website, something i’ve been meaning to do for ages and haven’t had the time (or motivation) for. been doing this for past few days and have developed a serious coke (the drink, not the powder) habit to keep me going …

get fed up with that, and i’m sure as a result of the coke, decide to paint the metal door of the kitchen. a loverly green colour.

do some washing in the sexy new machine. including the rug on which the dog puked up something he’d eaten which had obviously been dead for a long, long, time by the smell of it.

clean & tidy bedroom.

have cheese & salad roll for lunch.

do the washing up. this involves fetching & boiling water and taking it to ‘the washing-up place’ outside the adega. the still (amazingly) fully-functioning shelter with built-in shelf for washing-up bowl and drying rack which i built with help from my mum about 2 years ago and which we decided to chain to the wall of the adega (through one of many of the holes between the granite stones) to keep in place. the upright poles sit in hollow concrete blocks wedged in with old bits of wood and the tin roof is held on with rocks. now how’s that for not-so-techno peasantry?!

tidy up around the washing-up place. this involves shifting piles of bricks, 5l wine bottles, old cardboard boxes, dog food bowls, plant pots, etc. quite looking forward to a time when tidying up around the washing-up place means wiping down some worktops …

clean kitchen.

boys get back from juice-making and mess up my lovely clean kitchen making themselves a mid-afternoon snack (burgers). not quite sure how we got to be a household with coke in the fridge & burgers in the freezer …

more working on website.

boys start yelling ‘that dog is back’ - it’s a badly injured stray dog that’s been coming down here for past couple of days but has been chased away by our dogs before i’ve had a chance to look at it. today it’s down by the pond so i quietly go down and it comes up to me wagging its tail and very friendly. i recognise it as the dog that lived here before we bought the land. it has most of one ear missing and a really huge hole going into its head. it’s really bad, it stinks and the wound is full of maggots and there are zillions of flies around it. boys notice it also has a big hole in its backside. andy thinks it must have been shot to have such big wounds. wei don’t know what to do. we don’t want another dog. we can’t afford to take it to the vet. if it doesn’t have to be put down then it’s going to need major surgery and then a home to go to. i can’t just leave it to die. so andy phones some friends who mentioned they wanted a dog, to see if they want to take it on, it’s really a lovely dog. but they don’t. as i decide i’m taking it to the vet it disappears off up the track …

back to the website update.

make quiche for dinner and andy makes chips & picks salad from the garden.

eat dinner. check emails. write blog. now i’m going to bed.

Stumble it!

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