Green Roof, Wooden Floors and Lime Paint

We can make out the finishing line, we sense the day we will live in the houses we bought in the Autumn of 2007, is just round the corner. Still an enormous amount of work left to do. But the structure is in place and the rest is really a matter of decoration: laying stone floors, tiling, building the kitchen and bathrooms, painting. And yesterday was a big day cos we made our first lime paint after slaking it over 18 months ago.

Anyway have a butchers, we're off to Tia Laurinda's Café now to buy some local goodies for Arlene to take back to London with her tomorrow.

Memphis

Grand Designs in Portugal

Hey peeps. Hope you like the new look to the blog. Felt it needed a little refreshing and chose autumn leaves cos one day its gonna feel like that here with the new forest Von just planted!

Anyhow, big news this week is that Von's mum Arlene is with us. And its fabulous to have her here. The kids are stuck to her 24 7 like little fluffy limpets. Adorable. Well just look...




Other big news is that we began the green roof today. It's been so so long since we first imagined a green roof and it was beginning to feel like it might never happen. But then today came. And all doubt dissipated into thin air.

Von and I watched the Grand Design series back when we were in London, always fascinated by the way people with a passion could, sometimes against all odds, transform ruins into beautiful homes and works of art with the same stroke. Today felt like one of those episodes. Except we were the stars of the show and, thank God, no one was watching. A most excellent day. One to be cherished for a very long time. 3 vids below let you take a peak. Middle one's in Portuguese but you'll catch the sentiment.








Von will post up something on her rampant gardening endeavours. As soon as I can actually get her to come inside. She's weeding the veggie patch as I write. Don't expect to see her before sunset. A taste of things to come me thinks. And quite rightly so. She's pouring herself into this land with every bit of strength and love she has to offer. Enabling nature to put on such a show, the like of which I don't think we will have seen before.

Peace and love and all good things


Memphis

Renovation Update

Our builders return, the sun comes out and renovation work starts up again in earnest, while Vonnie continues to open up more holes and plant more trees along the road and sow more seeds in the lounge. Snow still on mountain tops of Serra da Estrella here in the photo in the distance.

Coming to the end of term so kids and I are a bit whacked, as is River, as you can imagine, after planting for so long. We are all looking forward to the Easter hols next week in which we will have Von's mum Arlene over for a fortnight as well as John and Caroline Purday and their girls for an extended weekend.

Some videos below on the restoration update but first one is an inside view of our compost heap. Making your own soil, or at the very least improving and caring for what you've already got, feels like one of those things that is going to become increasingly important for humanity. Can't explain that. Just feel it.

I will write something more substantive over Easter. My heads spinning a bit right now with all that's going on here. It's full on, and of course it's all delicious.

Peace and all good things

Memphis

Happy Birthday Memphis!

Turned 38 on Tuesday. Very sweet day. Eli drew me this lovely card because  Von had planted me 50 plus fruit trees in all the terraces along the river at the bottom of the land here. Think she had wanted to do that ever since her and Perdi murdered a couple of plums and pears I had planted in our garden in London. That well makes up for it babe. Cheers.

Von then came with me to school and I had prepped the kids to ask her loads of questions in English. They did great and so did she. I left with a stack of birthday cards they had all made for me. Returned home to find electricity was being repaired by two guys up poles in the dark and pouring rain. Only lasted the night though as we lost power the next morning again, and found out it blew out more machines once more. Just got fixed today, but still no running water as the bore hole pump got blown out as well. Again.

Kids bought me a waffle maker which I am sure is a present with huge vested interest for them! But they've promised to christen it this Saturday morning for breakfast before we head off to Orvalho to choose tiles for the floors of their house and ours.  Builders returned today to get the window frames all nice before the windows arrive next week, and to build the green roof structure and lay all the floors. I am a very happy man!

Peace and love

Memphis

Applerazzi in the new apple orchard

Too wet to work. So fun and games with water. In the video below the applerazzi chase River past the waterfalls to the new apple orchard. Its another rainy rainy day. Building work stopped. Tree planting in breaks between showers. Lounge converted into a temporary seed shed. Love it.

Got to give a big shout out to an old friend who facebooked us last night. Becky Crow, now Gooden. Check out the stunning jewelery pieces she designs and makes in Brighton. Outstandingly beautiful.

Memphis

On the edge of wilderness

Hey all

Very strange week just went by. Had 3 days off for Carnival. No school. Josh turned 13 and we all went to Coimbra for a day out and some Italian Pizza.  Unfortunately, we came back home to find most of our electrical appliances burnt out from a power surge, including our bore hole water pump. As a result, we've had no running water for 5 days.

The strange thing is that this last episode in our adventure out here in Amieira, has kind of served as a wake up call. We live in the midst of beautiful wild mountain forests, far from civilization, on the edge of a what often seems like a vast wilderness. We made a decision to search for a life more independent of the systems of control that we were engulfed by, unknowingly for most of it, in London. When we arrived, we knew we simply weren't yet ready for complete self sufficiency. But we wanted to journey on a road towards it. Last year we had a bore hole dug 100 metres below ground and bought a thermodynamic water heating system. However the borehole requires electricity for the pump, and when that goes, no water.

Water is life. Electricity isn't. Wake up. Something needed to change.

So this morning, Josh and I plumbed in the water mine tubes bringing fresh drinking water all the way down to a barrel in the kitchen, fed by gravity not electricity, and then from the barrel to an outdoor tin bath (next to the pergola covered deck), heated simply by a wood fire underneath it. We just had our first outdoor bath and it was an absolutely spectacular experience. The water was so hot we couldn't get in it for half an hour. With towels lining the tin to protect us a bit from the heat produced by the burning embers still aglow under the bath, we bathed beneath the moon and stars gazing out down the folding valleys for a good hour. It began to rain but even that was welcome relief from the sauna level heat.  The water was just as hot at the end as when we got in. A forever hot outdoor bath. Exquisite. 


And such joy to know that today we've put in one more thing, and a splendid one at that, to reduce our dependence on the system and take us one more step down the road towards self-sufficiency. If and when the global energy plug gets pulled, we'll still be able to enjoy the daily luxury of a hot bath. And in these uncertain times, that feels reassuringly satisfying to know. 


I'll leave you with a little vid of Eloise and Simba the puppy. As the Bajans say, too sweet.


Memphis

The Time Traveler's Wife

Such a beautiful film this. Von says the book is even better. I've felt like this often. That we're able to travel, even if just in our imaginations, back and forth, past and future and present, choosing the scenes of our lives we'd like to play out. I felt it the very first time I met Vonetta at 19 and saw her, really saw her, as a 30 year old woman, as my wife, with our 2 kids asleep next door. It was like I momentarily glimpsed the future, (real or imagined, it makes no difference to the story) and asked her to marry me. She must have seen the same in some way because she said "yes".

And here in the land of Moses, far, far away from the metropolises of the world, there's not a day that passes where I don't journey in some way again into the future to imagine a deciduous garden forest that I'm walking in around here where all the paths are the colour of red and gold from the fallen leaves in Autumn. Or every now and again will have a little chat with my 70 year old self to hear the wisdom that my 37 year old self just hasn't grasped yet (which, by the way, regularly and ironically includes reprimands for not submersing myself in the present). What is that if not time travel? Vivid imagination? Delusional tendencies?

Or maybe it's just that time is not so linear as we have been led to believe here in the West. Maybe time is more like a pool you look down in and things rise and fall to the surface to be seen. Whatever. Watch the film, read the book. Just yummy.

Couple of videos to show. First is of Eloise's 11th (oh my days!) birthday and the next of some pine tree clearing around the houses. Electrician starts today (yipee!). Off up the hill now to brief. Sweet. Toodaloo peeps.

Memphis.







And finally, after feeling a little bad about chopping so many trees, just got emailed this little nugget about annual tree murders. Worth a look. Staggering numbers felled each year.