After over 5,300 miles, five separate living accommodations, dozens of prospective homes viewed, thousands of kilometers driven around the countryside, nine trips to Ikea, numerous interactions with the Portuguese bureaucracy, living without WiFi for over a month, fifteen arguments about whether the GPS was telling us to veer slightly right or stay straight within the three seconds allotted between the decision and running straight into the divider, countless cappuccinos and pastries (setting us back only a couple of bucks each time), and just a few batatas consumed… we are home.

We love our new house. It’s in the countryside, where it is amazingly quiet. Well, that is until you go outdoors, where you can hear dogs barking, birds chirping, a turkey warbling, a rooster crowing, bees buzzing, and a continuously annoyed goose honking from just up the road. But as soon as you walk back inside, the blood coursing through your ears is about the only sound you hear. Unless it’s at night when either of us can hear the other snoring. I think we’re alternating snoring nights, but I’m sure I have a few more than her.

We’re busy furnishing the house right now, so inside pix will have to come later, as well as an opinion piece about Ikea, which alternates from heavenly shopping and appreciation of its genius, to looking at the 154 pieces intended to make a nightstand and calling the manual the Instructions from Hell.

Carolyn predictably wanted to change the wall colors, so we decided, being retired and all, we’d just paint it ourselves. The bathroom ceilings were an awkward light blue, so that was the first on the agenda. I taped the walls, stirred the primer, dipped the roller, and proceeded to drip whiteness everywhere except the blue ceiling. Any primer that happened to stick to the ceiling only served to make the blue just slightly lighter in streaks. The rest of the blue more or less spat off the primer, as if taking offense to the idea that we wanted to cover it up. It was having none of that, and the thin primer was complicit.

The stuff was so thin that I spent more time trying to catch the drips than rolling more of it onto the ceiling. After only about eight rolls, we decided to bring on the calvary.

We are very fortunate in that the seller of our house was a very detailed English gentleman who left us awesome notes about everything we need to know about the house, including who painted it for him in the past. So we rang up Luis, he showed up the next day to talk about it, and the day after he’s waxing paint poetic on the walls. Best money we’ve spent so far!