Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Drew and Julia have been gone a week and we returned  5 days ago from our time in Setúbal and tenancy in the Pousada de São Fiiipe. It's quiet here without Drew and without Julia's wonderfully lively spirit and engaging perpetual motion, so we are, well, resting. We were extremely lucky with the weather while they were here including the day trips to Lisbon (Drew and me) and the western Algarve on which we all went together.
Unforgetable images of Drew and Julia on the beach. Drew actually fully immersed himself twice into the water. Julia was reluctant to get her feet into the water (below she is giving it careful consideration) - in the end she overcame her reluctance.

But, it's back to the daily routines and, as we are in our last week, we are thinking a bit about a few things to do before we go and paying attention to organizing our larder so as to not have too much food to deal with in the count down to departure.

And, of course, included in the "daily routines" are my visits to the beach and my compulsion to make photos of sunsets etc., and put them here, even if they contain blemishes, like this one. 

Hip and foot discomfort have continued to plague Ruth off and on, so this rest period is a good thing. Fortunately, she has found a couple of good sources of books very nearby - one is kind of a loaner arrangement for free and the other is a buy back one - bring it back and he buys it back for less than you paid for it. So, in addition to her kindle books she has a reasonable supply of actual books. And, she has done a bit of drawing and painting, which is great.

We have continued our good fortune with the weather - 3 or 4 days in a row with cloudless skies and temperatures 19 or 20 degrees C or higher! And for the full 5 weeks we have had little if any rain. Good for us, maybe not so good for growing things.

Yesterday, a beautiful warm cloudless day, we went in to old town, Ruth on the bus and me along the beach, mailed some things, bought a few things, you know - "all I got was this T-shirt" - things. Then we had lunch at Sir Harry's pub before coming home.

When I walked the beach it looked like this - the beach manicurists have been beautifying it by getting rid of all those bumpy footprints and troublesome shells that keep washing up on the shore.

Though I am back to my pattern of doing beach photos, I am trying to include a tiny bit of variety. For example, the next two images are "moonsets" in contrast to my all too common sunsets. Not as colourful but beautiful in their own way and kind of serene.

And this view I have not captured before at sunset - if you click on this image, as usual, you will see a larger image and I hope you can then see the reddish cliffs (this is not all caused by the sunset glow - the soil is really quite red), the hills or mountains in the background and the white buildings of the capital city of the Algarve, Faro.

Here is his equipment - can the fisherman be far away?

Ah!  There he is in the fullness of this sunrise.

Thanks to encouragement by Michael, I am once again trying some long exposure photography - still getting the hang of it so nothing to show yet but maybe something different in the next blog post. The fellow who wrote the e paper I am reading about long exposure photography says that when he goes out to capture some long exposure images he anticipates making 500 or more in a couple of hours! - keeping possibly 10 and showing 1. There will be a lot fewer than 500 before one finds its way onto this blog.

What's this? A few minutes ago my fisherman friend was up on the cliff (above) and here he is again - I am beginning to think that he is following me to get into the photo, and, if you look closely, you can see that he has brought his dog into the photo as well.