Season 2, Episode 1: What the New Year Holds in Store

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Alright, hello, and welcome to another episode of As the Dinoson's Turn. I guess we can call this season two of As the Dinoson's Turn. We kind of took a little bit off around the holidays, and here we are, January already, heading toward the middle of January. So it seems like 2024 will be another year that flies by.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Well, we really needed to take a break. We actually, as you can tell by our background, if you're watching this video, we have moved. We are in the office. Um, we don't have office furniture or those things yet. That's a work in progress, but um we have a space, and so that's that's huge. I mean, the move made a big difference in the way I feel about life. I don't know about you.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Yeah, no, this is good. I th thought I would miss the other place, and there's parts of it that I do, but I think that this is a good place too.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Which is shocking for him to say because this is an apartment. So um I I don't know, you probably haven't I haven't lived in an apartment since graduate school. So the idea that we bought an apartment for a Midwesterner um is a little bit out of out of pocket, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

It is. I mean, in Iowa, you I don't know that that's even a thing that you buy an apartment. Maybe downtown Des Moines, you buy a lot of the high-rise condos or whatever, but you know, buying an apartment that's more of a New York City type of thing, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Not that's the way we imagine it anyway.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

So it's a three-bedroom, two-bath. Um, it's not overly huge. It's probably about the size of maybe, you know, like a maybe 1,100 square feet or so, a thousand. That's hard to know. But compared to the stone house, it feels like a mansion. Um, the thing that I am loving the most is that there are closets. That's that's huge. So the fact that there's storage, um, everything has a spot for the most part. We're working on that. Um, that's made a big difference in how we're able to keep up with our lives day to day and and the amount of home cooking and things that we're doing too. So the dogs are enjoying the walks through the neighborhood. They are, they are scratching at the door to get in now. So um I think it's been a good change and a good adjustment. I know that the boys are very happy with the change. Um, they don't have to share a mattress now, so they're pretty thrilled with that. And they've actually been playing a lot more. Um, and biggest adjustment so far is waiting on our internet to be hooked up.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Yeah, things, you know, things work differently here than in the US on a lot of different things. You know, when we we bought this house in May. May 10th or 11th is when we bought the house. You know, in the US, you buy a house and within 30 to 60 days you've closed and you move in and off you go. Here we didn't close until October. And then once we closed, we actually didn't move until late December. And some of that was is not so much the Portuguese bureaucracy as much as just the people that we bought the house from, then had to turn around and get into their new place after that, and there were some timing issues, but you know, then getting utilities and and electric and water and internet and stuff. Sometimes it's not as simple as just make a phone call or fill out the online form, and there it is.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Well, um, you definitely go in person, and talking to a person is a good thing. We've already changed our address with the tax authorities in Portugal, so that's been done. Um, we have everything set up here, it's just ending the accounts from the other house. We've ended the internet from there and it's transferring over here. Um, we've ended the electric, but there's a problem with the software that manages the water contracts. And so we've tried to end that water contract now. I think I've tried three times. And um, the software is still not fixed, and we were told again, come back on month, come back after Monday. Um, but the security guard this time was, he's like, he knows it. I've been in there a couple of times. He was wonderful. He's like, here's the number, go ahead, call. You know, hopefully they'll get it sorted out and fixed by then. But there's a problem with their software, so they can't end or make any changes to water contracts. So, you know, everybody's got a fun tech issue.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Well, one thing, you know, it rains a lot here and it is cloudy a lot. We don't have is we record this as a big blizzard running rolling through Iowa. I saw just a few minutes ago that Simpson College they tried to be open and now they've closed. And um yeah, a lot of people posting on Facebook that they've taken the day off and they're posting pictures of the big blizzard. We don't have that where we're at.

SPEAKER_00 5:08

We don't. There have actually been there's been the first snow of this year already um in the mountains. Um, about 20 minutes north of us, there'll be some snow, um, but it'll disappear pretty quickly. And I know Shavish, which is a town um a little bit further up in the mountains, they had a huge ice storm come through. And so everything was all the trees were like crystallized, and that was very pretty, but things are kind of back to normal. Here it's um foggy at the moment, um, rainy, so it's colder, not as cold as you all, but colder. I'd say we're in the 40s right now, and we've got a little front coming through, so um, but that will change highs in the 50s, low 50s. I know it sounds horrible for those of you who are gonna be tired of this cold really quickly, but yeah, no scraping windshields or shoveling or any of those kinds of things. And that I am not sad about. Um, the boys miss snow though. Do you miss snow?

SPEAKER_01 6:10

No.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

You don't miss snow? No, no shoveling or any of those things. No, um, I am cold here, which is funny. Are you cold here?

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Sometimes I'm very cold, and you look at the temperature and it's like fifty degrees, but um on rainy days especially it it uh the cold kinda Well, we don't have our thick coats out. We're wearing kind of our windbreaker jackets. Maybe that's something to do with it.

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Well, I mean we could get those out, but I do find my raincoat, so my hiking raincoat is enough to keep me warm. Like if I'm I just add another layer, like I can wear a light sweater and put that on and it's enough to keep me warm. So but I remember giving my mama a hard time when she'd say it's inhumanely cold out in Houston and nobody could walk, and it was in the 50s. Um but now I'm kind of getting it.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

But your perspective changes, that's for sure. On yes, you you get used to whatever the local climate is.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

True. So now we're in a neighborhood. Um, we haven't really seen a lot of the neighbors yet. Of course, it's been holidays and people are in and out. Um, and now we have a view of Fondarcada instead of Oliveira. So we're just a couple minutes down the road. But we have a great view of the church and cemetery up in the mountain right across from us. So um no real like well, I guess there is a farm behind us. I swear the farm behind us. We wake up in the morning and drink our coffee, and I swear there's a turkey that lives there. Although this morning it sounded more like an elephant, if you ask me, and the way it was talking. I don't know. What is what is back there, do you know?

SPEAKER_01 7:56

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

We haven't quite figured it out yet. Maybe we could see if we could record the sound that it makes and I know, and then have you all tell us what it is, because we can we can see parts of things, but there's so much um brush and so many plants that you can't see through the fence to figure out what animal is making this noise. But it's it's definitely something different.

SPEAKER_01 8:18

It is.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Yeah, I think it's a turkey. That seems the most logical to me, but we'll we'll see what happens. I don't know. There are times where I'm like, or maybe it's just somebody making random sounds like they're hunting. I don't know. So we'll see. But I think that now that we're, you know, January 8th, January 9th, um, all of the Christmas decorations from town are coming down now. We've gone past the Dia de Reyesh. So Epiphany has passed, and everybody's eaten their rosca de Reyesh, their king's cake, and which we actually ate the chocolate version because our children will not eat anything with dried fruit in it. Um, but we've eaten that chocolate version a couple of times, and we didn't have a baby Jesus or anything baked into ours. It was just basically a chocolate babka baked into a wreath. I mean it was it was horrible. No, it was just fine. But yeah, I think that's the the most of what we did as far as for radius.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Yeah, the holidays are over, Sass, just kind of back at it. Life is normal, but we don't really know what normal is like. We've only been here, well, only coming up on ten months.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

I know we have not lived January and February here. So what I can tell you is that um the boys did well at the end of their first term. Um, Tyler is doing really well getting at a scale of five. Three is passing, fours and fives and everything, um, except for threes and a couple of things. So he's at or above grade level and everything. Jack is at or above grade level in everything, except that he's getting twos in Portuguese, second language, and physics, chemistry, and math. And for Jack, that's pretty damn good. Um, his Portuguese skills have drastically improved. Um, and I think that he's kind of turned a corner where things just like have clicked overnight. For those of you who learn a second language know how that works. So he's feeling really confident and really good about that. So I expect to see a lot of those things change. Um, but yeah, he's he's noticed that he's a little bit lost, not with he says it's great to not be lost because you don't understand what they're saying. But sometimes the content is a little more complicated than than he was expecting. So we're working on it. It's fine. He's doing a great job, actually. I'm really impressed. So, you know, um, he he actually is one of the highest scores in French class, and he's been having extra French help. But I love that he had to have extra French help because he was about a year behind in French, and yet he's outperforming the people who've had French from the very beginning. So some things are clicking, and so yes, he is learning multiple languages at once. Poor child. Okay, right? He's like, if I could just focus on Portuguese, I'm like, you have to take French, everybody takes French. So part of the course. Um, we are going to have parent meetings though. So parent meetings will I we've got them this week, and um, I look forward to seeing how these parent meetings go. They've already sent out the agenda of all the things we have to talk about. Um, this is what you would consider a parent-teacher conference, but it's with every single parent of every child in the room all at once. So I will uh give you an update on how this goes. But I remember last time thinking this is the longest meeting, parent meeting I've ever been in in my life. Um, and so I expect this one to be not the good 15 minutes, 30 minutes you think it would be. I'm expecting more an hour and a half to two hours. So we'll see how it goes. Update soon.

unknown 12:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Well, otherwise, we're just kind of plugging along.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Yeah. Tax season's already started. So get your stuff in if you are gonna go ahead or if you're looking for somebody. We're still doing that. Um, turn everything in through the app. Um, yeah, virtually. So it works really well.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

All right. Well, we wanted to get a it's been like six weeks, so it was time to get an episode. We're still here and still doing our podcast will resume now. So I guess we can say catch us again next time on another.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

But wait, no, before we end.

SPEAKER_01 12:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Okay. So this is New Year's, right? I mean, if this is our New Year episode, what are the things you're hoping to accomplish in 2024 in Portugal, babe? What are you looking forward to this year?

SPEAKER_01 13:06

I think it'll be interesting to see how tax season goes. I think that we have some you know good things in the fire as far as some projects and then learning more of the language and and maybe seeing more of the country. We've taken a couple of little trips, but um, you know, maybe going to Spain.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Oh, yeah, no, we're gonna go to Spain. Like, that's a non-negotiable. 2024, Spain, here we come, and I've got a list. It's gonna take us six years to get through my list alone in Spain. Voice have said they want to go to London. I'm like, so maybe we'll do a quick trip to London, you know, fly out of Porto, not too bad. Um, the dogs are at the door. I would say things I'm looking forward to, um, looking back and seeing how much we've accomplished in in a year, and then also a full year of school of the boys. I'm just so proud of where they are. And yeah, I'm looking forward to getting getting a business up and running for myself, doing some more pottery, doing some baking, and uh kind of stretching those muscles and see how things go. I I actually made my first batch of bread this week and it didn't turn out terrible. So I'm in progress. So I think those are the things I'm I'm looking forward to. Getting back into it.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

All right. Well, join us again next time on another episode of As the Dinoson's turn.