Jonesberries

Promised some photos of Rock on Christmas and Alana and here they are. I am blogging from Cafe Chinta in Armaceo de Pera. The nice gentleman who runs this cafe says, “tell all your friends to come to my cafe and get free internet.” Anyways back to the photos.  Our truck became a billboard. We covered it with posters on 3 sides and parked it at the edge of the street in front of the warehouse.

The stage came around on Friday morning.

Next came the generator. Andrew was drooling. Then he realized the generator had an inferior engine to Maggie’s engine. His mind started spinning about Maggie generating enough energy for some future festival in some sort of obscure location around the world.

Now time to bring in some musicians. 8 bands worth. Great people to hang out with.

Hannah “helping out” Rob Cassells with his sound check.

Sam and Donald … uuuuhhhh … working hard on video.

Look who came to see us. Cindy! We love cindy. Me and Andrew met her when she was 14 in Australia. We are so glad she is still in our lives!!!

Rock on Christmas is over and done with. The warehouse is bare and ready to get the partially restored cars back inside. We had a great time! All of us worked so hard. Havent got all the technology and adapters and readers back together to be able to post pictures.

Photos: I will give you some of my favourite in word pictures since I am technologically challenged today. Lizzy and Alana shimmying up the poles of a bilboard to put up some Rock on Christmas posters – and arrows! All the jamming together – playing instruments together and singing as easy and profound as talking together. Sam, Donald and Alana in the “mosh pit”. All my kids but one on stage with the rapper. TJ and Hannah asleep next to the food stalls with heavy metal music blaring. Dang, was it loud. Many of us without voices and exhausted but what a great honour to be part of this festival. What amazing, selfless, crazy people those musicians were. How great to meet them. To see the older “father” musicians encouraging the younger ones and it warms my mother’s heart to see the impact they had on my kids.

Tip: Not exactly a travel tip. If you ever decide to plan and help with a heavy metal festival with your family ensure you have enough good quality earplugs for your family and some friends. It prevents the need to stick rolled up serviettes (napkins) in your ears when you are overcome with the reality and internal monologue of, “Dang, this is loud. I dont remember music being this loud when I was a teenager. Am I really that old?”

Other news, no I am not pregnant!!! Alana will be joining us. Where will she sleep? We have several ideas, not sure what we will go with. We love Alana. We have known her for about 4 years and she seems just crazy enough to travel with us for a while. I was going to find one of our old pictures of her but cant even get my act together enough to that.

We are going to go to a campground now with our extended family as is our family tradition after a festival to rest and regather.

So our days are numbered for electricity and internet and 2 working computers. Oh yes, our mobile lifestyle may have an affect on jonesberries.com. We are trying to make this less of a problem. Among other changes we have done a restyle. We had alot of fun with our new theme. With the last theme we had to hack into the HTML to make changes but with this theme it is alot easier to add personality. They seem to actually encourage it. We hope to also make it easier to blog or tweet or give a shout or whatever from the road.

So, Andrew is quite pleased as the new look is looking alot more minimal. The truth is me and Abi are looking at this as kinda like moving into a new house (or truck). White walls just screaming out, “GIVE ME PERSONALITY!” Ahem. Yes. We have already done alot of changes. Do you like abi’s chocolate brown text? (did you also see we snuk in some bright pink posing as almost red?). Well, our blog is on a journey just like us, heh.

Well it is now less than a week to rock on christmas. There is so much to do! We are still very language challenged and we are not from here so we are doing what we can to help.

Older members of our group went to whitewash the warehouse. Instead of paying for the warehouse we offered to whitewash it or as the literal translation says, “clean her face”.

Abi stayed back and baked a cake for Ranie’s 3rd birthday. Abi, Hannah and TJ also watched Edna’s twin 2 year old boys so Edna could get some much needed rest. We all think Edna is amazing. She is pulling together all the details, working with all that nasty admin stuff. She says she might take a break from her phone for about a month after the event. I wouldn’t blame her.

We had a great Thanksgiving. How about you? I gotta tell you there are so many American holiday traditions that we dont bring over. Choosing instead to enjoy the local customs. This is one holiday, however, that we love to observe every year, wherever we are. It is just a great holiday that I dont think has been altered as much as other holidays. It is about celebration, food, family, life and community with each other and the indigenous people.  You gotta love it!

Elizabeth had to say goodbye to her pet pumpkin so we could make our pumpkin pie. A very emotional experience for her.

We all cooked and the cooking started the day before.

Andrew cooked the turkey on a bbq with some modifications with tin foil an oven shelf or two and a pot. He was very proud of his invention.

Those who enjoyed our meal were our family, Donald (U.K.), Denny (U.S.) and lots of new Portuguese friends. Edna especially kept visiting the kitchen and getting tastes every once in a while saying, “these are things you dream about”. I hope your thanksgiving was wonderful too. Now time for the clean-up. hmmmmm.

Just thinking about our many faces of roadschooling.

We just made a shift this week.

TJ has decided that she likes schedules so we discussed what she wanted to be learning and came up with the following categories. Math, Reading, Writing, Music, Art, Portuguese, Animals, Gymnastics, New gym stuff, recess and golden time. With her new gym stuff she wants to learn to juggle, swim like a dolphin and be able to climb up someones back unassisted. At her suggestion we made a schedule and a series of small square papers with a different subject on each paper. The appropriate cards go up on the door at the beginning of each day and get taken down as they are completed.

The biggest Thanksgiving turkey we ever had was 33 pounds (15 kilos) which just squeezed into our double oven. We served 45 people that day, in our home in Portland, Oregon. I was the chef, of course, which means that I took all the credit for the entire meal which was, to be honest, composed of many other food items that my wife had made – sweet potato souffle with marshmellow, jello salads, pumpkin pie – but he who cooks and carves the turkey wears the crown. Just the way it is.

We invited a lot of international students who wanted a real American thanksgiving. It didn’t matter that I was a New Zealander. There were Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists. We all went round in a large circle giving thanks for what God had done for us. It took a while. It was a big happy memorable day. Hope you have the same today. We are having a slow and kind Thanksgiving here in Portugal.

For those of you outside USA, who only know of Thanksgiving from old episodes of Happy Days, Bob Beltz has an informative article on the history of Thanksgiving. And thanks to CG Grant and Co for sending me a nice Thanksgiving letter and this animated GIF that I appropriated.

People love, love, love this meal. I have cooked this meal twice in the last month for 12+ people. Serge and Jimmie swear it is the best meal they have ever had. Donald wants to cook it with me next time, “I dont cook”, he says, “but I want to learn how to make this because I want to have it over and over again”. Frankly, I dont understand all the fuss. It is based on a meal I have had all my life. Come to think of it, I think it was one of our favourite meals as kids. Well, I cant give you a recipe but I will give you a “story of preparation”. BTW, this recipe adapts well to a vegetarian meal, just leave off the porkchops and drizzle with olive oil instead. It is also great to cook for a crowd as it is one dish for meat, starch and veg. I like it also because I get to use all the leftover fresh veg laying about.

So, here goes. I get my chopping board out and a nice sharp knife. I know I will be doing alot of chopping. I normally do 2 large casserole dishes for 12+ people. So, I put my 2 casserole dishes just behind the cutting board. I take out a pile of potatoes, onions, carrots and whatever else I can find. A month ago I made it vegetarian and had courgettes (zucchini) and broccoli (including the stalks). Last nite I didnt have courgettes or broccoli but had a big bunch of some sort of strange portugeuse dark leafy thing that people say, “kinda like spinach, you just cook it longer”. I start slicing potatoes and then take turns with  all the other things in piles surrounding me. I wash everything well and leave the skins on everything but the onions. I slice as thin as I can, especially the carrots as they take the longest to cook. My animated husband helps by entertaining me with stories within stories of all things internet and blog and what people are talking about in the blogesphere. So, gradually my casserole pans got fuller and fuller. Something beautiful to behold.  Look at how the colours play with each other.  Two whole pans full of the vivid colours of playful fresh veg. I look lovingly at my sliced veg and give it a bit of a toss. My mom only used potatoes and onion and left them neatly layered. Uh, sorry mom, I am a bit rebellious, no neat layers of fresh veg for me. I give them another little toss about so the colours and textures can play a bit. I see a bit more potatoes than anything else. After both casseroles are full. Andrew is hovering now, the blogesphere stories have stopped and he is peering suspiciously at this large pile of veg that will be his dinner. He asks about salt and pepper and I tell him he can do it. Abigail has grated a generous amount of cheese, just normal boring cheese, in Portugal they have “flamenco”, in Australia it would be “tasty”, in America and UK I guess it would be “mild cheddar”. The key is a generous amount. I looked in the fridge and found a little corner of Brie and added that too. I really like some grated parmesan on top so Paulo eagerly went to the store to get some. Saying as he went out the door, “I love any meal that has cheese in it”. After the cheese I put 1 small container of cream for each casserole. I prefer 2 for each so I poured some milk over instead. I layed the pork chops over the top. Oh wait! Andrew has stolen my pork chops! Dang, that husband of mine. He cant stand the thot of me putting raw pork chops on top. He is looking guilty at the stove while he sears the pork chops with a bit of gravy left over from Sundays meal. NOW the pork chops go on and it cooks in a moderate oven for 1 1/2 hours.

Had a very productive day today.

Among the normal stuff we cleared the land here. It is now ready for “rock on Christmas” camping. Well, actually a local farmer, Viriglio had mercy on us and came over with his manly mega tractor. He likes curry so we will make him a curry meal to say thank you.

While the men did their manly land clearing the 3 older girls went out with Edna and put up lots of posters. Me and TJ just worked around the truck and had some special time together.

So, we went to the market on Saturday. Samuel says, “I want to learn to cook squid, well, maybe octopus”. As this is not a typical request to get from a teenage boy we decided to oblige and Sam picked out his octopus, had the man de-ink it and carried it home. Edna coached Sam and Donald through the cooking and we had 2 beautiful octopus dishes.

Even Hannah loved the octopus. She wasnt sure about the tentacles but decided they were good too. “tastes like chicken chewing gum”, she said. I wonder if the whole exercise was just for the photo opportunities. hmmmm.