Diary 2007-09-23

Posted on September 23, 2007

This was somewhat of a strange weekend…

Started out Friday evening when I was suppose to have the first sax lesson after the school vacation, which got canceled (the teacher is having a string of concerts on Friday evenings at the Casino do Estoril, so it is for a good cause), then I had plans for dinner with a couple of friends, which also got scrapped. Then I had a total of three concerts planned for that night (well, not planned exactly, but I did think about going to each one of them), but with nothing to do until it was time for any of them I was thinking about forgetting about the whole thing and going home to get some sleep (hey, it was a really rough week…)
And then another group of friends got wind of one of the concerts I was thinking about attending and we ended up making plans for “dinner and a show”, which did come to fruition.
But even that was weird because we’d all seen at the site that the concert was scheduled to start at 00h30 and so we had to burn lots of time at the restaurant and when we finally got tired of being there and went down to the venue it turned out that they had made a mistake on the site and the concert had started at 22h00! We still got to listen to half an hour of it, on the room next door, but I was really disappointed because I’d have loved to watch Donald Harrison play live and I have no clue when he will be back at Portugal.
Oh well…

Then yesterday I finally had the sax lesson and it rocked! We got to have the lesson on the big room, with the stereo, and basically we put on a play-along, the teacher gave me the “directions” about the song we were going to play and taught me the melody and after that we just played it through a few times and jammed a bit on top of it. Great fun!
The rest of the day was a bit more “normal” and I decided to bite the bullet and start to put all the papper work in order. I hadn’t touched my pappers since the divorce and the pille was getting so big it was scary, so I ended up having a nice(?) quiet afternoon/evening playing sokoban with piles of paper. Hey, it’s got to get done and I do feel better for having had a first go at it. Still need to buy binders and boxes for it all, though.

With the weekend drawing to a close, I decided at the last minute to go out to Guincho and watch the sunset and, as it turns out, this was an excellent decision.
Guincho is traditionally an extremely windy, cold beach with ice-cold water. But this evening there was only the slightest of breezes –and a warm breeze at that–, and the water was actually very nice. So nice that I got my jeans all wet, even after I had rolled them up. It was just so nice feeling the sea water in my feet while strolling along the beach, listening to good old Stevie Nicks and watching the sun burning down into the sea in one of the most amazing sunsets I’ve witnessed here (and I have watched quite a few of them since moving here three months ago).
Each day I’m happier with my choice of location to live.

Autumn is finally here. But as a friend reminded me Friday, this means that we’ll soon have yellow and brown leaves all over Sintra to go and photograph. Yay!