That last of a multi-part series on our three-week June 2024 trip to Portugal (Lisbon and points north)…
The Porto airport is gleaming and quite efficient. Our passports were checked once during luggage check-in, once at an immigration barrier set up on the way to the gates that serve non-EU destinations, and once more at the gate. Except for the final check at the gate, this was all done without a wait on a Friday before a 9:00 am flight (might not have gone as well on a Sunday when the British are returning from their weekend escapes).
The check-in counters still have their Plexiglas coronapanic barriers and, as in Get Smart, humans respond in the predictable way of leaning to one side of it so that they’re able to hear each other:
To my delight, I found a handful of Scientists in the terminal, voluntarily packing themselves into 100-percent full airliners while relying on 3-cent masks to prevent becoming infected with a deadly aerosol virus. Here’s one in University of Virginia Statistics logo wear:
(And he/she/ze/they is wearing a murse?)
Here are a couple more:
The reintegration into a Rainbow-first society begins as soon as a passengers steps onto the United flight. The seatback video screen promotes exactly one class of movies to a passenger who doesn’t touch the screen and search by category:
The Out and Proud collection is all about “modern love”, so the child who views the screen might reasonably infer that a non-LGBTQ+ situation represented “obsolete love”. We landed and were greeted by a “masks mandatory” sign:
After nearly a one-hour wait to clear immigration, it was time for the kids to get a refresher on America’s state religion:
(As noted in a previous post, given that our passports were examined three times prior to departure by qualified Portuguese personnel, why can’t the U.S. just wave in anyone holding up a U.S. passport? That’s how it is done when people disembark a cruise ship in Miami. The U.S. immigration bureaucrats feel comfortable, apparently, relying on Royal Caribbean’s ability to keep track of passengers and their passports.)
We went to a secret restaurant in Newark that is reserved for at least moderately frequent United flyers. I told the kids to go into a public restaurant and tell the staff “We don’t want to eat here. We want to eat somewhere secret.” Everything was going smoothly until they noticed the CNN screen with the word “Trump” continuously displayed (see Do CNN viewers think that Donald Trump is a god? but it also might have been because we landed a day after the first Biden-Trump debate of the 2024 election). The 10-year-old asked me who I thought would win the election. I said that Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice among the Republicans and that it was impossible for me to predict how other Americans might vote, but Biden’s promises of student loan forgiveness and other free stuff was going to be very popular with many voters. (Whenever politics comes up, I remind them that people who situated differently will rationally vote differently and that, for example, their unionized public school teachers are almost certainly going to vote for Biden and they should respect that.) As I hadn’t sufficiently condemned Donald Trump, a couple of elite New Yorkers at a nearby table stepped in to tell the kids that Donald Trump was a convicted felon and that his crimes were too disgusting for them to even hear about (what is the right age for a child to learn about the world’s oldest profession and Donald Trump’s alleged customer status?) and that he was “a racist”. So the kids ended up learning quite a bit about the elite Democrat political faith just while changing planes (even the simplest mask can prevent respiratory virus infection; the Rainbow Flag worship, and the blind rage regarding Donald Trump).
Our Honda Odyssey was waiting for us in the PBI garage (somewhat more expensive than an Uber round-trip, but worth it, I felt, for the shade (our car would otherwise have been on the street or in our driveway)) and, unlike the Sixt rental Mercedes, started right up despite having sat for three weeks.
We got to the house around midnight Portugal time (same as London), but discovered that the upstairs A/C system had shut down. It had been professionally serviced three months earlier, but there was what looked like white jello growing in the condensate drain. I borrowed my engineer neighbor’s Shop Vac with custom PVC connector and managed to clear the clog. The next day… a second air handler shut down with the same issue. I vacuumed out all three lines (significant gunk and water from each) and scheduled an appointment with the professionals… I think what needs to be done in a compressed air/CO2/nitrogen blowout starting at the air handler every 3 months. Plus maybe an IV drip.
The more stories of HVAC nightmares, immigrants coming to US with nothing & leaving with $1 mil of debt or owing $40k property tax, the more lions are convinced houses have become more of a way of offloading the national debt onto human bodies than any form of housing.
I guess people still wearing masks and putting up mask-related signs haven’t seen Elon’s latest tweet?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1817357502725407024
2 suggestions: check the slope of any drainage piping, it might have been installed too close to level; also there is an anti-fungal additive, very inexpensive, that will prevent any kind of “snot” buildup.
At some point, I used Pro-Treat tablets that worked quite well. However, I had to remove the front AH cover to place the tablets once every three months. It turned out that vacuuming the drain line twice a year using a simple plastic attachment was much easier than unscrewing/screwing back 6/8 screws. Perhaps, cutting a window with a small lid in the front panel to make tablet placement easier would be an option.
In December, I replaced the AH with the one creating positive drain line pressure and decided not to do anything and wait until it clogs (or maybe not). The previous one produced negative pressure and clogged unless I used the tablets or a vacuum cleaner.
AACKK! It breaks my Cavalier heart to see they are apparently not allowing access to true statistics in that particular school in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The Pro Treat tablets work fine in the drip tray. I only put them once/year. I put in two, one at the low end near the drain and the other at the high end. They slowly dissolve with the low one dissolving first. If you set the temp to high when you left then the AC turned on only intermittently and you accidentally provided a perfect Petri dish upstairs.
By a bottle of one hundred for about $10.00 and give them away to your friends, ten at a time in a ziplock bag and tell them “When you change the filter, put the bag inside the front door; they never get lost. I supply my whole Austin, TX condo.