The process for getting residency in Portugal is: you do a bunch of prep work, you apply for your visa, you come to Portugal, you go to your SEF appointment, you wait, you get your Residence Card. That card means you can come and go at will. It means you can sign up for the…
Toenails, Coffee, and Taco Bell
Once you cut your toenails in a new country, you actually feel like you live there. When I finished there was a strange shift in my feeling – this is home. This is normal. We were kinda “frenetic” at the start – every time we wake up, we’d ask: where are we going, what are…
Accessing American Streaming Media
tl;dr – I bought this router and set up Unlocator.com on it. It sits behind my ‘regular’ network. I use the regular network for work, but the ‘media network’ for the apple TV, and the various homepods. If Alison wants to watch American TV on her iPad, she needs to flip over to the ‘media…
Moving to Lisbon: Two Months In
Woof. It’s been a whole-ass two months already. How did that happen? I know some folks have been wondering where our heads are at now, so I wanted to give you a bit of an update. Things are much, much better. Some stuff is still dumb. The toilet seat is still broken, the ceiling still…
Moving to Lisbon: The Meta
We’ve been here a little more than a month now. Things have settled down a little, and it’s certainly more calm than the first week, but there is still a lot of friction. One of the most surprising friction points is, well, me. I’m a pretty worldly person, and I wouldn’t have considered myself particularly…
Moving to Lisbon: Week 4
Hello friends. I’ve been meaning to write this for a week or so, but life gets in the way sometimes. I’d like to start by saying it’s much better now. Not perfect at all, but no major meltdowns and the stress level is starting to become pretty manageable, which is all I could hope for…
Telecoms Woes Redux Redux?!
As I mentioned before, I hooked myself up to Mint Mobile from here in Portugal and it went fine – it actually went quite well! But hooking up Alison’s phone has been an absolute disaster – up until now. I JUST GOT IT WORKING! This is going to be an in-the-weeds post about the specifics…
Moving to Lisbon: The First Week
I had meant to write this when it was a bit fresher, but I honestly didn’t have it in me. Friends, this past week was hard. Harder than I thought it would be, and I’ve been though some shit. I had what I assume must have been a full on panic attack yesterday that was…
Telecoms Redux
I wrote about my plan for how to do what we needed to do for phones and watches and everything already. But now it’s come time to actually do it. Hasn’t quite gone to plan. I started from a worldview where I figured all phones and everything all use the same chipsets at this point….
SEF Appointment: Done. Sorta.
Today was our SEF appointment, which will give us a Portuguese residency card. This will, among other things, give us access to the health care system in Portugal (which is a whole other blog post that we need to write), local resident rates on things like parking and car rentals, and so on. The residency…