Jeanette had read that a new Italian restaurant had opened on the island in the town of Santa Cruz.  Santa Cruz is a suburb of Lagoa, about 10 minutes from Ponta Delgada.  The restaurant is called Villa Chianti.  What's unique about it is its run but an American-Azorean couple.  Michael Cockcroft is the chef.  We had reservations at 7pm.  The restaurant is a corner building with a great view of the ocean.  7pm is early for Azoreans so the place was pretty quiet.  Our meals were great and Jeanette considers it one of her new favorite restaurants of the islands.

It turns out that just after we left, Racquel and her husband came and had dinner there that same night.  They loved the place so much they stayed till closing time.  :-)

Jeanette and I have been married for 4 years now.  Being on the island limits what I can do.  I can't run to Hallmark and get her a card since I'd never know for sure what it said.  But I was able to do two things for her.  With my limited Portugese and the florist's limited English, I managed to get a half-dozen roses made up in a bouquet for her.

The other thing I did was add a mini-sprinkler system to her flower garden.  Now, with the twist of a handle, she has a fine spray water the entirety of her garden.  Spikes hold down the black tubing which have little 180-degree sprinker heads inserted every so often.  It was pretty easy to install and everything was available at the hardware store.

My next step may be to connect it to the home network so she can control it from her Tilt wirelessly.  :-)

When I was single, living in an apartment in Springfield, I had a 5-inch color TV in my kitchen that was tied into the cable box in the living room.  That way I could watch what was on TV while I was cooking dinner.  Yes, this was way before TiVo, DVRs and Media Centers. 

The Media Center we have for the living room has been fantastic and changed how we watch TV.  But it can do more like play music, display weathr info, run a slideshow, etc.  I thought the music aspect would be great for the kitchen.  But we run into a couple of problems.  First, I don't have a 5-inch monitor that would work with the Media Center.  Second, a Media Center Extender wouldn't play all the different video formats I have.  And third, it would require the living room Media Center to be on all the time.

So I decided to try an old Dell laptop as a self-contained Media Center.  The Dell is a Latitude C840.  Nothing special but with the upgraded NVidia card (to go from 32MB video RAM to 64MB), it met all of the minimum requirements for Microsoft's Media Center.  I couldn't hang the 15-inch LCD panel below the cabinets because it would take up too much space and block access to items against the back wall, like spices.  Seeing how thin the LCD was outside of the plastic casing, I decided to try mounting it in a picture frame that would attach to the front of the cabinets.

I got a replacement cabinet door made so that when we leave, I can put the unmodified original door back up.  The frame was a silver 11"x14" (to try and match the trim of the center cabinet door) that I cut down to fit the 15-inch LCD.  The laptop is mounted to the inside of the cabinet door with the LCD ribbon cable going through a hole in the door behind the LCD.  USB-powered speakers sit on top of the cabinets for audio.  The power and speaker cables run down past a notch in the door to the laptop.  The laptop connects to the home network via wireless and is able to play all of the videos stored on the TeraStations, just like the living room Media Center.

All I'm missing is an extra remote and receiver so that I can control it as I do the living room one.  With the laptop behind the cabinet door, I can't hear it at all - no fan noise, no hard drive noise, etc.  It does get a little warm in that particular cabinet but it doesn't affect the laptop nor the dishes. 

To me, it works and looks great.  I've seen a couple of areas for improvement that I'll apply when we get our permanent home back in the States.  But for now, we have entertainment in the kitchen while we cook.

See more in the photo galleries.