Organic Design (blog)

Punnets of pain![edit]

Posted by Nad on 8 June 2018 at 22:27

A few weeks ago I found this insane company called Viciado em Pimentas who grow some of the hottest chilli peppers in the world! The guy who founded the company, Fábio Tuma, spent a year developing their own special hybrid chilli plant called VICNIC-1313 based on the Carolina Reaper and the Trinidad Scorpian Moruga - it's hotter than the Bhut Jolokia, but he couldn't beat the pure Carolina Reaper!

I ordered a big selection of their products when I found their company on the net, but they're only just arrived due to the truck strike. You can see my selection below as well as a photo of Fábio and his punnets of pain!

As well as the standard insanely hot sauces, I also ordered a couple of mustards, a ketchup and a barbeque sauce each with an added chilli bite! They also threw in a special free present - some strawberry jellies sprinkled with coconut - and of course they too have a serious chilli aftershock :-)

Posted by Nad on 7 June 2018 at 19:40
A huge pile of shit![edit]
This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
We just paid a thousand bucks for nothing but a big pile of shit - literally - R$1200 for sixteen tons of chicken manure! Actually we gave the guy an extra couple hundred because we ordred it when we were in Canela and told him we'd head home first and let him know if the road was ok for a big truck. Well it seemed ok, but when we returned to meet him and guide him back the road had somehow got much more slippery - so slippery that even the Hilux was sliding all over the place in some parts! Still, he took it slow and got there in ok in the end, but there was no way he was going to do the last kilometre, so we're moving it the rest of the way a trailer load at a time.

Posted by Nad on 3 June 2018 at 20:12
This girl chop wood good[edit]
This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
Beth's been getting really efficient at chopping firewood! Not only that, but she's the only girl I've seen who actually uses the axe with proper technique - there are many videos on Youtube showing women doing a good job chopping their wood, such as barefoot girl, tiny girl or no-pants girl, but their technique is awful! Here's a description of proper technique, and as you see from the video on the right, Beth's really got the knack down pat :-) Beth loves chopping firewood for dissipating agitation, and especially on cold days to warm up - like Henry Ford said, "chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice!"

Posted by Nad on 31 May 2018 at 00:56
Server move complete (again)[edit]
This post has the following tags: Server
It was only a month and a half ago that we completed the move of our server from Codero in the US to AbeloHost in the Netherlands, but unfortunately that just wasn't working out. They're really nice guys, prices are good and support is responsive, but a lot of dodgy spammers, botnet controllers and phishing sites have been using their service and their IP address range has gained a very bad reputation as a dirty host full of crime & abuse! This meant that a lot of the emails sent from our server were being rejected by other mail servers, so we've now just completed yet another move - we're still in the Netherlands covered by Dutch privacy law, but now we're with AltusHost on a clean IP address :-) We've also just moved all our .nz domain names from webdrive.co.nz to gandi.net for the same reason that initiated the server move - our financial situation is in limbo at the moment and we've become part of the infamous "unbanked" so we need to move to services that accept crpyto as a payment option. As it turned out Gandi not only accepts crypto, but is also 30% cheaper than Webdrive :-)

Antonio trabalhando na terra[edit]

Posted by Nad on 26 May 2018 at 00:22

We now have a guy called Antonio living with us for a few months to help us get things moving on the land. He's been working for Beth's parents for a few years and they highly recommended him to us since he's been wanting to earn some extra money and also have some peace and quiet :-)

He's unbelievably fast and strong! The first job was to rebuild the south fence which was in a terrible condition. But it goes through about 250 meters of dense bush, some of in is thigh-deep in mud and water. I thought this would be the first week's job, but he had cleared the entire 250 metres of bush with just a machete on the first morning, and the fence was completed before the end of the second day!!! He's made and repaired many more fences since then, including about a dozen counter-masters which are used to make a firm ending that has wires pulling on only one side. In his first week, he's also cleared huge amounts of overgrown grass and made many holes filled with manure and lime ready for planting fruit trees!

But he works so fast that we've been unable to get the materials he needs fast enough! Although we have been having extremely bad luck as well, there's been too much rain for a truck to come, and half our trips we've made in the car to Lageado Grande and Canela have been almost a complete waste of time because the things we've needed have been out of stock - in all the stores at the same time! When we finally managed to successfully get an order of fence posts and buy a trailer to carry them it turned out we don't have a tow bar attachment, we got one made, but they took so long that it was too late to pick up the wood so we had to stay in a hotel for the night. Then on the way back, one of the bridges was broken! It looks like truck carrying a load of pine had snapped one side of the bridge and a trailer full of pine logs had fallen into the river! Much of the remaining wood on the bridge was cracked, but we decided to risk it - our load was only half a ton and the bridge still looked pretty solid. Later a neighbour told us that you can actually drive across the river to the side of the bridge, we went back to check it out, and indeed we could get across quite easily, but the river bed is too rocky to try it with a trailer I think.

Just when we thought things were starting to move smoothly with a week of fine days and we were ready to place a big order of materials to be delivered by a truck, all the trucks in Brazil have gone on strike!!! Petrobras wants to raise the price of oil even though the rest of the world is lowering oil prices. It was the last straw for the truckies and they took action, now all the cities throughout Brazil are in a major crisis, there's no petrol in the gas stations and many supermarkets are out of common items! Luckily one of our regular truck guys said he had enough gas that he could still do a delivery, but after he called in the morning to confirm the damn cell phone tower went down and we couldn't answer him!!!

The only issue is that it seems like the cold may be a problem, he comes from much further north where it never really gets below about 15 degrees, but down here the early mornings have been well below zero. We're getting the feeling that the isolation, the freezing cold weather and the lack of modern comforts are too much for him and he may cut his time here down a lot :-(

Posted by Nad on 16 April 2018 at 17:49
Server move to Netherlands complete[edit]
This post has the following tags: Server
Over the weekend we've moved the server from Codero in the US to the Dutch hosting company Abelohost. Apart from a few small email glitches, the move went very smoothly. The US has been stamping out liberties like there's no tomorrow, and Internet privacy is one of the worst hit areas with abominations like the CLOUD act being signed in. This along with the fact that Codero have never responded to requests I've been making to them for over three years to accept crypto-currencies as a payment option has finally prompted OD to leave and head for greener pastures. We chose the Netherlands as our new digital home because Dutch law takes privacy much more seriously than most other countries in the world, especially the US where the very concept of privacy has been rendered virtually non-existent now. Abelohost use the 100% Dutch Serverius data-center and they accept over fifty different Crypto currenies for payment :-) We're now running Debian 9, Nginx 1.10, PHP 7 and NodeJS 8.11. All the wikis are running MediaWiki 1.30 which is the first time ever that everything's completely up to date!

Mum & Dad's last week in Brazil[edit]

Posted by Nad on 10 April 2018 at 15:38

After spending a few days in Caxias, we spent the last week of the holiday at our land again, there was a bit of rain, but the view from the guest house is nice especially when there's some mist rolling in over the hill :-)

We went for a walk to the other waterfall when the weather cleared up a little bit. We drove most of the way, but stopped the car at the top of the hill at the start of the infamous Vaca Velha trail. I realised later that actually we could have driven all the way to the river as the road only gets really bad a few hundred meters past the other side.

On the way back to the car, we noticed some fallen Pinhão so we collected some to cook for dinner, but then completely forget we had them and had omelette for dinner instead!

The next day we went back to Caxias where Beth dropped the three of us off at the bus station, and then went to take the car in for some repairs while we set off for Porto Alegre. We spent a couple more days there so that we could go to the public market, and Mum & Dad could get some good photos of some of the historic buildings and go to the museum. And then it was time for them to head back to the airport so they could get their flight to Chile via São Paulo and then a few days after that back to Nova Zelândia.

I got the bus back to Caxias and then we went to Canela in the newly fixed car and spent a few days there for Beth to do her drama course. This time we stayed in the building right across the road from the cathedral which looked right down on the apartment we all stayed in a couple of weeks earlier :-)

Mum & Dad spending time at the land[edit]

Posted by Nad on 30 March 2018 at 22:24

The holiday hasn't quite gone to plan, first Dad and Beth and now me, have come down with various sicknesses and we've had to cut out all the hot places (which is pretty much everywhere!) and cut the duration down to just one month. We were unable to book anywhere comfortable to stay in Florianópolis due to it being right on Easter, and so we've spent the whole time staying at our land and at a hotel in Caxias!

We have two waterfalls that are a short walk from our land, and we went to the first one last week:

And the rest of the time has been spent reading or doing odd jobs such as chopping and collecting firewood for the winter and putting glass in the guest house windows - while being careful not to disturb the uninvited guests squatting above!

Mum & Dad's 2018 holiday in Brazil begins![edit]

Posted by Nad on 11 March 2018 at 14:23

Mum & Dad arrived in Brazil the day before yesterday! I forgot to take the camera when we left the land and I've also been changing over to a new Purism laptop that they brought over from New Zealand with them, so the blog has started a couple of days late sorry!

They flew from Auckland to Santiago (Chile), spent a day there, and then flew another six hours across the continent to São Paulo, and then took another couple of hours on a connecting flight to Porto Alegre. Meanwhile, Beth and I drove from the land to Canela where we unpacked all our luggage into the apartment we've rented for the week, and then I caught the bus to Porto Alegre about three hours away to meet Mum & Dad at the airport. Their plane arrived right on time and we were on our way to a hotel about half an hour after I got to the airport. The next morning we had breakfast at about 9:30 and then got a taxi to the bus station to get a bus back to Canela. We all arrived in the apartment at about midday :-)

We've just been relaxing and going out to nice places for lunch and dinner, but one thing Mum and Dad did do here in Canela was visit the Caracol Falls and go on the gondola which gets some very nice views of the falls.

After that we went to lunch at a nice buffet called Paradouro Rural which is a few km out of Canela to the north, they have good traditional Gaucho food as well as a good vegetarian selection for Beth and I, some nice speciality beers and some free Cachaça ;-) They also have tables overlooking a really nice view of the valley, those eucalyptus in the background are around eighty meters tall! It's amazing that it's only 40km from our land, but yet there's tropical fruit there that's really thriving like papaya and banana.

Unfortunately, on what was to be our last day here in the apartment in Canela, it was pouring with rain all night with thunder as well. We thought this probably wouldn't be a very good situation to go to the land in, so we've extended our booking until Monday, and then we'll go straight to Caxias from there. We can do a day trip to the land if the weather picks up, and stay there for longer after Caxias. So meanwhile we've set our selves up for some rainy days in the apartment :-)

Posted by Nad on 6 March 2018 at 00:28
New house design for 2018[edit]
This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
Oops! I should have posted this a month ago! The bad feng shui in our house has been driving Beth crazy¹²³⁴⁵ so after getting some emergency interior design advice from our friend Irena, we bought some new furniture in Canela and made some long overdue changes!