Sandbox

Subscribe to this feed: RSS Atom

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233

Punnets of pain!
Posted by Nad on 8 June 2018 at 22:27
This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
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 :-)

A huge pile of shit!
Posted by Nad on 7 June 2018 at 19:40
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.

This girl chop wood good
Posted by Nad on 3 June 2018 at 20:12
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!"

Server move complete (again)
Posted by Nad on 31 May 2018 at 00:56
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
Posted by Nad on 26 May 2018 at 00:22
This post has the following tags: Our sixth year on the land
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 :-(

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233