Sandbox
PVC pipe doesn't cut it out here in the wilderness![edit] | ||
| Posted by Nad on 2 August 2014 at 17:57 | ||
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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When we first laid our LAN and power cables between the house and the antenna on the hill for our rural net connection, we just had them naked and hammered in to trees with U-nails through the forest area, then held overhead on some strong fencing wire across the open areas. It wasn't long before the cables became worn and chewed, so we decided to lay the whole distance on the ground within a strong PVC pipe. This worked very well for a year or more, but in the last few weeks connectivity problems have begun again! I thought the problem must be due to the various cable joins at the ends and at the hub at the mid-point, but after checking, re-checking and even re-soldering them all, the problems remained :-( I could tell by the fact that I could connect without trouble from the mid-way hub, that the problem must be in the first hundred metre segment between the house and the mid-point, but I couldn't figure out where the problem was. It was Beth who eventually found the problem; after carefully examining the PVC pipe through the thickest part of the swamp she discovered that some animal has chewed many holes right through it exposing and chewing the cables within! It seems from the damage that whatever animal this is doesn't like to leave the thick cover of the forest and swamp, because there's no damage at all in the open areas or even under the house. It looks like we're going to have to use metal pipe for the fifty or so metres of forest and swamp!
It's not just me with these problems though, even Google have trouble protecting their cables under the sea from shark bites. |
Mouse attack![edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 22 July 2014 at 20:01 |
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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| Out here in the wilderness the mice are relentless! there's no point trapping them and taking them away or even killing them, because within hours of their absence others quickly replace them. We've been having a lot of trouble with them over the last few weeks, perhaps because it's nesting time or something. Every night many of them are scuttling all over the house looking for any slightest hole they can gnaw away at to get in.
A few nights ago one of them finally made it into the ceiling. We tried putting a trap up there, but country mice seem to be smarter than city ones and they're able to remove the food from the trap carefully without setting it off. We quickly set about sealing up any holes in the ceiling that it would be able to enter the main living area through, but unfortunately we were too late! It managed to get out of the ceiling onto the top storage shelf, and when we started removing items from the shelf to reveal it and trap it, it made a huge two metre jump onto the kitchen bench and disappeared amongst all the bits and bobs. It took an hour or two, but we eventually managed to corner it and get it into a mouse-transportation jar. We tried to seal everything up as best we could by nailing bits of wood around the suspicious looking parts of the exterior, but then last night we heard another one scampering around in the ceiling! We eventually discovered that they were getting into the capping and entering from in there. So today I went up there and pulled it all off to put concrete in all the holes, so that firstly they won't be able to get into the capping, and secondly if they did manage to get in there's no entrance into the ceiling from there. Here's a picture after I got started with the job.
The lesson learned from all this is when you build a house in the forest, it has to be made without any holes at all, especially in the foundations or roof which often are left with some small holes such as under corrugations. It's best to seal any holes up with concrete during construction, because it's a major hassle doing it after everything's built! Concrete, metal or hard wood is best because the mice will eat through anything softer given enough time. |
Cycling back home from Caxias[edit] | ||
| Posted by Nad on 14 July 2014 at 15:43 | ||
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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| Since we both now have decent bikes, we decided to try riding all the way back from Caxias! Normally this would be about 80km (60km to Lageado Grande, and then the usual 20 from there back home). Eduardo, Beth and I all cycled to Max and Lucy's the evening before for dinner and stayed the night there which is about 20km along the highway towards Lageado Grande, which made the trip a bit shorter :-) The first photo below is taken at Max and Lucy's as we're just about to leave at 10am.
Also Eduardo showed us a way we could go that meant we only needed to travel about 17km on the highway to a small town called Apanhador, at which point we could have some Pastels for lunch and then turn off and travel through the country side from there. The total distance is about 5km shorter this way, and the country tracks are a much nicer ride - also this stretch of highway is really dangerous, and you have to cycle on the rough gravel shoulder to avoid being hit by trucks! After turning off onto the dirt road, it's about 12km to another small town called Juá which has just a school and a wood yard. We stopped at the wood yard to get their phone number as they may have better prices than our place in Canela, and they would be able to deliver to our place very cheaply. From there it was another 15km to Lava Pés, and we were starting to get really tired by this time - we started to think that Eduardo's instructions were way out, as it felt like it had been more than 30km from Juá by the time we finally saw Lava Pés!!! But when we checked the map later it was only about 15km, so we must have been really tired! The second photo below shows our first view of Lava Pés coming from Juá which was a great relief indeed! We knew would could make it the last 12km home when we were in familiar territory, so we slowly carried on. Four cars passed us on the road home from Lava Pés and three of them were people we knew who stopped to talk, which really made us feel like we're proper locals here now :-) We finally arrived home at about 5:30pm, so we had taken about seven and a half hours in total - but we had stopped for half an hour for lunch in Apanhador, another half hour just before Juá to fix a puncture, and another half hour or so for various conversations and bites to eat along the way. The total distance we cycled that day was 56km, which is the longest ride we've done so far. It was a very hard ride for us, and we were both really glad we hadn't also had to do the extra 20km we'd done the day before to get as far as Max and Lucy's!
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