Sandbox
Starting our second house[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 11 February 2016 at 00:07 |
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This post has the following tags: Our forth year on the land
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| We made a start on the foundations for the new house today. The wood hasn't arrived yet, but we had some cold concrete and large PVC pipes lying round which we could use to get started on the foundations. We decided to use concrete and PVC instead of logs for the foundations this time to make it more bug resistant.
We only got two of the six done though as there was a lot of weed-eating to do to clear the area and clear a path to it for the truck, and we had to make a gate in the fence to let the truck through - but not the cows! 
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Starting our forth year on the land[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 9 February 2016 at 13:20 |
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| Our third year on the land |
| Wow that year sped past in a flash! We've just got back from Brasília where we stayed with Beth's parents for a couple of months for Christmas and New Years. It's always good to catch up with the family and spend time with them, but we have to remember in future not to be away from our land for too long because we start really missing the peace and tranquillity of have natural forest all around us. We have another three months away soon too because we're visiting New Zealand, but after we get back we plan on spending some really solid time here!
One interesting thing that we did in Brasília was to do some bike Mechanic lessons with Beth's friend Danielson. This was mainly for Beth because she felt very unconfident about fixing anything mechanically on the bikes, but it's made me more confident too because there were some things I didn't really understand too such as the gear adjustment mechanism. He took us through assembling a bike completely from scratch and now Beth feels really confident to fix anything on our bikes :-) 
Remember the Habanero source that was too hot to handle? Well shortly after it was made I put two olives in the bottle, one for me and one for Beth's dad, the challenge was that on the last day of out visit, we would both eat one of the olives! Well I ate mine, but Beth's dad cheated and spat his out!!! It was pretty hot, but luckily we had ensured that we had some ice cold beer in the freezer to cool off with :-) 
We caught a plane back to Porto Alegre a couple of days ago, stayed in a hotel there then got a bus to Canela where we hired a car which we'll use for a few days while we get supplies and arrange building materials. We have to build a house over the next few weeks since they won't connect the power to our new pole unless there's a house within 40m of it (and they didn't want to put our pole close to our current house because they thought the truck would get stuck in the mud). When we arrived, every thing was really overgrown as usual, but amongst all the tangle of weeds we found heaps of ripe tomatoes and some grapes are ready too :-) The mulberry trees that had died from the intense surprise frost last year have regrown to the size they were before, and the banana tree is looking really good too - the tiny one that cropped up next to it is pretty big now as well! 
The strangest thing we saw when we arrived though was that a pumpkin vine had travelled all the way out of the vege patch straight to our door as if it specifically wanted to visit us in our house! Perhaps this is the way that home delivery works in the wild :-) 
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Too hot to handle![edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 27 December 2015 at 20:39 |
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This post has the following tags: Our third year on the land
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| We're staying at Beth's parents place in Brasília at the moment, and soon after we arrived, Beth's Dad introduced me to his new Red Savina Habanero plant! This kind of chilli pepper is extremely hot and held the world record for the hottest chilli from 1994 to 2006 when it was beaten by the Bhut jolokia, and the current record holder since 2013 is the Carolina Reaper which is a hybrid of the other two. These peppers are literally hundreds of times hotter than Tobasco source! So I thought it would be a good idea to cut a whole lot of them up and preserve them in sunflower oil to make a really hot source!
I've had better ideas :-( In the process of cutting them into small pieces a lot of the juice went onto my fingers - I didn't think that was a problem because I washed my hands immediately afterwards with plenty of soap. But the juice is so strong that not only did the washing process fail to remove enough to stop it burning, but it also just spread it all over my hands and wrists making my whole hands burn the same way your mouth burns after eating a normal chili! Not only that, but washing the juice into the sink produced choking fumes making me cough uncontrollably! I tried to get it off by having a shower which only proceeded to spread the burning sensation all over my body and into my eyes!!! I had to pour water directly into my eyes and pat them dry with a towel, and then just accept the burning everywhere else since whatever I did just made things worse :-( It's about four hours after the incident now and the burning has finally started subsiding! I'm not sure whether I want to take my new hot source home with me now...? 
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Off-grid shmoff-grid :-/[edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 7 December 2015 at 16:09 |
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This post has the following tags: Our third year on the land
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| After a very dark winter with literally weeks of solid rain and even longer periods with no sun, we've finally decided that it's time for our solar power experiment to give way to the grid! We're still going to continue with our power project, but we'll change our focus to micro-hydro since we have a usable river current nearly all the time, and we'll look in to more exotic forms of power as well such as hydrolysis and Tesla antennas :-)
The first step to getting connected to the grid out here is to get a power pole put in with a meter on it. Then we can call another company who can connect out pole to the closest existing poles. It took a while to find someone reliable for the first job of putting the pole in, and then he had to cancel due to rain so we thought we'd miss out this year since we're leaving for Brasília in a few days, and then for NZ after that. But the weather has been good for the last few days and he spontaneously appeared today. He didn't like the look of the place though as he reckoned his truck was too heavy and the ground was still quite muddy. But half an hour of 
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Free SSL certs for everyone!!![edit] |
| Posted by Nad on 3 December 2015 at 19:53 |
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This post has the following tags: Server
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 The procedure is far simpler than all the back-and-forth of signing and requests that is required with the "legacy" corporate method, you simply install the LetsEncrypt utility on your server and tell it to make all your sites secure! Simple as that! Although we do have a very complicated configuration so I decided to have it just make the certificates and let me adjust the configuration manually - but even that process was eazy peazy lemon squeezy :-) Here's screenies of Chromium (right), Firefox and SSL labs responses to our fist test domain secured with a LetsEncrypt certificate. 
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