Our first year on the land
Now that we've moved from Curitiba to Canela and moved on to our land, we need to get the net and power working and get the garden producing enough food that we can stay on the land full time, rather than having to return to Canela every week to get work don on the net and buy groceries. This blog is the ongoing documentation of what is involved in getting to that stage. It starts with the sixteenth week after initially setting up our tent in the "island" which was when we'd got the house to a complete enough stage to move into it out of the tent.
Week sixteen
Happy birthday Dad!!!
We made you an awesome potato pie for your birthday present and ate it for you too :-) Here's a picture of your pie - and of Beth eating your birthday cake for you! The last photo is from the last time we were at the pub which must be almost two years ago by now - you only had a tiny beer as you had to go to info centre shortly after :)
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This week the weather was pretty bad on Friday so we delayed heading back to the land until Saturday since we wanted to catch the bus to an even closer bus stop than the church and then walk the rest of they way - about 8km I think. This bus stop (shown below) is at the start of the route to our land that we went on one time with the car (the one we all agreed we'd never drive on again!), but for walking it's the best option we know of so far. It took about two hours, but we were going quite slow due to carrying a lot of things - such as 100 meters or fencing wire round my neck and 100 meters of power cable on my head!
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It's lucky we moved in to the house last weekend and didn't delay another week, because when we arrived this time, the tent had finally given up the ghost - as well as all the usual problems of broken poles and snapped ropes, it had a large rip in the side and what had been our bedroom had a small lake in it!
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On Sunday I got the cable for the second half of our net connection in place. The distance to cover for the second half was about 100 meters which is longer than expected - I think due to making an error in the original distance calculation; I said that it was 160m on the map, but that it should be less than that in reality since its a hill and we'd be stretching the wire straight - but the 160m map length is already the straight length and in reality we can't stretch it completely straight, so its longer than 160m.
I got some good macro shots of a grasshopper eating a flower and of one of the odd looking yellow test-tube-cleaner caterpillars :-)
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I only stayed for one day this time as I had to be back on Sunday night as usual to be in contact for work on Monday morning, but Beth wanted to stay longer, and since it's a lot safer now that we're in the house she decided to stay a few more days by herself :-) I walked back the same way we came to catch the bus back, but I had to wait over an hour at the bus stop because I only took an hour twenty five to walk back, and the bus was later than we estimated.
Week seventeen
I cycled there on Thursday afternoon with a heavy backpack full of fruit and veges - I found it pretty hard, but I think I'll get used to it after a few more times :-) On the way in to the land I took some photos of our place from up high on the hill, the second photo shows the entire length of the cable for net connection, but you'll need to click on the image to get enough detail to see it. When I arrived our "island" looked quite empty as Beth had packed up the marquis and tent.
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I also took some nice pictures of the entrance way to the bush surrounding our "island" (the small clearing within the bush where our house and garden are situated). The entrance way is a natural arch formed by a tree which was left after we chopped a whole lot of branches out of the way to get the car and trailer through.
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Beth was very happy after spending over a week at the land in peace and quiet - and also happy because many of the vegetables in our garden have finally started to grow - especially the pumpkin which has really gone crazy. Here's some pictures showing the pumpkin, kumara and radish, but also doing very well are lettuce, spring onion, turnip, capsicum, mint and aubergine.
 Pumpkin |
 Kumara |
 Radish |
On Saturday I made another wooden box to house the equipment for the net connection at the top of our local hill. I made this box a bit bigger so that it can fit a router, a signal amplifier and any other equipment or tools that may be useful at the remote end. I also took some photos of the cell tower we'll be connecting to (there's actually two, a VIVO and a Claro) so I could figure out exactly where they are to get the angle of the antenna right. I used this excellent site which pinpoints all the cell towers in Rio Grande do Sul. Our towers are about 9km away, quite close to the dam, which is a fair bit further than I'd thought, but a good connection should still be available at that distance with a decent antenna and signal amplifier. Next week it'll finally be time to test the cables and connection!
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On Sunday afternoon we both walked back to the bus stop which is a really nice walk. We were a bit stressed when there was no sign of the bus after an hour of waiting though! we started off down the road preparing for four or five hours of walking, but luckily after half an hour we got a ride in the back of a pick up squashed in between a bunch of pumpkins and milk bottles! when we finally got to Canela, we decided to pop in to the bus station to find out what had happened to the bus. It turns out that our bus was pulling in just as we got there - it was an hour later due to daylight savings! that'll teach us for being such isolated hermits! but not really - we'll be back in the loop once the net's up and running :-)
 The start of the 8km road to the bus stop |
Week eighteen
I've just got back from another weekend at the land for another week of work. Beth's staying there for the week again so she can put more solid time into the plants which have been demanding more than just weekend attention! But it's paying off, we had our first salad made from the plants on our land today - it was a pretty modest salad, but it's a start :-)
I made some excellent progress on the net connection this weekend too. First I got both segments of power cable tested which was the easy part, then I tested each segment of the LAN cable by plugging the router into the power and LAN at one end and checking if I could reach it with my laptop at the other end. All the cable segments tested fine, so the next was the big test - put the router at the far end up the hill (on top of the box since there's no antenna yet), plug the hub into the power in the middle box and both LAN cables into it, then see if we have net!
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The first picture above was me after first establishing a connection with the router at the top of the hill, the second shows the router's web interface after having made contact with the Vivo tower, and the third is me making our very first wiki edit from the house which was the following message:
I'm writing this from our house with the router at the end of the cable up the hill!
This is great progress, but there's still a lot to do before I can work from the land. The next thing necessary is the antenna which I started on Sunday, but didn't have time to finish it - I was also disappointed with the inaccuracy of my drill holes which may cause it not to be tuned close enough to 850MHz to have a useful amount of gain. I really need a proper workshop environment to work on things like this with a vice and drill press. But then even after getting the antenna sorted out we still need to set up a power solution too - all these tests have been done using the generator which we only like to use for very short bursts of time as it uses a lot of petrol. I'll probably start by getting a battery and assembling our 150W solar panel which should be enough for running the computers and our LED lights bulbs.
Week nineteen
We didn't spend the weekend at the land this week, instead of me going to the land on Friday to meet Beth, she cycled back from there to Canela to meet me and we caught the bus to Porto Alegre. We've been wanting to go there for a while, because being a large city there's a lot more specialised items we can find there that aren't available in Canela or Gramado. Beth wanted to get some special rice and some Granola at a good price, and I needed to find a place that sells electronic components so I can start experimenting with some free energy devices. We're also looking for a battery suitable for using with our solar panel (which I need to construct from 36 individual solar cells I bought in Curitiba) and charge controller so we have power for our net connection and LED lights :-)
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