This week started with work on Monday morning which is now our usual cycle. Apart from work we’ve bought a 40cm Husqvarna chainsaw and found a good place to buy wood for the house. We’ve also checked out prices for various things such as glass and roofing materials. Even though our idea for the land is about independence, it sometimes feels like a bit of a contradiction – we need to visit the gas station a lot and have to buy petrol for the generator, ethanol and clutch fluid for the car and two-stroke for the chainsaw! but our dependence on these things should reduce down after this initial setup phase eventually to practically nothing as we get our food, water and power solutions established.
We had some bad news this week – unfortunately a problem’s occurred in my residency process 🙁 The Federal Police come to visit at some point after getting the temporary ID so they can assess the relationship to ensure it’s legitimate. The problem is that they’ve been going on strike a lot over pay issues or something which meant that they took over two months to come and visit instead of the two weeks they said they’d take, but when they finally came we weren’t there because we’d moved. We’d advised them that we were going to be moving, but it looks like that had got lost in the pipeline due to the strikes as well! so now the head office in Brasilia has been notified that we’ve failed the assessment.
We talked to the Federal Police in Caxias and they advised us that we can get our status reassessed by waiting until my current failed assessment shows up in the official journal, Pesquisa Jornais do Dia, and then go back to Caxias with evidence that we’ve moved and go through the relationship assessment process again!
We didn’t go to the land this week because on Friday afternoon when we were about to leave a huge thunderstorm suddenly came up and the weather didn’t clear up again until Sunday. We didn’t really fancy staying in our tent in that kind of weather and needed to be back here in Canela again for the working week, so there’s very little to report on this week unfortunately apart from that we finally found a place that sells good water filters so we no longer need to carry huge twenty litre water bottles to the land each week, we can filter water straight from our river 🙂 Here’s some pics of the tent though which is a little more organised now than it was a couple of weeks ago.
