Life with a Dog

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A Mended Wall

The rainy season has been very long this year.

And it is expected to last even longer.

We went up to Ibitipoca on Tuesday (in the pouring rain) to settle up on some work that has been sporadically happening on the house. Our great pedreiro has been trucking the cement in on his own because the delivery truck still can't get into the valley.

No much further work on the house has been done, but the swamp lilies are in full bloom. (Their smell is intoxicating.)

And we really must to remember to fix that weed wacker. (The gardener's been on vacation, apparently.)

We discovered we have a new waterfall.

And a new wall!

The wall was not a structural necessity. But it is something I always envisioned there. And while maybe there is something that doesn't love a wall, I certainly do! Even if I never bothered to ask what I was walling in or walling out.

I think it adds a bit of civility to our rambunctious little spot.


We also earned ourselves one very wet,

Very (very) dirty,

Very (very! very!) happy dog.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go, as promised and clean the backseat of the car.

Guest blogger

I think the computer surgery kind of beat me down on computers this week because I haven't been able to get any posts up. I still don't have much juice going to write about anything special so I thought I'd let a guest blogger take over today.

Hi there, Dharma here. I'm filling in for that other person who occasionally shows up round these parts. I thought I'd take this opportunity to ask for your help in resolving a little interpersonal problem I'm having with that afore mentioned blog-slacker.

You see, she just doesn't understand how hard it is to be a dog in Brazil. Especially on Sundays.

Sundays are bbq days. All the neighbors grill out. A ridiculous number of them. The air is just ripe with grilled rib-eye and sausage and sirloin. There isn't anywhere you can go to escape the smell. Every breath is a drooling torture.

And those grillers are all laughing and carrying on and I just know their dogs are getting in on the action.

I've tried reasoning with her.

But she has no idea what it is like to have a nose this big.

It's a real bummer man.

So I was wondering if you could be so kind as to convince her to do just a little grilling for me. Nothing extravagant - maybe just some pork sausage or a few chicken hearts - they're easy right? Or at the very least, a little bacon grease on my dried sorry excuse for daily sustenance would suffice.

(And by the way can you also talk to her about my ridiculous hair cut. I'm getting so sick of the Falkor wisecracks.)

I'll be your friend forever.

November Showers bring mold (and flowers!)

My mother read that last post and called me up immediately – International Call – and told me to take it down. She said it was too depressing. She then told me to “Call some friends. Go outside. Blow the stink off of you.” Thanks mom. You're a big help.

That post was not depressing. That’s nothing.

This is depressing:

Do you see what I’m doing people? Do you SEE it? I’m IRONING UNDERWEAR. Arrrrggggggg!

We have had 20 days of rain straight. Nothing dries. I shouldn’t complain. Santa Caterina (where the yoga center is) has had over 50 days of non-stop rain. They are in a state of emergency.

Clothes dryers are nearly non-existent. They are a luxury for only the very rich. Mostly because the electricity to run them is so expensive. We pay a lot for electricity. More than in the US. So there are few dryers on the market and little demand, making those that are available stupidly expensive.

Everyone just throws the clothes up on a line. And then has to iron them to get the stiffness out, and, more importantly, the damp.

I don’t usually iron, that is if it is sunny and hot. I’m a bad housewife. I let the clothes be stiff. I remember seeing tags on t-shirts here that said don’t iron over the decal, and I thought, “well that’s stupid. Who irons t-shirts anyway?” Oh, how I learned the hard way!

In the first year or so, if the clothes were a little damp and stiff I didn’t really pay attention. I would just pull them off the line, shake and fold and put them away. No big deal, right? Wrong! One day after a particularly long rainy spell, I pulled a pair of shoes out of the closet that were covered in mold. And then another pair. And then I dug deeper. The walls of the closet were lightly moldy and so were the clothes. Item after I item I took out and found it covered in moldy spots. I ended up washing 90% of what we own and scrubbing the insides of the closet out.

So now I iron undies. Isn’t my Brazilian life sexy?

We got an almost break in the weather yesterday (I swear we moved to Seattle some days) and we took Dharma out to the college to walk.

Of course, all this rain is making things very green and what bloomed earlier in the spring has fallen and is carpeting the grass.

I worked overtime fidgeting with the dials on my camera, trying to bend it into something it’s not. But these flowers are so pretty they don’t need a fancy camera to shine.

First night in our house!

So nearly nine years after buying our land, we finally spent the first night there last night. We couldn’t have picked a more auspicious night to do so. A full moon, AND an eclipse.

We took a blanket and a bottle of wine and walked up our road and watched the moon rise over the mountains as it was just about reaching the apex of the eclipse. And holy crap! The moon always looks so much bigger when it is just rising, but to see it eclipse at the same time! And we were watching through binoculars (thanks dad!) so it looked like something out of a sci-fi painting. Crazy. The picture can’t even begin to do it justice.

But because C is still recovering from his laser eye correction surgery, what he saw probably closer to this.


With the moon dark for a while we snuggled up with our wine and saw more stars than I can remember ever seeing. We always dreamed about what the stars would look like on our mountain, so far away from any and all lighting. It was better than I hoped for.

Later we sat out on our veranda with a full moon shining down. It was so bright you could see as clear as day and it turned the green leaves of the trees silver, like they were covered in mercury.

It was so great to finally stay in our little house. We think it’s coming along very nicely – much faster than we expected.


We have lights.



And our bedroom is very cozy.



The bathroom has a spectacular view and the water pressure is awesome, making showers quite an invigorating experience.



We even have a highly sensitive security system. (Currently deactivated as it malfunctioned all night long – for some reason it went off every ten minutes and we couldn’t figure out how to shut it off.)




Oh! And the kitchen – a real joy to cook in. Modern, convenient and equipped with that much hyped wood burning stove.


Hey! Don’t laugh! It’s still a bit of a work in progress…

Personally we were thrilled. We finally had the chance to stay over night, and wake up to the monkeys howling and do some things we always dreamed of…

Like soaking up the morning sun on our veranda. Relaxing on our finely crafted, imported furniture and finishing off last night’s wine at 10am. (and why not??)


And birdwatching in our underwear.


And spending hours stalking butterflies.

You're just dying to come, right??

Homeless Horse

We have this cat who lives on our street. She's adopted a building and its residents a little further up from ours. They feed her and she pretty much hangs out in their garden. She’s a rolly polly little butter ball. Super cute and she just loves to torment dogs on leashes.

Dharma will pull and tug at the end of her leash trying to get at her (more curious than anything because I honestly don’t think she knows what a cat is) and the cat will lay just a paws distance out of reach. She rolls over on her back, stretches, meows, bats her big green eyes and purrs. Once she wrapped herself around my ankles, rubbing and purring while Dharma ran in circles around me trying to get her. I ended up bound like Gulliver and when Dharma had no slack on the leash remaining I had to bend over at the waist, hobbled and hopping about to secure Dharma by the collar and prevent the little seductress from taking a swipe at her nose when she got bored with the game. Love that cat.

Anyway, this morning I was walking Dharma and I stopped to notice that our little feline tramp is looking far more rolly polly than before. Looks like she’s had some busy nights and will soon have a family to feed. When I looked up, I was staring at the very dirty butt of a horse.



Just a random horse. Loose. All alone. On our street. In the middle of a bustling city of a half million residents. Typical Brazilian incongruity.

Poor fellow looks old and very much worse for the wear. Skinny, filthy. I’m guessing that someone dumped him because he’s too old to be useful. He’s been here all day. Wandering up and down, munching on weeds and poking his head through the fencing of the empty lots on our street to get at some sweeter grass.

I took him down a carrot and pet his nose. People looked at me like I was nuts. Even C told me I was crazy and that I should be careful messing around with a "wild" horse. Yeah, he looks like a real killer.

I don’t like to see any creature suffer, but horses are such intelligent, noble animals, its harder to watch. They spend their lives in service and then are just thrown out like garbage. And not at all ironic that it is the sanitation department, the garbage men, who someone will eventually call to come and get him (apparently that’s who handles these types of “situations”) and take him off to be “put down.”

Maybe I’ll bring him some more treats. Just to make his last day a little kinder.

Dog is my Co-pilot

So Dharma had her first trip up to our land yesterday. She thoroughly slobbered all of the windows, panted and whined in our ears, jumped from the backseat to my lap every five minutes for two full hours and was completely and utterly in dog heaven with her head out the window in the sun and warm breeze and a full menu of countryside smells to take in.

We have avoided bringing her up figuring that the only way to do it would be to first bathe her in Frontline and then encase her in a plastic bubble because she would surely become one large, indistinguishable ball of cockleburs, mud and ticks. And we were right. It’s taken me since yesterday to wrestle, pull, yank, comb and cut all of the burs and stickers out of her fur – I have several bite marks on my hands to prove it. But thankful for small favors, she at least was so exhausted from racing up and down the road, in, out and around the house and making a holy terror of herself in the raspberry brambles, that she nearly fell asleep while I was hosing her down in the shower later at home. And to count further blessings, not one tick has been found on any of us.



So after many years hemming and hawing over what we should do with the nearly 100 year old, falling down, wreck of a house squatting on our land, we finally resolved to preserve it, which was followed by another year of bad luck and false starts. But now, at last, we just might be getting somewhere close to having it habitable.

At the end of last year C hired a guy, let’s call him Jack, to oversee the work on the house so we wouldn’t have to be making the 2 hour trek up the mountains several times a week. Our timing was terrible. It was the beginning of the rainy season and no one would deliver supplies because the roads got too muddy and of course Jack(ass) turned out to be a perfect scoundrel and took off with our money, but not before he had hired – without paying – the local nutcase to work on the house. Turned out to be a well-known fact among the locals that our own personal Village Idiot is a part-time alcoholic and full-time unmedicated schizophrenic who, shortly after Jack disappeared and we were informed of this, had a psychotic break and ended up hospitalized. Which was actually a blessing in disguise (for us) because once someone starts working for you in Brazil it can be very tricky getting rid of him. The worker’s laws are yet one more bizarre rabbit hole in the bloated, arcane Brazilian bureaucracy that in the end help no one, rarely even the workers they are supposed to protect. Anyway, if we had tried to fire Jack(ass)’s choice in dependable labor, he could have taken us in front of a judge and created an even bigger headache. So he’s now happily medicated in the county cuckoo nest, didn’t hurt himself on our watch and we can finally move on.

Oh, except for that little thing about having to take Jack(ass) to court to get our money back. Luckily C had written up a contract for the project that was signed and notarized from the beginning…so we’ve got a lawyer on the case. Just for the record, I didn’t like Jack from the beginning, and made some serious noise about it as the contract was being drawn up, which then led to some arguments between me and C about how I was being negative for no reason and not giving people a chance (hello, intuition!!). I have, however, judiciously refrained from saying “I TOLD YOU SO” -- well, except for here, but this kind of doesn’t count… Very big of me, don’t you think?

The ray of sunshine in the whole story is that after desperately calling around trying to find someone to continue the project before the 20 some bags of cement that were finally delivered went bad, we finally found a great, if not totally awesome guy to finish the job. This was no small task as it seems that everyone and their uncle is building around the area – it has become an immensely popular vacation spot due to the national park – and all the good builders had already got themselves set up on other jobs at the beginning of the dry season. But through some luck and C’s relentless pestering of everyone in town, we found Vicente and cajoled him out of retirement. He’s a local, going back several generations, who is now doing quite well managing a little restaurant and market that sells to tourists and isn’t really doing much of this kind of dirty work anymore. But he knows our land since he was a kid, knows how to build the heck out of a house and apparently is an expert in constructing a fogão á lenha –a traditional wood-burning stove. He tells us all kinds of stories about the history of our place, the local plants, animals, always punctuated with lots of jokes that we fall into every time, and he has even told us (hopefully this is not one of his jokes) that we might actually have a DOOR and windows by the next time we go up. Maybe next week!



That means that we will have a house soon and then when people come to visit we can go there and swim in waterfalls and hang out with monkeys, cook on a wood burning stove and hopefully not have to visit the banana trees to take care of necessities because surely our lawyer will have recovered our money, with interest, and we may just have plumbing... Electricity however is another story.

Road to Nowhere

So this is something else we did last year.

It’s a road going up the hill of our property. There didn’t use to be one. Hiking to the top involved a machete and snake proof boots.


This picture was taken during the 5 month drought last year. You can see why you wouldn't want to get anywhere near it and even think fiery thoughts. We were very lucky not to get burned. The road keeps going off to the right of the picture, along the crest and out of the photo where it ends in a big plateau where we would love to build a house someday (a big SOMEday and sum involved in doing so, making it even too much to dream about.)

The view from up there is amazing.

It’s not with out a lot of problems, the road that is. C and I are still slightly at odds about what to do with it now that it’s done and not really usable. There are parts that have such a steep incline they will need cementing before anything other than a horse will go up and only 6 months after having it plowed it is nearly overgrown with tall weeds that will quickly turn to bramble and trees. The vegetation in the tropics is predatory.


But at least we did finally decide to finish the little house. We debated for the longest time if we should just tear it down and wait until we could afford to do something better or if we should put the money into fixing it up.

So one bag of cement at a time we are trying to make it habitable. It’s going terribly slowly because we of course decided to start at the beginning of the rainy season when no one wants to deliver supplies. The access road from the village to our land involves a big up hill and a big down hill and if it's raining the trucks refuse to come because they are afraid they won’t get back out. Wimps. We are currently several months without a sand or cement delivery. But the rain will stop soon and we'll be back fearing brush fires in no time.

It’s just a simple little cottage but we were please to find out that when brush and dirt were cleared away from the sides that it has a stone foundation. It’s nice and dry inside and with a few expanded rooms it will be a good little get away. We plan to put in a fogão á lenha – which is a traditional wood burning stove. It’s kind of mythic to Minas culture. I suppose that means chopping wood. Hadn’t thought of that…

Of course the real attraction to the whole situation is that it is 5 minutes from the park.


If you haven’t seen the pics from my mom’s epic vacation here, take a look at “part 2” with all the pictures of the park. There are so many waterfalls and swimming holes it sort of monotonously beautiful.


Yes I took that picture. No it's not photoshopped. Yes that is a waterfall that the kids look like they are about to go over. But I don't think it's that big a drop. Swimming anyone?

Lightning!

This is Lightnin’.

She’s a 2 toed choloepus sloth. She’s my dad’s favorite kid, and probably the best looking of all of us.


And this is Lightning!

As seen from my balcony.

Brazil, I have read, has the most lighting of any country in the world. And I have also read that our city tops the records with the most lightening in the country. That makes us the Lighting Capital of the World!

It’s pretty scary actually.

Last night and tonight starting at about 7pm these amazing storms rolled in from the horizon. You could see the lightening from way off coming at you. It made the clouds glow red and light up from the inside.

By the time the storm got close to us we were running like crazy to not only shut all the windows but to unplug every possible fry-able thing in the house.

Last night, when I took the above picture, (which by the way I am extremely proud of – have you ever tried to take a picture of lightening? You gotta be a quick draw!) we turned the lights off in the apartment to watch the show and sat by the glass sliding door ohhhhing and awwwing at the lightning that was still a bit off in the distance. The thunder claps were loud and exciting and fun. Good times.

But tonight, I was alone when the storm hit. C was still working. I was actually trying to meditate in my usual spot in front of the glass sliding door, and these brilliant flashes kept lighting up my closed eye lids. I thought maybe I was actually getting somewhere serious in my meditation (heavenly lights, epiphanies and such) until the thunder clapped so loud it about knocked me off my pillow (that actually could have been Dharma nose diving into my lap.)

I opened my eyes and the storm was literally right on top of us. We live on the top floor apartment on top of a hill, and when these storms roll in we really get up in the clouds. So when I say on top of us, I mean the lighting was hovering at eye level. I sat there stunned until at one point the whole sky turned GREEN with the discharge and the electricity on the street shorted out for a second.


I leapt up, ran around doing the usual ripping of plugs out of the walls and then returned to sit by the door (with Dharma on my lap trying to climb inside my shirt – you’d think she was raised by kangaroos) to watch the show. But I almost couldn’t. It was just too intense. I actually screamed out loud a couple of times and freaked out when I could feel my hair lifting up with the electrical discharge. The sound of the thunder that close is just too much. It gets inside of you and rattles your internal organs. That must be what it’s like to be a drummer in the bateria in the samba schools.

Warmer Days Ahead

Sometimes I still have a hard time accepting that I live in inverse seasons to those I spent my entire life experiencing. It’s a sort of seasonal dyslexia. The end of September should be a time for sweaters, lengthening shadows and a shopping bags filled with at least 4 types of apples. But instead the days are getting longer, I'm wearing sandals and while the plants never really loose their green here, seasonal things are starting to bloom again. The streets are filled right now with peddlers pushing wheelbarrows overflowing with a special fruit called jaboticaba.

It is only ripe in the spring, when it sprouts in wart-like clusters on the spiky trunks of the jaboticaba tree and poor farmers and rural people from around the city bring it into town (probably on a horse and cart) and sell a can (lata) for $1 real. It’s quite unusual, looking like a black cherry on the outside but the inside meat is white. It is sweet, not at all tart, somewhat grape-like in texture and has several large seeds in the middle. Can’t really say I’ve ever tasted anything similar – maybe a mix of ripe banana and a golden delicious apple.

C always says that Dharma has jaboticaba eyes (when you can see her eyes.) Now I know what he means.

The other marker of spring here is the return of the sabiá, the national bird of Brazil which looks (to the layperson like me) a little bit like a drab robin. In English I think it is called a rufous-bellied thrush. While the US has its fierce majestic eagle for a mascot, Brazil picked this plain, unremarkable looking little bird. It seems kind of strange until you hear them sing, which they do non-stop almost drunkenly from morning to night in long looping melodic cycles. There are several species of sabiá and the songs differ a lot even within the same species, but they are always several phrases long, sometimes 15-20 notes, and with a loud, surprisingly catchy musicality.

Brazil of course has a sublime musical tradition, and I guess with its nomination of the unassuming little sabiá as a symbol of pride, you can see what matters to them.

(By the way, I have a video of a sabiá singing that I shot recently in a park. I was all excited to jump on the youtube.com bandwagon, and start linking videos here on my blog, but after almost a week of trying to get this damn little 30 second video uploaded, I've finally given up. My relatively fast connection speed (for Brazil) is apparently just too slow for video upload. Oh well.)

UPDATE:
Well since I first wrote this entry almost a week ago and then futzed around with youtube forever, that giant bowl of jaboticabas started to go off and even Dharma couldn't deal with the fruit fly infestation in the kitchen (thanks mom, I will try the bowl of vinegar trick). So today I found a recipe on a brazilian website for making jaboticaba brandy. It's currently a stinky sugary fermenting mess. I'll let you know how it comes out...