When the levee breaks (2)...

Written to For Everyman by Jackson Browne

Into each life some rain must fall.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Last Friday Dennis and Anne arrived from Denmark via Zurich, none the worse for wear, that is until we subjected them to a four-five hour car ride in a very, very cramped Ford Ecosport 4WD 2.0 16v, stopping along the way from São Paulo-Guarulhos International Airport to Fazenda Alfheim to assess the damage in São Luiz do Paraitinga (gut-wrenching: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13), check for mail (arriving intermittently via a temporary, mobile post office established at the home of one of the São Luiz do Paraitinga postal workers), pick-up milk and purchase a Queijo Minas from our neighbor, João. Admirably, the people of São Luiz do Paraitinga are getting themselves back on their feet. We stopped and spoke with the owner of the feed store that we frequent, and he was busy cleaning the empty shell of his building. During our brief chat, he informed us that he expected to be up and running in another 20 days. Also, while walking the streets of the town, we happened across the driver from Depósito Cursino, where we purchase all of our building supplies. He told us that they lost 50% of their inventory, but that Nazaré, the brains behind the operation, had already moved into one of their deposits and everything was pretty much business as usual. He insisted that we should not hesitate to order anything at all. Funnily, just a few days before Lone and I had discussed the probability that Nazaré would be the first business person to bounce back from the floods. This is the same woman who once told one of her employees that os mortos não pagam (the dead don't pay) when asked if it mattered whether a certain customer paid his invoice (from which I surmised that the gentleman in question was no spring chicken).

Back at Alfheim, Dennis and Anne relaxed, ate well and read to the hearts' content…all of which led to a speedy recovery from their arduous journey.

On Sunday we continued our new tradition of walking the fazenda. We inspected our lagoa, fed the chickens on pastures 3, 4 and 5, walked the fence line of the new, and still as-yet unnamed, hog area and fed the hogs and inspected the piglets. All 22 are doing well, and the feeding octagon is a big success, though the sows are pretty upset that they are prohibited access.

On Monday we ear-tagged 5 of the 15 sows that have yet to give birth for a second time. The first three were lassoed and tagged in less than 20 minutes, the last two took us more than an hour. Clearly hogs are capable of learning. We agreed to divide the tagging over three (or more) days...7-9-13!

On Tuesday we spent the day in Taubaté shopping for odds and ends, e.g. tractor motor oil, a bicycle pump (for the wheelbarrow tires), aluminum siding (for hog and chicken houses) and also registering our Fazenda Alfheim at the local Casa da Agricultura. All in all a productive day.

Finally, I wrote this blog post in the car on the Marginal Tietê (Lone was driving)…after spending four and one-half hours stuck on the NovaDutra. The traffic jam was the result of a particularly heavy rain which hit São Paulo on Wednesday, January 20th, killing at least eight people. Mother Nature seems to have awoken in 2010 in a foul mood.