Productivity boost

Written to Fabulous Flamenco/La Gitarra Flamenca by Paco Peña

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.
- Thomas Szasz

Last week’s blog post was read by 126 people, the third highest weekly total ever. On the one hand I am delighted by the high level of interest, but on the other I cannot help but wonder if there isn’t a correlation between this enhanced interest and my (almost) being eaten alive by a corybantic swine mother. Probably better not to ponder...

On May 1st Lone and I picked up the Danes, Anella and Sandra Jørgensen, at São Paulo/Guarulhos – Governor André Franco Montoro International Airport, a day after celebrating my birthday, actually both of our birthdays, with a lovely day in São Paulo (an oxymoron?), including dinner at Churrascaria Rodeio, one of our favorite restaurants. With the addition of Anella and Sandra, our workforce has suddenly ballooned to nine (including the proprietors, of course), and the results quickly followed. In what ended as a mere three and one-half day work week, we managed to:

• Prepare Lone’s local, ladies-only, birthday bash. A couple of weeks back, Lone had sent out invitations to all of her female friends and acquaintences from Greater Vargem Grande to coffee, tea and cakes to celebrate her aniversário. Before Lone and I departed for our São Paulo sojourn, Lone pre-prepped a colossal chocolate cake and a slew of lemon cupcakes and stored them in the freezer. When we arrived from the airport, Anella, Sandra, Mark and I helped Lone tie up all of the loose ends: dipping strawberries in chocolate (it was a brutal job, but someone (me) had to do it), making coffee, tea, setting the table etc. -even feeding the hogs.
• Give the girls a Sunday tour of Fazenda Alfheim, focusing primarily on Hog Hill, the vegetation of which has regrown to such an extent since we removed the hogs on March 1st that we will have to bring them back for a couple of weeks prior to planting corn there in July. If everything goes according to plan, I will purchase a disk plow (arado de disco), a harrow (grade) and maybe even a planter (plantadeira) to help us with soil preparation and planting.
• Paint the exteriors of both houses, this after numerous false starts by the aforementioned proprietors -and their full-time workers. (Almost) all credit for this accomplishment goes to Anella and Mark. They painted the exterior and the foundation of our house on Monday, and ditto for Clair and Rosana’s house on Tuesday, even squeezing in time on Tuesday morning to help Rosana paint her kitchen. The energy of youth is a beautiful thing!
• Paint (virtually) the entire exterior of the storage room/apartment complex (on Wednesday)
• Clean up the bamboo shed where the surplus building materials share space with the three numb-nuts (read: our dogs). Sandra was both the brains and the brawn behind this feat.
• Break up and remove the entire floor in the third house in order to try and (re)solve the mystery of the damp concrete floor. For this task we had the aid of Abilio, a local handyman, who finally completed his previous gig and was thus freed up to work at Alfheim. We had to wait almost four weeks to contract his services…some things never change, whether in the city or the countryside. Abilio suggested we add Vedacit to the new concrete to lock the moisture out. Interestingly, after they had broken up and removed the previous floor, spreading it judiciously on Alfheim's entry road, we could find no evidence of humidity or moisture anywhere. Go figure.
• Obtain 25-30 liters of whey per day from our cheese-producing neighbors, João Jipe (roughly translated: John the Jeep) and Isilda. We will soak our organic corn in the whey and feed it to both the hogs and the piglets. This represents a MASSIVE nutritional upgrade for the larger swine.
• Dig up four different ant nests inside of Lone’s one hectare vegetable garden. In other words, Lone's May Ant War has officially begun. The head Witch of Eastwick has taken off the gloves!
• Distribute the final 40-odd fence posts in what over the next three weeks will become our newest hog pen, henceforth to be known as Hog Weald.
• Treat all of the Topigs and the 3 Chiquinas, Betty and Beta Boar for parasites. Chiquina is definitely PREGNANT!
  

We completed all of these tasks, in addition to our normal fazenda workload, before 11:00 on Thursday morning, when the five of us piled into our Ford Ecosport 4WD 2.0 16v and headed to Campos do Jordão for some well-deserved R&R at our friend's (Paula Afrange) gorgeous mountain retreat. We arrived in the late afternoon after a quick stop in Taubaté to get the car lights fixed (a burned out relay), enjoy a pastel or three and shop at the Mercado Municipal. After settling in at Paula's, we ended the day gazing at this gudsbenået solnedgang!

Finally, the fuana of the week is once again a moth…I am running out of adjectives.