Animal of the week
This is our garden horse!!
Posts
under the stairs
I was slightly disconcerted when I noticed the toilet role hanging in the top right hand corner under the stairs!!
Money
In Brazil the notes have animals on them 100 Reais has a grouper and is worth £34.79 for 100 Reais you could buy a very basic mobile phone the 50 Reais note has a big cat on it and is worth £17.40 for 50 Reais you could buy a meal for 2 at a burger place. this time its a little monkey, only worth £6.95 this will get you a large bag full of vegetables!! the 10 Reais note comes with this lovely parrot, its worth £3.48 and it is not quite enough for a jar of nutella!! the 5 Reais note will get you a pound of pork chops its worth £1.74 the 2 Reis note is my favorite with its turtle!! it is worth 70p and will get you on the bus to Recife!!
Bill's training project
Bill, my apprentice from Hope House, is doing really well with his bricklaying. We have been working every afternoon for the past 2 weeks building this workshop, except for 3 afternoons when we were working on the flats. It's a bit slow as each day we have to sieve all our sand then bring the bricks and sand from the other side of the base in wheelbarrows and then mix the mortar by hand. But it is all good fun!!
the big pour
Tuesday morning we started at about 6 am mixing, pulleying and pouring the concrete for the roof of the apartments. by lunch we had poured a quarter by 5pm we had almost got to the half way point. by about 2pm on Wednesday we had finished everyone was so tired but we had a BBQ to celebrate!! in 2 days we lifted in excess of 25 tonnes of concrete on 2 rusty pulleys!!
a training project
Bill the apprentice , and I will be building a workshop in these 2 open garages. it will be a really good opportunity for him to practice his new skills and maybe learn some more. I will still be over seeing the construction of the flats, but it is at a good stage to let the plumbers, electritions and plasterers do their thing!!
fruit
Unfortunately the Mangos are all but finished, but the Passion fruit are here and fresh passion fruit juice is my favorite!! we also have an interesting fruit called Jacka which can weigh over 10kg and kind of tastes like banana but different. Its sap is incredibly sticky and the only thing that cleans it off is vegetable oil!! Very odd!!
construction progress and the big pour
Here are some pictures of the flats we are building on top of Milton's house inside we have supported all the ceilings ready to pour the concrete for the next level The roof is all beams, steal and polystyrene. On a sunny day it is incredibly bright working up there Tuesday and Wednesday we will be working from 6am till 5pm making the concrete ceiling/floor. If anyone is around to help we would appreciate it!!
Spiders
A few people have commented on the spider in the last post, ok it is big, but it is by far not the biggest we have seen. They get about twice this size!
