Gifts for kids

When my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year, I told her to have my guest bring a gift for a needy child. I had been to a birthday party earlier this year for my wife’s uncle and he did the same thing. It’s a great way to give back and make the children feel special this time of the year. There is a lot of poverty here and it’s not the child’s fault. They were born into poverty, so sad. It’s also a great way for our children to see how great their lives are and we should be very thankful. My mother in-law also did the same thing and added to my huge pile of gifts that we are going to donate.

So keep this in mind for your next birthday and give it a shot!    

Bird...the one that got away!

On Monday I was outside with the kids and the construction workers next door flagged me down. They asked if I was missing a bird or knew someone who had a bird like this. It was time for them to leave work and taking a bird out the gate through security wasn't an option. I took the bird and went to my house with him. His right wing is clipped and he can not fly. He or she was very friendly and didn't mind being touched and carried around. I went next door with him to ask the neighbor if they had a cage to keep him in and to get some food. They didn't have one and the one time he tried to fly away he just crashed landed on the floor next to me. So I wasn't worried about him getting away.

Next I went into the house to show my wife that we now have a bird. At first she was not thrilled and said get him out of here. In the meantime I was growing attached. I had grabbed a handful of bird food from neighbor and also gave him peanuts and crackers. Little guy was very hungry and thirsty. I took him out to the garage to feed and find a perch for him to sit on. My wife came out and I asked her to go get a cage at a store. My intentions were to keep him until we found the owner or make him a forever home with us. He was actually a bird who liked to be held and didn't mind attention unlike the other birds I have seen here.

I decided to see if he minded a box for just one night and that got him all crazy. Not an option and the likelihood my wife would find a place to buy a bird cage this late in the day was zero to none. My next idea was a wine bottle holder with a few sticks secured through it. More comfortable than metal on his feet for the first night. He also climbed all round it like it was a playground for him and seemed to be very good at using his beak to climb. With the perfect cut of the wing and the fact he was touchable, I knew he was a pet of someone and he was loved for sure.

He ate a ton of food for such a small bird and drank a lot. I had finished putting a few sticks through the wine holder and securing them with wire. As he moved around the sticks would fall off and it scared him so they had to be secured. Next I was working on a food and drink container. My idea was to put him in the bathroom for the night so he would be safe. Pet store trip tomorrow to buy a proper bird house or go to my wife's grandmothers house to borrow an old cage she had. I was on the fence of spend money or don't because the real owner could show up to claim him

Now here comes the bad part, as I was doing all this work to secure him for the night. He was hanging out eating, drinking and climbing around the perch I made for him. A few times he crash landed onto the floor and walked around. No more than a 10 foot radius. Well, he did it one last time and must of caught the wind just right coming out of the patio into the backyard. He cleared a huge row of tall bushes separating my backyard and neighbors. I took off running and couldn't get through the thick bushes. Through the bushes I could see him crash land and take another leap and flapping his wings across the neighbor's yard. As I ran around the hedge row I lost sight of him.

I spent the next hour looking for him until the sun went down. Met a new neighbor and got to see their beautiful house in the process. They let us search their yard and look around for the little guy, but couldn't find him. With his color it's almost impossible to find him when he is in the grass or brushes. I wish him luck and looked for him yesterday and a little today. Hopefully he is a survivor and will make it. There is a lot of cats around here and I'm sure he will eventually be cat food if not found. I will keep an eye out and security is aware that a pet bird is on the loose. Maybe someone else will catch him.

My kids are now asking for a pet bird. I am opposed to buying one from a pet store, because I believe they all belong in the wild. Don't want to support this behavior of collecting birds and selling them as pets. It's a shame they do this and cut their wings so they can't fly. I am however, for rescuing injured birds and would accept one this way. Maybe we can find one this way, we will see.

The kids are always trying to convince me to get a pet. Can we have a dog...no fence, can we get a cat...there is a cat at your grandparents, can we get a bird...the neighbor has two, can he get a guinea pig...they stink. I have lots of excuses! The fact I just lost a bird who can not fly should tell you maybe I am not fit to take care of animals. I am a little heart broken I lost him...        

The shower has electricity going to it...Zap

Let's talk about the wiring here in Brazil. It's very similar to American wiring, just a little bit more juice involved and some caveman style application. The voltage here is 220 volts and I have experienced a jolt a few times with the well that doesn't work. A little more painful then the standard 110 volts like in America. The weird part here in Brazil, is the whole country is not 220 volts. There is parts of the country, mainly around São Paulo that are 110 volts. Plus, many Brazilians buy in America and bring the electronics here. Its standard to see a 220v-110v converters here and there. I have a bunch of them in random sizes depending on the appliance they are used for around my house.

There is also no water heater tanks in the houses here like you would find in an American house. The only type of water heaters I have seen here are for the pool and shower. Yes, there is wires going to the shower. At first it seems like you got to be kidding me and then its who the hell thought of this. That's 220 volts right above my head, when I am naked and wet. All I can think of is those warning pictures of a man standing in water messing with electrical wires. This is a very odd thing for an American.

Well, if you have read my earlier post on the rain in my office, you would of heard about my shower head debacle. So, these showers are very expensive and fancy with a digital temperature gauge. They are also not very good quality. The water here has some calcium build up and will clog very fine holes like the ones in these showers. So I have started a little graveyard of the ones that blew up and use what parts I can to keep the last one working. I am hoping to get another piece to fix the other shower in the master bedroom (the head). The only reason I like them is because I can see the temperature. The basic showers that I replaced the others with have 3 selections of temperature: warm, hot and extremely hot. Its nice to select an exact temperature!

I went out and bought 3 basic showers to put in the boys bedrooms and the guest bedroom. For a little while we shared the the master bathroom shower and it was getting crowded each night trying to get ready for bed. Time for them to move back to their rooms. The new showers were a great price at R$120 (USD $37.50). As you can see in the pictures they are huge and have two different ways for the water to spray out. A true rainfall shower and that is actually a true statement here. The water to the house is gravity fed from the two large tanks in the tower on the roof.

The problem with the new showers for me was the fact they were not pre-wired to just plug into the wall. A very weird concept of buying a supposedly ready to use shower but you need to wire it to plug into the wall. Or there is another way...shove the 3 wires into the receptacle. The shower adapter to the water line screwed in easy and the whole shower attached to that. So easy to install but now it was time for the wire part. It took me about a week to work up the courage to shove wires directly into the receptacle. Yes, I turned off the circuit breakers to the house...all of them. Just because a receptacle is in your kitchen doesn't mean the circuit breaker box next to the kitchen is responsible for it. Found that out when we hooked up the dishwasher...a few kitchen receptacles go to the garage downstairs for some strange reason.

First I made sure a responsible adult was in the house, in case I had an accident and shocked the piss out of myself. Then I just went and did it! Prayed I put the wires in the correct holes even though the Internet told me it could be backwards. This could definitely happen here! All wires are in and I started the process of turning all 3 circuit breaker boxes back on. No strange bangs or burning smell and everything seems fine. Next was to test them out and see what happens. Luckily they all worked and no problems at all.

Old Showers, one is currently inoperable 

New awesome simple shower with wires shoved in the receptacle 

For me this is a strange concept of no water heater for the whole house and the fact you can shove the wires into the receptacle. Well until next time, thanks for reading!  

       

Textbooks for school

I am in the process of going to school on-line for my MBA with a focus particularly in International Business. This is my second semester taking classes and it has been running pretty smoothly up until this point. Internet connection has had minimal times of not being connected, the electricity in the neighborhood has been really good lately and I was able to get all my books for the first semester on-line as E-Books. I rented two and bought a digital copy of the other. Really cheap, $110 for all 3 books and the VA pays me $250 each semester for books. A little extra in the pocket for myself!

Now, lets talk about this semester. I am in the first day of the 3rd week of both of these courses today. There was 3 required books that I had to find and only one was available digitally. This digital copy I got was off some Russian website and I probably have viruses now or Julian Assange is borrowing my e-mails to use later. Some funky things have been happening to my laptop too, not from the water problems either. I've tried to run antivirus stuff and delete some weird programs to no avail. I will mess with this at a later time.

Ok, the other two books had to be purchased on-line with international shipping. I actually paid more for taxes and shipping then I did for the books. Both books were purchased two weeks before this semester started and I just got the first one today.

Lets start with the Amazon purchase, I bought it and provided the correct address and my Brazilian tax ID (CPF). Without this tax ID customs will hold it forever and send it back eventually, sometimes. I assumed Amazon has had experience with international shipping, so I wasn't too worried about this book actually making it. Five weeks later I have it after the first book got held up in customs and they eventually abandoned it. When I finally got a hold of UPS they told me Amazon told them to throw it away and here is the name of who authorized it from Amazon. I then talked to Amazon and they claimed customs was on strike a few days and that is what caused the book being tossed out. So they reimbursed me and I bought another book through them without any additional cost to ship it to me. I'm happy they resolved it and I finally have this book now.

The other book was purchased through the only website I found it on. Its called Biblio.com and the book shipped from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with DHL. This should of been a key indicator that this was going to be all messed up. It had a nice journey too, from Malaysia, United Kingdom, Netherlands and finally to São Paulo...where it sat for a few weeks. DHL was very slow to answer any of my E-mails or phone calls and kept saying it processing customs. Even though it was a messed up place to have a English textbook to come from, I had some faith in DHL. They are a well known international shipping company. I would think that they were better than UPS and could find a way to correct problems easily. Well I finally got notified after the book was returned and why. The description on the package of what was inside was a bunch of random letters and numbers that meant nothing. Customs said hell no and kicked it back. I am now in a back and forth where is my replacement book and have no idea when I will get it.

So, for 3 weeks I have been winging it and still getting A's. The one digital book I got from the beginning of the course hasn't been used once. I have been mainly looking for key words in the questions provided by the professors and google searching for some materials to write about. We are supposed to be taken quotes out of the readings from the textbooks to support our ideas and I have somehow used references from what my classmates have posted in the discussions without both professors realizing it. Either I am very good at BSing or just lucky.

I am now laughing at this but I have lost my mind a few times. Hopefully the other book will be here soon. The logistics of living abroad can be a hassle at times.

Trash can...its wild here!

I just lifted up the trash can in the bathroom and about 50 huge ants fell out the bottom of it! A little excitement to say the least. I redneck threw the trash can out the front door into the yard, which was a good idea, because there was more in there. I took the electric bug zapper and started giving the ones on the floor some juice and smashing them. Lots of zaps and the smell of hell yeah, die! These little bastards have large pinchers on the front of them and I have found similar ones on one of my sons soccer uniform after practice. They mean business and do pinch if they get to you. Its wild here folks and stuff like this happens on a normal basis.

Water Problems

The Shower Head Graveyard!

Friction on the concrete floor

Shut-Off valve that blew apart

So I had a little water problem here lately. Not from the rain as one might expect, but from the water pressure coming from the city connection. Yes, in a 3rd world country the pressure can be too much. I know I didn't believe it at first. When the water tank would signal to fill back up, the jolt of water pressure caused one pipe to wear through over a 8 month period and another fitting to destroy itself. With these two events happening it caused it to rain in our office twice in 1 week. Not once, but twice! We found the first problem and fixed it, didn't see the other problem until it was too late for another event.

First episode of rain in the house happened because of the friction on a pipe laying on the concrete floor upstairs wore through. It sprung a leak sometime in the night and slowly filled every crevice in the water tank area until it seeped through the ceiling into the office. Yes, the office with many important electronics, books, documents and other nice to have stuff is directly under two huge water tanks and all the associated pluming. I think I would of rethought this process when designing the house, but at the time I didn't think of it. So, like every week day I get up at 0630 to get the kids ready for school. As I am walking down the hallway I hear the sound of rain...I just walked by a window and noticed there was no rain outside. It was a beautiful sunny morning. I ran as fast as I could to see what was going on. As I rounded the corner I saw water rushing out of the office into the house. I started grabbing everything I could and yelling to the wife for help (big mistake, I will explain later). She comes running out to help. I get what I really thought was important and started to think of what to do. Got to stop this in the house rainfall. Once I feel she can rescue the rest I head out to grab a ladder from the garage and head up on the roof. The water tank area is an enclosed tower on the roof. I get in there and immediately find the tower on the bottom level is about 2 - 3 inches of water. I shut off the incoming water from the street and open the valve to dump both hot tub size water tanks. The tanks dump in a matter of minutes. I come off the roof and run to the street to turn that valve off too...wanted to make sure there was no water at all coming in.

Wow, that's a huge event for so early in the morning! Now, we started the process of cleaning up the water. Buckets, rags, towels and whatever else to sweep and mop the water out the front door. Mind you I'm doing this with my wife...and she is not happy with me. I'm clueless of why she may be mad at me and not the fact we just had a huge rain in our office. A hour later when she returns from dropping kids off at school, she tells me the next time something like this happens to come in the bedroom and wake her up nicely. I tried to explain the extreme circumstances of this event and realized this was a losing battle.

Well glad we were home when this happened and prevent everything from being destroyed. If we were away this would of continued for a long time until we came home to discover it. It was the main line to the house and there is no safety device to realize oh no I am sending a lot of water into this house. I fixed it with the help of the neighbors worker who is repairing her roof. I went and got a new pipe with two fittings and we fixed it. I took up some old rags to put around the pipes where I thought they might rub or chafe. What a mess! Cased closed and what the hell was that!

Nope, it happened again but in a different spot the very next day! This time, it was much more and the video is attached to show you. It was like a waterfall coming out of the ceiling light and splashing all over. We were gone most of the day and I decided to come home instead of staying longer at the in-laws house. My wife sent me a message saying she was coming back to work from home. We were in the house no more that ten minutes and I was preparing the kids a snack and my wife was just walking in the door. This time she heard it first and we both ran to see what was happening. Again rainfall in the office but this was a torrential rainfall. We did the same as last time and started to grab everything important and then I ran first to the street to shut off the water valve. Which was the best decision ever, because the only shutoff valve upstairs was the one the blew up. If I would of went up there first and found out there was no way to stop it. It was like a damn fire hose going off up there. We completed the same process of clean up and this time the wife wasn't mad at me. Maybe its because she found it first and yelled for me to help.

This time we contacted the plummer who did all this work to fix his mess. I am no licensed and certified professional plummer but the fact he had put pipes on the concrete floor and didn't realize the pressure was a bit much tells you he is not very good. Although he did fix his mistakes, it will be a cold day in hell before we call him again and we have also had other water problems before this. I will give a short paragraph at the end of the other problems that could be his fault or maybe just bad luck. After he completed the work I looked everything over and made sure it was all legit. We reduced the pressure by restricting the flow to the house by only opening the shutoff valve upstairs half way and the one on the street halfway. The filling of the tank is much slower but at a decent pressure. Ok, I am now satisfied nothing else will happen!

Two day later I come out of the house to find two garden hose connections spraying water up into the air. The water meter reading guy decided he didn't like the fact we only opened the valve halfway. He opened it all the way causing too much pressure to the outside connections. I can't win! So, I replaced the two outside spigots and hopefully they will hold. Please, I hope this is the end of it!

Now let me tell you briefly of the other water problems. First is the well that was drilled in our front yard. Hasn't worked since day one of moving in the house. I tried to look it over and found out if you touch the electrical box to the pump it will shock you with 220 volts. So, I turned off the power to it and haven't touched it since. Next is the laundry room area, the drain to the sinks was plugged and would cause it to leak into the garage through the ceiling and then next we found out the washing machine drain pipe was also plugged. This caused a hole to develop in the garage ceiling and for the same plummer to come fix it a few months before the rain in the office. Lastly, the bathroom showers in all 4 bathrooms plugged up and exploded except for one. I take a sewing needle and shove it through all the holes where the water comes out of the shower head roughly once a week. Its about 40 holes and takes sometime. The water here seems to be a little hard and develops crusty chunks in these shower heads. I have replaced 3 of them some far with simple showers, but I am trying to save the last one in the master bedroom. It's fancy and has a digital temperature gauge. Its a double shower in there and the other side is just the body of the fancy shower and I am in the process of trying to find where I can just buy the shower head part. Hopefully this week I will figure out the place!

So as you can see, we have had a few problems. Nothing that has questioned my move here, but has made me more aware of future potential problems. Its Brazil, things are more difficult here. Even with a brand new house you can expect some problems. I know, in America it would be very rare to experience anything like this within the first few years of a new build.

Well I hope you enjoyed this and had a few laughs at my expense! Thanks...