Feeling a bit negative about Brazil today

Last month I blogged about a kidnapping and robbery that took place in Lagoinha, of the man who owns Lagoinha's sole tourist attraction, a waterfall. We thought the perpetrators got caught--but it turns out that even though everyone in town knows who did it now, the police are doing nothing, because they're either too scared or they've been paid off. The waterfall owner has decided to shut down his business because he's too scared. So much for Lagoinha's sole tourist attraction!

We'd already started planning to move, but we thought we had some time to do it, as these people had just robbed $120K and would probably wait to do it again. And we thought that if anyone wanted to kidnap and rob us, we would get some warning in the form of suspicious people checking out the house and studying our movements.

On Saturday night our dogs were going crazy barking at something. We learned the next day that two men drove up to the first gate and stood staring at our house for a long time. A guy who lives by the gate overheard the men say, "This was a wasted trip." The next day, a bar was robbed, and we suspect it's the same people who found our fence and dogs too daunting that evening...or their timing just wasn't right, as they might have been hoping to find my husband and the kids playing down at the house by the gate, as they often are on weekend nights, or perhaps they were planning to stop us at gunpoint if we happened to go out and come back in through the gate.

I just have to say, Lagoinha police suck and the city council here sucks and most of all, those people who use violence and intimidation to take things that don't belong to them and ruin people's sanctuaries really, really suck. (and on top of that there's a 35% chance these people are animal rapists)

Some generalizations about why Brazil sucks, which are very negative but might be based in truth
More on Brazilian police sucking--who considers their salaries more important than human lives?
A couple random articles I read today on political control over media in Brazil--if you try to expose people they might shoot you or fine you

ARGH!

Oops

I've been starting to write and schedule posts for April's A to Z blogging challenge, and a couple of the posts I tried to schedule for April have run away from me so they might have appeared for a few hours on your Google readers and been confusing because of the lack of context. Sorry!

More sloppy blogging

My blog has been in identity crisis lately. I've felt at a loss about what to write.  It reminds me somewhat of what it's like writing to friends after a long silence--because they haven't been privy to my small daily changes, what I write doesn't feel quite like communication--it feels more like just making a summarized list of my life since the last time I wrote. It feels like effort, instead of an organic sharing, a give-and-take flow that responds to cues from a community and expands upon ongoing dialogues. That's my fantasy about blogging, anyhow.

I went on a cruise to Uruguay and Argentina, thus achieving two of my Bucket List items...but I realized that goals like those aren't really that satisfying to achieve...since going onto a luxury boat and then getting off it isn't really achieving anything...so I didn't feel like writing about that.

However...speaking of things I'm proud of achieving...Draft #2 of my WIP was completed yesterday! Today I'm printing out the thing to read and make notes for further revisions. With the exception of two choppy chapters and a sex scene I didn't feel like writing at the time, there will be very little complete rewriting in the next revision, I think--which will make it a lot more fun.

I'm having a little trouble finding critique partners--I tried to write a few people on ladieswhocritique, but now I'm wondering if they thought I was some creepy old porn-peddling man disguising as an Asian female mom wanting her novel critiqued, because one of the main characters is a detached talking penis who says and does a lot of lewd things. There are a couple rather un-traditional sex scenes in the novel, as you might imagine. (It's the traditional one I didn't feel like writing) Anyhow, my next step is probably to get it up at critters.org.

Life is good...I'm in the yahoo group now for the ecovillage, and the conversations people have on it make me happy, because they're all subjects close to my heart, and discussed intelligently! I've changed my mind about house plans--I figured that it would be cheaper and more ecological to have a two-story house instead of one, because it'll use less materials for roofing and foundation. So what I'm thinking of now is the plan for this house:

which would have a modified version of this floor plan:

This is the first floor. 24' diameter, 471 sq ft per floor. I want to take the bedroom out and put the bathroom on the upper right, with the utility room on the left. I also would add a built-in solar oven and rainwater-collection cistern, and fireplace on the right side of the house. The upper floor would be a slope-roofed loft, not very high because it would have the two bedrooms and a half bath.

I'm thinking we could make two bedroom nooks for the kids--these are just awesome:

My husband is going to a class in three weeks on how to make living roofs or recycled roofs. I thought it would be neat to somehow get the roof to be white and red, like a real mushroom, but I suppose it would be all right if it's green with a few flowers.

I'm the newest member of an ecovillage!

Today we joined the Ecovila Clareando, in Piracaia. I'm really excited about this, because it's the first big YES my gut has given me about pretty much anything about living in Brazil since I came here. I'd almost forgotten what it feels like to experience that kind of affirmation of a path I want to take. I've been more cautious about making life-changing snap decisions since my first kid was born, but I waited until my gut gave me three or four huge YESes and continued to do so even as I took steps to make it happen.

The next step is to build a house there. Right now this is close to what I have in mind: (look here for more specs)

This is a plan for a house made of straw bales. We are going to build with earthbags, though, as the materials are cheaper and more available, and it's easier to do round shapes with earthbags as they are stronger and don't require the buttressing that straight walls do. The half of the house with a larger radius (of 18 feet) is two feet longer than the recommended radius for an earthbag roundhouse, unless you buttress, but the inner walls will provide some buttressing so we might be able to get away with just putting in a couple on the outside. I am thinking of making those buttresses into life-size animal sculptures made out of earth. Like an alligator, for one of them, or perhaps a seated camel.

Building round and small is ecological because it won't require post and beam construction, thus using much less wood...and requiring less skill in the builders (I'm going to be one of them!). Round is harder to furnish, of course, but I think creative solutions can be found for this. The only problem I see with this model is I don't know where we would put the fireplace. We could try to do some kind of solar-powered radiant floor heating, but I think that would be very expensive and complicated.

We also would build an additional small studio roundhouse for guests to stay in, as well as for me to work in--both writing and hopefully Rolfing again--and generally as a place for me to get away from my husband's television addiction.