She told me not to post this photo

My older daughter came for a visit during her spring break. It was a much needed break from a relentlessly tough PHD program in the US. We were both amazed how much her hair curled up in this humid weather. At 26 she has curly hair just like when she was 3 years old.

Welcome to Fazenda Sacramento

After the airports and bad roads we finally arrived. These photos are in no particular order.


Workshop, one of several employee homes, the storage and drying barn, and an excellent soccer field where the employees spend after hours.

Sorry, another bad photo but the only close up of the workshop.
View from one of the owners homes.


The commandante trying to get a cell phone signal.

An owner home under construction.
The first home built on the plantation.
It stretches as far as the eye can see and then beyond.

Marta's little garden.
They have acres under landscaping around the 5 homes of the owners.

Pool and barbeque area construction.
Tennis court construction.

Do you ever wonder where your coffee comes from?

Clustered like grapes on these beautiful branches they are either harvested by hand or by machine.
Or picked by me, one by one. My son is standing in the background. One of these days I will master the use of a camera.

Until then . . . you get the idea. Inside those red berries we find the green coffee.

May is harvest time. The berries are gathered and dried in the open air, then kiln dried for 30 hours to reach the standard international moisture content of 11%, then shipped to market on 60 kilo sacks.

Traveling to and from Fazenda Sacramento

My family is wondering where I have been. Unable to reach me by phone and email they were ready to list me as missing in action. I have also been exhausted since returning to the city and you will soon see why.

We left from Santos Dumont airport and flew to Uberlandia in the heart of the interior. It took us about 2.5 hours flying time in this little plane.

This is a Brazilian federal highway


We got into a truck and drove 390 km to reach our destination near the town of Patos de Minas.


I am trying to illustrate here that nearly the entire length of the highway are potholes and every vehicle must drive around thousands of potholes. As you can see it is not wide at all and very frightening to suddenly find yourself confronted by the grill of large cargo trucks.

After our 4 day visit, we took the road back to Uberlandia Airpot, whoops I meant airport.

The airport officials would not allow me to board the plane because of a name difference between my air ticket and my passport. After an hour they admitted that the airport clerks in Rio made an error. They should not have allowed me to board with the discrepancies in the first place. After considering my situation they folded and allowed me to return home.

Good intentions

Here I am sitting in front of an old computer with a bad keyboard in the dead center of Brazil. I brought my camera and took some great photos of this lovely coffee fazenda because my plan has been to blog every day. Well of course something had to go wrong. Not only did I forget the camera connection cable but the computer is slow, slow, slow.

We return to Rio tomorrow and I promise I will post these photos and tell my readers all about this farm, the transportation and the creatures crawling every where.

In dog years, I'm dead.

I can't regret aging because as we all know the alternative's a B . . . . I sat down yesterday to google age and birthdays. The results were charming, clever, funny, thoughtful but in general not very inspiring. All those quotes on old age, good living, hallowed halos; essays on how beauty never dies, it just moves to the heart . . .blah! blah!

The prolific Oscar Wilde tackled the issues in The Picture of Dorian Grey when he said "To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable." And although I've typically not been hard on my body I think I've been a bit tough on my soul. It seems to me that I could have gone for more joy and icecream.

It was John Mortimer who said:There is no pleasure worth foregoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward. But doesn't his name share a latin root with the name for death, or morgue, or an old boyfriend? So why does he expect to be quoted?

I'm so proud of myself, I fixed my links.

Really, truly I did it myself. I have been aware for months now that they did not work. Every day I skipped over the area with apprehension, thinking it would take me hours to correct. But it was simple.

Do visit those sites. I love Lucy Pepper's sites, I can't live without my recipe site and I depend on Medline to give me the real skinny on the medical world's claims. I just don't trust the doctors enough to accept every word that falls from their mouths. And in return, they don't know what to do with an American nurse who questions everything they say. Maybe try to cancel my health insurance so they never have to see me again?







Well this is what I think of you turkeys!!!!