This is Brazil signing off...

My apologies for not writing anything new sooner. As you know from my last entry my wife is pregnant and thus this week she’s commandeered an army of builders and painters to come into the house and change the spare room into a nursery. There’s no shortage of people who can do the job thanks to the almost daily boats of immigrants arriving here in Rio. Mostly Brazilians who have been sent home but there are an increasingly large number of Europeans and Americans eager to escape their own countries. The irony isn’t lost on anybody and the papers are even calling for stricter immigration controls!

Well anyway the house is a mess with banging’s, drillings and sawings going on all through the day. My wife however is all a glow but she’s a little dictator in these matters making sure everything is perfect for our future son or daughter. Me, I’ve just agreed with everything she said and handed her my credit card. She seems to know what she’s doing and she’s taking great pleasure in doing it. And showing off to all her friends. She’s already kick started a photo album with the first ultrasound images!

So the house is full with the sounds of construction and the clucking of hens. On the business side of things alls well. Orders have reached a steady plateau and everybody is being kept busy. The only worrying thing is that the government has passed a law that invades our privacy. Strictly speaking it only applies to those in the petro-chemicals industry at the moment, namely the government are checking to make sure no one is giving away Brazil's top technological secrets on bio fuels, though im sure they will exercise it on other areas soon enough. Thus it means that this will be the last blog I will be publishing as it is getting too risky to carry on and I now have a fully fledged family to take care off.

The little world news that is still filtering through is that of greater crisis in the USA and Europe with more riots for food and the governments steady loss of control. Though a lot of this is rumour and hear say. The one thing I have noticed is that it seems that consumer goods are starting to climb alarmingly in price. This was rammed home to me when I saw my wife’s receipt for a baby monitor, nearly 200 Reais (which is a lot these days since inflation has been reigned in)!! It amuses me that since plastic is becoming a luxury it is advertised as such on the products. In this case our monitor boasted ‘A tough rugged plastic casing using the latest polymerisation techniques to ensured unbeatable durability during your babies early years!’. We truly live in a world gone mad.

Well I must say that even though this hasn’t been the most eventful of my entries its has been probably the most enjoyable to write. And now I think I will go back to my wife and dream of our childs future. If it’s a boy will he be the next Ronaldinho? If it’s a girl, what will her first boyfriend be like! Good luck to everyone out there in the world, stay safe and I wish you all the best. Tchau! - David_Mattock