California 2 Puerto Rico

Along with beautiful tropical weather comes little annoyances that have to do with all of the moisture in the air. Anytime you open any food, cereal for example, it goes stale in minutes (literally sometimes!). In order to keep things edible, you have to keep them in the refrigerator: Spices, boxes of cereal, flour, sugar, etc…which makes for one annoyingly crammed full fridge!

The moisture issue also creeps into our closets and things that have been in there for more then a week or two smell funky and mildewy. I actually have mildew growing on all of the leather high heeled shoes that I don’t ever wear.

But I recently found a SOLUTION to these two little moisture/humidity problems! For the kitchen we ordered a set of OXO Pop Containers. We actually found one of these containers at the local Kmart, but they were $22 a piece! Once we tried it and found that they work great to keep the humidity out of our food, I went online and found that Macys.com (who ships to PR), had a 10 piece set for $100. These containers really do work so well at keeping our food fresh as they have a type of pop seal that uses suction to seal. We can keep cereal in the cabinet again…YAY!

Next, I tackled the mildewy closets with Space Bags. We have way too many clothes that we NEVER wear now that we live in Puerto Rico. This includes my collection of vintage fur coats, high heel shoes, Stefan’s designer suits, ties and dress clothes, snowboarding gear, etc. These items have been literally rotting in our closets. So the other day I finally busted out the Space Bags that we bought well over a year ago and I LOVE THEM! They are so incredibly perfect for Puerto Rico, or any place that has high humidity. I just ordered 10 more…haha.

Look! My shoes are shrink wrapped!

We’ve been really tied up with the baby, work and the usual life stuff…but Sydney wanted to say HOLA!

Does anyone know what kind of plant this is that Sydney and Summer and standing next to? It is really cool looking, almost prehistoric. Is this the plant that killed off the dinosaurs?

We’ve planted several dozen (50ish) citrus, exotic fruit and avocado trees on our property, and while many of them are flourishing and doing well, unfortunately we keep losing trees to careless weedwackers. Recently we’ve lost a canepa, tangerine, kumquat and avocado in the battle that is maintaining our property. No bueno!!

We made another trip out to the nursery and spent a couple hundred dollars on a new batch on injertado (grafted) fruit trees and this time, we are protecting our investment! Stefan came up with a plan of using PVC pipe to create little tree jackets to protect our trees from wayward weedwackers. While this is a great plan, it’s kind of a pain in the butt to go buy PVC and cut it to fit each tree, so I made a trip down to the $1 store and bought a bunch of plastic hair curlers. They are much easier to cut then PVC, and you can just add more curlers if the tree is taller. Hopefully this will work!

Our new batch of fruit trees:

Our trees wear fashionable light blue “armor”:

The town of Rincon does a wonderful job with their Christmas and Three Kings Day lights every year. This year was no different, aside from the fact that they had bigger trees to drape the lights across. The town planted all new trees and plants about 5 years ago and completely rebuilt the square. It looks great. Not only is it nice now, but much like our yard, daydreaming of how nice the square will be in 10 years with tons of shade from all the grown up trees it will be amazing.

Summer, Sydney and I were walking around the square a few weeks ago and I took a closer look at how the municipality hung and powered the holiday lights. Now, maybe it’s just because Brian Henry (aka: The Mad Electrician) is so talented and is certified in all the necessary codes to run safe power and I dip my feet in the civil litigation pool for a living, but the holiday lighting in Rincon is absolutely insane. Instead of planning ahead and putting in power outlets at each section of trees (separated by concrete sidewalks), they simply spliced into the power of the gazebo and ran 3 wire taped together from tree to tree. There are no boxes and the wires are low enough to the ground to touch. Completely rigged. Check out this picture. Felicidades Rincon!

My iPhone doesn’t take the best pictures, but they work for the web and I always have that thing with me so I have been capturing a lot of moments on my iPhone. Here are my top ten (11) photos from the past two weeks.

As of lately, Summer and I haven’t really had much time to do much of anything at all. We are working, taking care of Sydney and trying to get a little free time in after the little munchkin goes to bed.

We have been cooking a lot at home; Indian food (plain yogurt marinade for the chicken), Mexican Baja style fish tacos, pasta, lasagna, grilled chicken, spicy stir fries. We have been having a lot of fun, eating great food, spending time together cooking and saving a lot of money because every $15 meal we cook lasts two days. Going out all the time was getting expensive in our little tourist town and we were getting tired of the same old-same old. Unlike Ocean City where I grew up, there is no back door with different pricing for the locals versus the tourist on a travel budget. We all pay the same prices.

One of our regular spots over the past year or two has been the sushi served over at The Pool Bar in Barrio Puntas (that’s the neighborhood on the windward side of Rincon). They have a great fresh salad (served with shrimp or ahi), delicious and creative sushi (coconut wasabi drizzled over the tuna roll) and an awesome seared tuna with beurre blanc sauce. Dennis and Carol, the owners, have been in Rincon for thirty plus years, raised their own family here and now have their adult daughter working the bar and their grandson keeping them in board games, skateboards and days at the beach. If it’s a hot night, go for a swim in the pool while waiting for your sushi or to wash off the strong buzz you tacked on with the Saki bombs you were doing. For Summer and I, soon enough it will probably be a combination of the above along with our daughter begging us to go for another swim.

Thursday Nights in Rincon

Jazz Night and Sushi at Pool Bar

I went over to get take out sushi for Summer and I last night. I didn’t call my order in ahead of time because I wanted to have a cold Presidente or two and listen to some live jazz while waiting. There was a good crowd with all the tables taken at 7:30 and a few people waiting at the bar to be seated. They started a new hibachi menu, but I didn’t go for any of those items, we stuck with sushi and salad (our usual). The Jazz was a refreshing change to the reggaeton, house music and nursery rhymes I am subjected to on the daily. I really like the live jazz, the band is a colorful bunch of guys and girls…and they make me tap my foot. I recorded some of a song so you could have a listen before you head over next Thursday for your sushi jazz experience.

I can hardly believe it, but the gym in our house is finally done! While we were in San Diego in Sept/October, we had the ceilings put in downstairs so when we got home, I started working on the gym since I am anxious to get back into shape after being pregnant and it sure it nice to finally have a permanent place to put our fitness equipment. This is what I had to do to finish our gym:

- Clean. There was annoying construction crap (spackle/drywall dust that took more then 4 floor scrubbings, stray concrete, etc) that I had to clean up.

- Paint. I painted the ceilings and soffits white, the walls light blue and one wall a bright blue.

- Install stripper pole. It might seem strange that I have a ’stripper pole’, but it really is the best excersize and it’s super duper fun. Like playing on the monkey bars when you were a kid!

- Install entertainment center. 32″ TV mounted on the wall, hooked up to a Mac Mini so we have internet access, DVD player, Wii Fit and stereo system.

So, there are all sorts of fun things to do in our gym now! We have a treadmill, stripper pole, Wii Fit balance board, Tai Bo/Dance/Fitness DVD’s, yoga ball, free weights and jump ropes. And most importantly, we have air conditioning in the gym (This may seem like a given for a house in Puerto Rico, but most of our house does not have A/C.)!

While I would consider the gym as being done, these are a couple of little things that will be done in the near future:

- Trim out the windows. But I havn’t figured out how we are going to do that yet.

- Organize/hide all the cords hanging from the entertainment center.

- Install grande mirrors on the back wall.

And one last thing that we will eventually do:

- Install Brazilian teak hardwood flooring. We have just enough left over from when we did the upstairs, so whenever we get around to doing the floors downstairs we will install that in the gym. But we are pretty burned out on construction, so the polished concrete floors are just fine with me until we decide to open that can of worms ;).

Here is a walk through of our gym today:

First, eat. Next, practice talking:

Next, get a little independent. No need to be pressed up against a sweaty daddy all day long.

After about 2 hours of play, diaper changes, boobie, dogs barking and the infinitely intriguing ceiling fans, it’s time for a nap…Rincon style.

I don’t know which is the bigger accomplishment, getting the ceilings done downstairs or blogging about it! Summer and I have been so busy with work and Sydney that we haven’t had time to post the pictures of the soffit work and drywall on the ceilings downstairs. Aside from that, it has been hectic trying to get settled back into the house. There is drywall dust EVERYWHERE and we are only able to really work around Sydney’s nap schedule. Life has changed

Now, looking at these pictures, you need to understand that so much more went into this behind the scenes. First off, we have the electrical work. Brian flew in from Florida for a 7 day trip and ended up staying for 21 days! Apparently, the last guy we had down here completely butchered the electrical work and basically spit in the general direction of electrical code and standards. He didn’t ground outlets (we have gone through 3 battery back up units and the computer on Summers’ commercial sewing machine fried). Not to mention the fire hazard of ungrounded electrical run in a wood house. So, the former electrical rats nest known as our home, was rewired downstairs. We also added all the recessed lighting (good luck finding commercial grade recessed cans on the west side of the island), ran Internet up to the kitchen, set up the wiring in the wall for a TV downstairs and ran electric out of the front of the house on the left and right side for future landscape lighting and to have outdoor outlets. Brian did a ton of work that was above and beyond his responsibilities. He also fixed some plumbing issues around the dishwasher and cleaned out the sewer pipes before we close everything up. Man, I get tired just thinking about all the work he did.

Then came the next bit of work. Cleaning out all of the rooms and getting ready for the crew to come in and do the ceilings. We wanted everything out of the way so nothing was in the way and so nothing got broken. Cleaning downstairs was a much bigger project that we thought and we left more behind and open to damage than we wanted to when we left, but with Sydney and packing for two months in California we couldn’t get it all done.

The work took about 5 weeks to complete. Thank goodness we weren’t here for all that banging. At this point, we are sick of hearing the banging of construction and people coming over asking for money, running over our baby plants, driving on our lawn (around the rocks we have set up to stop people from doing that) or honking the horn in the driveway just as we get the baby to go to sleep.

So, without any further delay, here are the pictures of the ceilings, soffits, fans and recessed lighting downstairs.

Here are the big things left on my ‘to do list’:

1. Tile Downstairs
2. Install leftover hardwood floors in the gym/guest bedroom
3. Find a wood worker to build and install big ’shutter style’ windows like we have upstairs
4. Find and install french doors (get rid of iron bars downstairs)
5. Recycle the iron bars by welding them into our front gate
6. Back deck

Right before we left for our two month excursion to California & New Jersey, I was walking around our property checking out the plants. One of the first things that we planted were a few little banana trees and they have gotten quite large. Since they havn’t produced any fruit, I was wondering if perhaps we planted non-fruit bearing banana trees and said out loud, “Hey, why havn’t we gotten any bananas out of you guy!?” (Yes, I talk to our plants…) I looked up and guess what I saw: Bananas!

Does any one know the best time to pick bananas? While they are still green or when they start to turn yellow?

In addition to bananas, we could not believe how much the papaya plants had grown in the two months we were off the island. I would say they are ten times the size from when we left and there are 20+ papayas hanging off of that tree!

In the madness of preparing for our first cross country trip with the baby we forgot to harvest and eat our first pineapple and it went bad by the time we got back…Bummer! But we do have 6 more pineapple plants in the ground so hopefully we will get another soon.

It’s so cool to finally be able to eat the fruits of our labor (literally)! So far we have produced the following food from our land: mangos, papayas, pineapples, avocados, kumquats, limon dulce, noni, tomatoes, lettuce, basil, rosemary, string beans, calabaza, snap peas, jalapenos, edamame, chives, bell peppers, peanut butter fruit, starfruit and cilantro. It’s like Farmville, but for real! Right Robin?