When we bought our house in Rincon, Puerto Rico, one of the first things we started doing was planting trees. Before we even had electricity or running water, Stefan and I were swinging the pickaxe in the yard and planting all the trees we could get our hands on! Now that a few years have passed, those tiny little sticks with leaves have actually grow into full-sized trees and in addition to providing shade, many of them are finally starting to produce fruit too.

Since we live in the tropics, we planted tons of exotic trees that produce fruit that we’ve never even heard of, let alone tasted. One of those trees is the Pachira Glabra or “French Peanut” tree and it just recently bloomed and gave us our very first French peanuts!

After we returned from our recent adventures in California, I noticed that the french peanut tree had produced a single blossom. I thought that a single blossom on an 18 foot tree was pretty funny, but didn’t think much of it, until Stefan pointed out two odd looking “fruits” on the tree a few weeks later. Not knowing when to pick the French peanuts, I just let them be. To my dismay, the other day I noticed that one of the fruits had dropped, busted open and was empty! Someone ate my french peanuts!! Luckly, upon closer inspection, the french peanuts had just been scattered and I was able to collect them from the grass.

The Pachira Glabra tree produces a fruit that has a very hard outer shell, similar to a coconut. The inside is soft and furry and contains about a dozen of the edible french peanuts. The nuts have a hard shell that you peel off and then you can eat the nut. AND…they are actually pretty darn delicious! I think they taste like a cross between peanuts and macadamia nuts. Can’t wait for more!

Puerto Ricans love them some holidays! I absolutely love this place during the holidays. The municipalities go nuts with christmas lights (not always up to code, families get together and neighborhoods decorate for all the celebrating they are about to do for Christmas, Day of the Innocents, Three Kings Day and the Birthday of Eugenio María de Hostos. I really can’t describe how crazy it gets…and as long as you don’t have official business to tend to, it is an amazing time to be in Puerto Rico. It’s awesome to see and maybe be involved in a parranda.

Parranda; the Puerto Rican Christmas ritual were groups of people go door-to-door pulling others into the revelries.

In my neighborhood, this usually involves rum or moonshine and often lasts all night. I think it may be part of the tradition, showing up to your family/friends home in the middle of the night, pulling them from bed and filling them with the holiday spirit (as defined by The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) and getting people out of their comfort zone and into the we’re all family zone. I don’t particularly like being pulled from my routine, but this slap in the face is for a great cause and brings people together…so I am all for it (unless they wake up Sydney

Last night, Brian and I went to a full moon party that was BYOB, so we stopped by the 7Express Convenience store downtown to pick up some adult beverages and saw a great representation of Puerto Rico during the Christmas holidays. Sure, it was a marketing campaign by Coca-Cola (pure genius by the way), but it is Puerto Rico at Christmas time. The only thing missing were the fireworks…which were set off downtown the night before (we had a perfect view from our back deck).

I was about to upload this picture to Facebook so I could get it up real quick, but I bet you guys will really enjoy this sunset from last night. I took this picture while driving a buddy to a birthday dinner. This is a picture of Tres Palmas at 6:15. I’m sure many cervezas were enjoyed by many watching this. Click on it to view a full size version. If you want to use this on a blog or website, please feel free just give us a backlink!

Before I moved to Puerto Rico I was into fish-keeping and had 3 fishtanks in my house. When we moved to Puerto Rico I figured it would be too hot in our un-air conditioned house to keep a fishtank from overheating and pretty much struck that hobby off of my list. Lately, we have been talking with several friends and neighbors about aquaponics and that got me missing my little fish friends . So when I was at Wal-Mart the other day, I picked up a 20-gallon tank and decided to set up a little experiment tank.

Our new fishtank with our new peces:

One of the many pluses of our trees/grass/plants growing in, is that it has made the temperature at our house much cooler. All of the added shade and greenery has literary lowered the temperature at our house by 5 – 10 degrees and made our property a lot more temperate. And ready for a fishtank! After I purchased the tank, I ordered live aquarium plants and real stone gravel online. I prefer live plants and real gravel to the plastic stuff, as the real stuff is beneficial to the fish and creates a little self sustaining eco-system. That means less cleaning and healthier fish. Win-win!

Once the plants and gravel arrived in the mail, I set up the tank and headed to the Mayaguez mall for some fish. There is a little pet shop kiosk there and the two kids working the store were very knowledgable and helpful, even with my bad Spanish. I purchased 2 bettas (1 male, 1 female), 3 tiger barbs and 2 gouramis. All of these types of fish are semi-aggressive, which means they can hold their own. (It’s important to keep the same temperament of fish together in an aquarium or else they will fight/nip/annoy the less aggressive species to death.)

Our new fish / Nuestro peces nuevos:

Sydney LOVES the new fish and looks forward to feeding them everyday. The fishtank as a whole adds a great element to our living room and, in my opinion, is much more fun to watch then TV.

Spanish fish hobby words:

Aquarium = Acuario
Freshwater = Agua Dulce
Fish = Peces

I have one freshwater aquarium with seven semi-aggressive fish. = Yo tengo un acuario agua dulce con siete peces semi-agresivo.

(please feel free to correct any of my bad Spanish …)

The noni fruit grows really well here in Puerto Rico and has been touted as an amazing antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, immune system booster and all-around good for you food. The only problem? It tastes/smells even more disgusting then it looks…

The noni that I picked from our tree today:

Just smelling a ripe noni makes me gag a little bit (and I have a pretty strong stomach), and if fresh noni wasn’t bad enough, the traditional way to “juice” them is by sticking them in a jar in the sun for a few weeks and letting it “ferment” (rot) so that the juice seeps out. I don’t know about you, but I was taught that eating rotting stuff is not a good idea. With that in mind, we havn’t done much with our noni, but recently a neighbor sent me some information on an alternative way of juicing the noni that does not involve letting it rot in a jar. It’s called “freeze juicing” and this is how you can extract the noni juice this way:

- Pick hard white noni.
- Let it ripen/soften for a couple of days (1 – 5 days).
- Put in a container and freeze for 6 – 12 hours.
- Remove from the freezer and let it thaw completely (6 – 12 hours at room temperature)
- Transfer the resulting juice into a container and store in the fridge.
- Noni juice should be good for 2 weeks if refrigerated.

Apparently, this method of juicing the noni results in a juice that is less disgusting and the beneficial properties of the noni juice remains intact.

I just picked my first batch of noni to try the “freeze juicing” technique, so I’ll let you know how it goes!

After building a chicken coop and buying 6 chickens from the local agro last year, we’ve really come to enjoy what the chickens bring to the table. They eat bugs, fertilize the lawn and produce tasty fresh eggs for us to eat. Unfortunately, the agro assured us that the 6 chicks we purchased were all female, but we ended up with 3 roosters and 3 hens. After a bit of natural selection, our 6 “hens” became 2 roosters and 2 hens and 2 eggs a day wasn’t really cutting it between Stefan, Sydney and myself. So, I decided that it was time to add to our flock and fill up that sweet coop that Stefan built.

I did a bit of research and not wanting to risk acquiring any more roosters, I decided to order pre-sexed chicks online from a professional hatchery. The minimum order is 15 chicks, so I purchased 5 Salmon Faverolle chickens and 10 Ameraucanas (or Easter Egg Chickens). The Salmon Faverolle’s are unique because they have an extra toe on each foot, feathered legs and a beard, and the Ameraucanas are cool because they lay colored eggs (green, blue and pink). 15 new chickens seemed like an awful lot, so I sold a couple of the Ameraucanas, and unfortunately we lost a few chicks to the perils of Puerto Rico. Monkey the dog killed one, Chichieto the cat killed two and a mongoose got two more. So the new chicks have been culled down to 7 Ameraucanas and 1 surviving Salmon Faverolle.

This is the sole surviving Salmon Faverolle, whom I’ve named “Skipper”:

“Hi! My name is Skipper and I’m a Salmon Faverolle chicken. I’m from Missouri and moved to Puerto Rico when I was one day old. Please don’t ask about my 4 sisters. Thanks.”

Our newest chickens are now 3 months old, so we should start getting eggs in the next month or two. Pictures of the Ameraucanas and their pretty colored eggs to follow!

I guess marketing works. When we were purchasing all of our appliances in Puerto Rico we didn’t know where to go to buy them. Our biggest concern was how unreliable a warranty might be if we bought off a small local business. After a bunch of years down here, that is the only way to go. I absolutely recomend buying your appliances off a local business like Raffuci Gas (787-823-2350) in Rincon But, we didn’t know that then, so we bought all of our appliances at Sears (and got a Sears Credit card for the discount and payment plan).

The appliances we purchased for upstairs were the Kenmore Elite and for the laundry room, the Kenmore H2 series. We have had the sears repair guy out for our oven upstairs and after charging us $125 for showing up didn’t even go into the house, he just said that an F-11 error meant we needed a new computer motherboard for around $900. Did we want to order it. I sent him home and unplugged the oven for a few hours. It has worked perfectly ever since.

The second experience we had with the sears repair guy in Puerto Rico was when they showed up to work on our Kenmore washer. He took the back off, found a dead mouse in the body and said sears policy is that he can’t work on the washer. I cleaned out the dead mouse, bleached and he still wouldn’t work on the washer. He just left. After waiting another week for the next repair guy to show up, the sears repair center apologized for the previous repair guys attitude and told me it wasn’t policy. So, as I suspected, he was just lazy and didn’t feel like working on our washer at the end of his day.

Now, a few months later, our dryer stopped getting hot. The first step was to check that we had propane and when that was confirmed we had to call for a repair appointment. I was on the fence on whether I should call sears repair or a local guy, but I went with sears because I don’t know anyone local and since we have friends staying at the house, I didn’t want to make them do the extra work. Well, sears repair in Puerto Rico has once again proved that they are so lame.

They were supposed to show up for an appointment 2 weeks ago but pulled a no call no show on us. Now, in order to get that appointment in the first place, we had to wait 2 full weeks! After waiting two weeks, and them not showing up, I called sears repair back and they told us that no one was there and we would have to reschedule. Do you want to guess when the next appointment was? Two weeks. Uuuuuhhhhhhhg. Ok, I’ll play along and book another appointment for two weeks out, but in the meantime, I got the number of a local appliance repair guy. Unfortunately, he was dealing with a family emergency so he couldn’t help us out and I still didn’t want to put our friends through the process of qualifying a local appliance repair guy in Rincon so we stuck with our sears repair appointment.

Here we are, almost a month after my first phone call to sears repair and they still haven’t shown up to the house to fix out dryer. I called to check up on the appointment and they told me the repair guy should be at the house between 12:45 and 1:45. Yesterday the told me between 8:00am and 5:00pm…so basically they want me (or Tony and Meghan) to take the full day off from work for a repair and just keep our fingers crossed that they are actually going to show up.

Man, sorry for the rant, but I’m super annoyed with Sears Repair in Puerto Rico. This is just ridiculous and my opinion of them is around an 8 out of 100. Lame.

Warning – Utilities in Puerto Rico are expensive! Every year Puerto Rico produces 20.92 billion kWh of electricity and we use it all! It’s crazy, power bills are way more expensive than the bills we got in California before we moved here and the average income in Puerto Rico is $16,300 a year with a 12% unemployment rate. How do people pay their electricity bills?

I say all this even though we are still in California, because I miss home. One of the things I think about are the beautiful Trade Winds consistently blowing through the house. Without fail, almost every day, those Trade Winds start blowing through Rincon around 10am and don’t settle down until 3 or 4 o’clock. When we were in Palm Springs a couple weekends ago, I took a few pictures of the mesmerizing windmill farms. They are everywhere.

So, it makes me wonder. It would be great to subsidize our power bills with wind or solar power. I need to think money though, does Puerto Rico recognize renewable power additions to your home in tax breaks or credits? Is it considered when your house is being appraised for a refinance or sale? How many solar panels do you actually need to power a 4,000 square foot house? How much do battery back ups cost and do you need a lot of space to store the fuel cells?

Man, we really miss being home. We have some friends (Tony and Meghan) staying at our house watching Monkey, Cheech and the chickens but we’ve been gone for 5 weeks now and I am loosing it!

We are in San Diego again visiting Summers family, working and enjoying everything this extremely spread out city has to offer. Unlike Rincon, it takes 30 minutes to get anywhere here…without traffic.

Last weekend, I went to Palm Springs with 12 of my buddies for a bachelor party. We stayed at a place called The Ace Hotel and had a great time. We played golf on Saturday morning and had dinner and a few drinks on Saturday night. It wasn’t exactly like the movie Hangover, but now that Sydney is around, I don’t think I need anymore of those weekends

The drive from San Diego to Palm Springs is direct and on main highways the entire time aside from one really cool mountain pass. Outside of San Diego county, my phone buzzed indicating to me that there was a wireless network available, and the network was called RINCON! It made me think about our little finca in Rincon and miss it even more. It’s funny, we totally take it for granted while we are there. Our life in Puerto Rico is ‘as good as it gets’ and I’m stoked to hear the clapping upon the plane landing, smelling the humidity and hearing the Coquís when we land.

When we moved to Puerto Rico, I was super stoked to hear that there are “no sharks” here. After hearing that, I did a little bit of research and there are actually sharks in Puerto Rico, but there had never been a shark attack on record and you do not see them in the water when you are surfing. (My theory is that the reef formations in Puerto Rico keep the sharks farther out to sea.) WELL, a tourist recently got attacked by a shark while swimming in the bioluminescent bay at Vieques!

The Washington Post reports:

“A shark estimated at 6 feet (1.8 meters) long bit a U.S. tourist earlier this week while she swam in a popular bioluminescent bay at night, doctors said Thursday.

The woman, identified as 27-year-old Lydia Strunk, faces several months of physical therapy and will remain hospitalized until the weekend, Dr. Ernesto Torres said.

The wound is about 10 inches (25 centimeters) long and runs from below her knee to the ankle, said Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, trauma director at the Rio Piedras Medical Center.

‘It was like (the shark) tried to tear away,’ he said. ‘She has an imprint of all the shark’s teeth.’

Strunk is expected to make a full recovery but will likely have some nerve damage and limited movement in her right foot, he said. Doctors repaired four tendons that are used for flexing the foot, and it will take up to five months for Strunk’s damaged nerves to grow back, he said.

Her mother said Strunk was doing much better, seeming to improve by the hour. She declined to go into details about the incident.

Stefan, my mom and I recently did the bioluminescent bay tour (the one in Parquera)…Yikes! It was creepy enough swimming around in that murky bay at night. Now that I know there may very well be sharks there, I won’t be doing that again!