When i went to the Bike Shop in Mayaguez, I had to pass these two guys wheeling my bike on the back tire with my laptop bag (I wasn’t going to leave it in the car) and they were attacking me like crazy. The lighter one of the two that is being more bold in this video actually bit my ankles a couple of times…I didn’t have the heart, but I am sure any local would have booted those things across the streets, I pulled out my camera. Check out the Vicious Chihuahua’s.
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Rumor has it that there are a bunch of old trails running through Rincon that all of the old guys still use as shortcuts so they can avoid the long dangerous walks on the roads. There is also supposedly a couple of kilometers worth of trails down by Domes (the defunct nuclear plant) and directly behind the lighthouse. It has been a while since I have been on my bike…so after hearing about all these jungle trails and realizing that I need to start getting in shape for wave season I decided it is time to ride.
Unfortunately, the front disc brakes on my mountain bike got worked on the way down here on the plane. It took me about two weeks of asking around before I found someone that knows of a Mountain Bike store close to Rincon…and by close to Rincon, I mean Mayaguez. Mayaguez is about a 25 minute drive from Rincon and is home to University Puerto Rico Mayaguez Campus.
I dropped my bike off with those guys yesterday, and despite the neighborhood and the fact that one of the employees needed to “buzz” me in (like entering a jewelry store)…I am confident they are going to have everything I need around here for my mountain biking needs. They had some sick bikes on display in there, many of them costing well over three thousand dollars. I will let you know how the do with the repair of my specialized.
Because it took me so long to find the Mountain Bike Shop in Mayaguez, I decided to give you directions and post maps on how to get there in case you are looking to buy a new bike or repair your bike while you are on the west coast of Puerto Rico.
Get to the Number 2 highway and head towards Mayaguez. You will know you are on the outskirts of Mayaguez when you pass the Home Depot, K Mart and Sams Club. You are going to go for another couple of miles from there. A few landmarks you will pass to know you are heading in the right direction are the Holiday Inn Casino (right) and the Mayaguez Casino (left). About two lights up from the Mayaguez Casino is a public fountain on the left side of the No. 2 Highway along with two turn lanes that would take you to the University of Puerto Rico and the Pueblo if you turned left. These turn lanes are your indicator to get in the far right lane. After you pass the lights and fountain you are going to have to take the first exit ramp to the right once you get on the bridge that goes over the main road (you’ll see the Pueblo on the left and concrete barriers will start on both sides of the road). Take that first exit ramp to the bottom where you will have a light (one way street to your right), go straight through that light and straight through the next one (a block further, one way going left) and the bike shop will be on the right hand side about 4 blocks down. If you pass the entrance ramp to get back onto the 2, you have gone too far. Don’t forget to lock up…the neighborhood is sketchy.
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I never really made the time to post about this fence I put up in the back yard before the dogs came down…but it’s up and keeps Kuta and Monkey safe and sound outside/inside without Summer or I worrying about if they are “prize cock hunting” at the chicken coups next door.
If you look closely, you’ll see some the palm trees summer and I just planted last week.
More backyard fence
We pulled this out of the woods with a backhoe…I see a coffee table
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You would not believe how much trash piles up while building a house. We had a couple of huge piles of trash and debris from hanging the drywall and one large pile of scrap wood. After looking into getting a dumpster in the back yard we decided that it wasn’t cost effective. It costs $150 a month for rent, a $150 delivery charge and $250 every time we had it emptied. That added up to $550. Instead, I paid $150 to have a guy park his dump truck in our backyard for a couple of days so we could fill it up with just our trash…no wood allowed.
Unfortunately, no one was around to help fill the truck up, so I had to fill it up myself by breaking all of the drywall into manageable sized pieces (I still remember my hernia surgery) and filled up the truck.
Once I got to the bottom of the pile and picked up the last big sheet of drywall off of the ground, there were about 30 little centipedes running around and one large one. Centipedes suck. If a centipede bites you, it is very painful and will cause swelling and redness. The symptoms can last as long as 48 hours and can only be temporarily relieved by placing ice cubes directly on the bite (with no power, we have no fridge/freezer…hence no easy access to ice cubes) but you pretty much just need to deal with it. I killed the big one with the closest long object I could find…a sledge hammer (i was afraid to step on it because it was longer than my foot and i didn’t want it to curl up and bite my ankle).
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Well, it seems nothing is easy the first time you build a house. There are tons of little things that are very simple and intuitive while construction a home…but as a first time ‘contractor’ (i use that term loosely), most of these intuitive thoughts are afterthoughts. For example;
When we were framing in the guest bathroom with the help of brian, I never thought about adding an extra 2×8 in the wall behind where the sink was going to go in case we decided to install a pedestal sink. This extra support is needed for both supporting the weight of the sink as well as providing a stud that is easy to find so installing the sink doesn’t require multiple holes in the Travertine while searching for the studs. Well, now we have the tile completed (including grout and sealer), the toilet installed, the shower is done and now it’s time to move on to the pedestal sink that we bought…but we can’t install it because we don’t know where the studs are and I am not willing to drill multiple holes in the travertine to find it. It’s a pain because Summer and I don’t really want a pedestal sink in there but we are limited by space so we figured we will put this one in there for a year or so until we find exactly what we like…but now that option is out the door. We are probably going to have a custom vanity built to fit the small space and get one of those new sinks that will sit on top of the vanity. Now, the only problem is tracking down a quality product in Puerto Rico.
Not our new sink, but a sink that rests on top of the vanity like we want
The other thing I would do differently in the bathroom is a pretty major headache, but would have save tons of time and money. I would have pulled out the level and made sure all of the walls were level so when we laid tile it would come out perfectly straight without a bunch of bumps and slopes. It causes the tiles to lift up a bit and once all is said and done, the bathroom doesn’t have the same high quality look it would have had if all the tiles were lined up. Don’t get me wrong though, we didn’t put in tile on uneven walls. We filled in the walls with grout/cement to make them all perfectly level and then installed the tiles…so it does have a high quality look to it….but that was expensive.
Here are two teaser pictures of the guest bathroom as it stands right now just to give you an idea of how the tile, the one piece kohler toilet and the cast iron kohler tub look.
Travertine with One Piece Kohler Toilet
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Dengue Fever is at an all time high (since 1994) in Puerto Rico.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20181559/
Dengue Fever is spread by mosquitos and can actually be fatal (but most often it’s not). Symptoms can be flu-like and there can also be intense pain in the joints and muscles, which is why Dengue Fever has been nicknamed “bonecrusher disease”.
I’m surprises I don’t have Dengue Fever. The mosquitos were feasting on me the last couple of weeks. Bastards.
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I’m back in San Diego for a couple of weeks, but when I get back down to Puerto Rico, I’m going to have to start driving. Which means, I will probably be getting lost a lot and asking for directions (direcciones). So, here are Las Palabras del Dia:
Left - Izquierda
Right - Derecha
Up/Above - Arriba
Down - Abajo
Below - Debajo
Near - Cerca
Ahead/Forward - Adelante
La casa es debajo del panaderia. (The house is below the bakery.)
Vamos izquierda a la vaca cafe. (You go left at the brown cow.)
Torco a la derecha despues de restaurante China. (I turn left after the Chinese restaurant.)
El pajaro es abajo mi casa. (The bird is above my house.)
Hay un raton cerca de tu pie. (There is a rat near your foot.)
Abajo este calle. (Down that street.)
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Summer left early this morning (we left for the Aguadilla airport at 4:00am EST) to head back to San Diego for a few weeks for work. It was a hard good bye. It was great to spend two weeks straight with her…we have only been able to hang out together for a couple days at a time since April.
Shawn, her brother, called looking for her flight number and arrival information. Of course, her flight was delayed out of the JFK airport by about 2 hours. She is scheduled to arrive 2 hours late. While I was there checking on the status of the flight, I saw a link that said “view map”. I clicked on it and it showed me exactly where her plane was at that very moment. It refreshes every couple of seconds. Really cool stuff.
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Today, I met with the Supervisor of the Power Company because he is helping me complete all of the paperwork I need in order to get electricity hooked up at the house. At the moment, we have the poles in, the pedestal is hooked up and run to the house leaving us with just one thing left; the meter.
Unfortunately, we found out today that we are going to have a few more roadblocks. The first one is that they won’t grant us electricity until we have our Permiso de Uso from ARPE which is a couple months down the line. We may be able to get around that with a construction line, which costs more to run but will still get us power. The second thing is a bit more difficult to deal with. When the supervisor read the “electrical inspection certification number” to the Electric Company, they told him that they don’t have any record of that number and that it doesn’t exist. This means that we were either ripped off and sold a forged electrical certification or the paperwork hasn’t made it into the system yet (but it has been 8 weeks, so that is doubtful).
I am going to have to grease many more palms to get this done, because the only way another electrician will give us our certification is if he/she see’s the wiring…which is now behind $12,000 worth of greenboard, mud and paint. Theoretically, they could make us rip the walls down to inspect the lines. I have my fingers crossed we are going to work through this without that debilitating expense.
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Over the past couple of weeks, www.ca2pr.com has been getting hammered by spam bots, programs that crawl blogs and automatically post links to their site, so Summer and I had to do something about it. We installed an anti-spam bot program that is going to require everyone to type in a security password when they post comments…just a word. Not too much, just one word. Die spam bot, die.
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