California 2 Puerto Rico

For the past two months, we have been loosing power to the house regularly. We have had plenty of tropical storm action blowing harsh winds and dropping dozens of inches of rain on us here in Rincon and I have attributed the regular power outages to the weather conditions. Well, last night at poker, some of the local guys were talking about how much the power has been going out and why (power went out twice last night forcing our poker game to slow down and run on candle power).

A few of the guys said the reason the power is going out so much is because it is election time. I didn’t really understand, so I asked what the elections had to do with the utility company. They all agreed that every election season things go wrong, in this case, the electric company is having problems supplying power to Rincon. They continued to explain that the current mayor will announce that he has fixed the issues with the power company right before the election and that we will not have any more power outages. In short, the current government is making the power go out so they can look like champions and get more votes by saying they fixed it right before voting day.

I have to admit that election time is in November and Puerto Rico gets a lot of heavy weather systems, tropical storms and hurricanes in the months prior to election day. To me, logic dictates that the weather is the reason for the power problems in Rincon but what do I know about Puerto Rico? This country has its own way of doing things. What do you guys think?

When people find out that Stefan and I live in Puerto Rico, most people ask: “Why did you move to Puerto Rico?!”

Well, let me put it to you this way…

Stefan about to get shacked in PR:

Photo: Rachel Tanner

And there you have one of the many reasons why we moved from California to Puerto Rico ;).

I am not sure how to start this blog, because I have a story to tell, that someone told me. Here’s his story:

His cat, Ham, cruised in through the cat door of his house with a mouse in his mouth a couple weeks ago in the middle of the night. Hammy, with the mouse in his mouth, hopped up on Eric’s bed (his wife was sleeping) and dropped the mouse in the middle of them. The mouse took off through the covers, hoped on to the floor and darted down the hallway to the master closet.

Side Note: His other cats name is Cheese. Get it, Ham and Cheese.

This story was brought on by the fact that Cheech keeps bringing baby mice into the house, through the great room and right into the guest bathroom. He drops them and lets them run around and he chases them, swats at them and eventually kills them (if I don’t get in there and save them). I wouldn’t want to be killed by cheech, he is cold blooded ruthless murderer.

This morning I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and there was blood all over the floor and there was a very large rat in the corner behind the toilet and trash can. It was very dead.

The first thing that popped into my head was that this thing is half the size of Cheech! I can’t imagine him trotting through the front door with that thing in his mouth. So, the second thing that popped into my head was, did he catch it in the house? So, instead of trying to resolve this mystery, I cleaned it up and now I am blogging about it.

I woke up this morning at 6:00am. I have a lot of things I would like to do today, none of them are related to working on the house or yard

I worked on ‘work stuff’ all day Saturday to take today (Monday) off and go golfing. The only thing stopping me from going to Aguadilla to the golf course was going to be the possibility of waves. Last night, at last light, the surf was starting to show up about knee high and I called my golf buddy with an audible: “let’s bring our surfboards to the golf course, if the surf is good, we’ll surf, then golf.”

Mother nature had a different plan for us today. I woke up, and it has been raining all night and is still raining this morning. Golf is out. I am heading out the door to surf, knowing that if there is no surf, I can keep myself busy on the computer working for the next 24 hours straight (maybe just 8 or 9 hours), but alas, the power just went out. I am typing this on battery back-up. Pray for Surf.

After a few hours of grass cutting, weed eating and weed pulling, the house is really looking good these days. Rainy seasons downpours combined with the hard work Summer and I have been putting in on the daily basis is really starting to pay off.

You can see how the lawn looked 7 full days before I cut it here. I know it doesn’t seem like too long, but the lawn was out of control in these pictures…by the time I got to cutting it, it was a slow and tedious endeavor.

Here is a pretty bouquet I made from clipping from the yard!

I clipped some red and yellow heliconias, deep pink ginger flowers, areca palm frans and a giant tahitian torch ginger flower (from Mark). I got the idea after trimming up the front planters and thinking that it was a waste to throw away such pretty flowers…So I stuck them in a vase and made Stefan admire them. Then the wind promptly blew the vase over and broke it (yes, we really do get a strong breeze through our house), so I had to throw out the bouquet. Oh well…At least I got a picture…ha.

I know, I mention our local Rincon grocery store stepping it up and you are expecting me to tell you about locally grown fruit that didn’t sit on a cargo ship all the way from California or perhaps a new wine cellar in the back that I just discovered (just kidding), but instead I am going to tell you about the appearance of two old favorites: TastyKakes and Vegitarian sausage links. Oh how sweet it is.

It has been a year since we started landscaping our originally dusty and barren property…and what a difference some greenery makes!

Front of the house a year ago:

Front of the house now:

When we 1st planted the elephant ears:

The elephant ears are now 6 feet tall!

Pretty weird that Kuta is still in the same place a year later…haha.

I didn’t realize, and I’m sure most first time home buyers and Do It Youselfers don’t realize how much coin it actually takes to build a house; kitchen cabinets, tile, grout, skilled labor, treated wood, finishing wood, counter tops, appliances, wiring, lighting, fans, floors, locks, driveways, furniture……

Summer and I are managing the expensive work little by little and enjoying our new home AND as you guys know, we are landscaping like crazy. Much like investing in a home in a booming town like Rincon, all of the landscaping we do today is going to be mature and beautiful in 5 years which makes our time spent on the yard an investment.

I was walking around the yard with my coffee this morning, watering our garden, and decided that I wanted to show you guys all of our star players:

I planted this flamboyant tree on the side of our hill about 6 months ago. It really likes it there because it is growing like crazy and looks really healthy. We just need to keep the vines off of it (and all the other plants)

These are Elephant Ears transplanted from Dennis Richs’ Pool Bar. These guys must be prehistoric, because they are just huge. Definitely the fastest growing plant we have so far.


This flamboyant tree started at 6” tall 6 months ago and is reaching for the sun. Once these Flamboyant trees mature, they are going to provide great shade and beautiful flowers.

This is the state tree of Costa Rica, it is called a Guanacaste Tree. They look like the Flamboyant tree but get to be 6x the size! Great shade tree down the line.

Everything in our planter is BLOWING UP! If you look closely you’ll see Ginger (red flowers), Christmas Palm trees, some invasive plant from the stream bed, passion fruit vines and some flowers that Summer planted.

We almost named our street, Crooked Palm Lane because a bunch of Palms we bought last year were all super crooked. We have been staking them and trimming them to help them straightne out. This Queen Palm is getting less crooked everyday.

These palms (I think a Royal Palm or King Palm) are so green and majestic when they are mature…I’m looking forward to seeing this one dead center in our front yard.

This rubber tree is well over 12ft tall now, it was about 2 ft when we planted it 6 months ago.

All in all, our trees and plants are loving the rainy season down here. Hopefully, we won’t have to water them everyday once the dry season kicks back in. I am really looking forward to the privacy and shade all of these trees are going to provide us one day.

I have been making some great progress on the front yard hard-scaping lately. We finished up the really hard part of our rock platform in the driveway last week. Now, I have to finish cleaning the brown stone and granular dirt off of the rocks, fill in between the rocks with topsoil and then seed it, water it and let the green grow through the blue. Our goal was to not have a giant slab on concrete. Granted, concrete is much more solid, no one will trip on concrete but I am completely addicted to the ‘blue stone’ look that we got started on last year when we built the front entrance to the house.

This morning, I finished digging the holes and setting the last 5 or 6 rocks to complete the blue stone walkway from our front porch to the driveway. Here is how it looks now that it is complete. I also threw in a picture of the new black top driveway the city put in last week when they were in the neighborhood redoing the roads…there is another story/post that goes along with that one. Oh, keep in mind that our lawnmower has been at the shop for almost 3 weeks now…so the lawn is looking a bit wild!

Notice the ditch between the rock and the blacktop? That is where I am going to install a drain to help with water flowing down our property towards the front yard. We don’t have a problem with erosion, but I figure we should keep it that way and go above and beyond controlling the water on the property. My only real experience with erosion is with the ocean, and once the ocean gets a hold of something, chances are you will never get it back.