Yep, the earthquake map just said it was a 5.8 and it was centered right around Aguada! It was 11.3 miles east of Rincon.

AAAAAaaaaaaaaaah!

Check out the new FAQ page here:

Sydney time takes 100% of your attention 85% of the time. That 15% is when she feeding herself cheerios, playing with her juice bottle or watching the animals in amazement. Even when she is on the front porch in the pack n’ play (see photos) or trying to crawl around on the floor, she requires constant supervision. It’s like she’s a baby or something

This last week, I have been leaving the office around 5:00pm and loading up Sydney in her new baby backpack and hiking up into the hills. Our average hike was about 45 minutes or so and Sydney just loved it. Loaded up in the pack, she is way up high, bouncing around, grabbing for leaves, checking out cows (see photos) and staring at every dog and cat like it’s the first time she’s seen one. Keep in mind, we’re in Puerto Rico and everyone has dogs. It’s like a barking orchestra as you walk through the narrow roads up and down the hills.

Last weekend, we started building bench railings on the front porch. Sydney is getting more and more mobile everyday. Putting up the bench railings is going to kill two birds with one stone. First, Sydney won’t be able to fall off the sides of the porch (highest part, the front is bordered by a big planter) and that is a good thing. Second, it solves our front porch seating issues. Porch furniture is super expensive and we haven’t found anything that we like that will work on our narrow front porch. Adding the benches has eliminated the need for furniture out there. Now we have two hammocks and seating for 6 to 10 people. I’ll upload the bench photos as a single post once we finish them. You can get a sneak preview by checking them out in the background of the front porch picture with Sydney.

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!

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!

Here is the photo I took with my iPhone:

Thanks for the good shots this winter Mark!

Popular Mortgage | Banco Popular Mortgage Division

As everyone knows that pays attention to the sensationalism passed off as news on the television everyday, the world is in a financial crisis. The sky is falling and chicken little (strong rooster in PR) is running around confused causing hysteria. Well, such is capitalism, and those of us who did not live over extended on our credit and ‘perceived’ value of our homes for the past ten years can now reap the benefits of being financially responsible consumers. Right? I don’t think so.

I filled out the paperwork and payed Banco Popular over $700 to survery, appraise and do all the paperwork associated with refinancing our Rincon home (primary resident) and just last week (after multiple phone calls and visits) they told me the offer has changed, I need a second appraisal (another $150) and they raised my required hazard insurance (equivalent to home owners insurance) from $65 a month to $281.53 a month! They also added a $2,000 fee that they labeled as a mortgage loan discount (FYI Banco Popular: if it’s a discount, you subtract money, not add it, it’s the little button on your calculator that looks like a plus sign, without the vertical line) and they added a $2,600 cancellation fee for canceling my old loan to refinance with the new one. All this has been making me furious. I am dealing with mortgage brokers who answer yes/no questions with a 10 minute explanation that always ends up with some sort of sales person style tie down and a question back to me along the lines of: “are you ready to move forward. sign the paperwork today!”

You have got to be fricking kidding me. Four months and counting on a refinance with Banco Popular? Aside from all the new fee’s they added, they are trying to ignore them and just get me to close the deal. Here is what I have for your deal Banco Popular. I curse you to eat Noni for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the rest of your life. When you get sick, I hope some comes out your nose and it burns and you smell that noni puke for days and days.

Banco Popular | Investments and CD Accounts

When we bought our house, we agreed to place 20% of the value of our home in a 2 year CD Account with Banco Popular as collatoral that we were not going to default on a home that was not finished construction. Heck, all our property and the unfinished home wasn’t enough, which I was cool with. I make interest off the money for two years, Banco Popular doesn’t have to worry about selling the frame of a house and we’re all good. Well, now it’s two years later and they won’t let me cash in my CD Account with them. They tell me that they need some collateral for the mortgage. Hmmm, Isn’t my 5 bedroom, 3 bath house (marble, granite, mahogany) the type of collateral most banks have on mortgages? More over, I received a letter two weeks ago saying that I had a 5 days grace period to pick up the check (cashed in CD Account) or it would be automatically re-instated for two years. But now, I go in and ask for my money and they say there is a hold on it from the office in San Juan. I have been in the Rincon office of Banco Popular 3 times this week and everytime they say they are working on it.

Today, I contacted a Puerto Rico real estate lawyer and then went into the bank. I told them I was not going to leave until the ‘mix up’ was resolved. The Rincon branch manager did not know what was going on and passed the task on to someone else earlier in the week. Today, I walked right into his office, sat down at his desk and told him that if they couldn’t provide a reason (contract with my signature on it) to continue holding my money without me making interest on it, I was not going to leave his office. I told him I would ruin his day if he didn’t pick up the phone and start making phone calls.

Ultimately, the reason for all this is because they can not find my original Popular Mortgage paperwork. I told them that I have a copy and I’ll bring it in so they can give me my money. They said that the paperwork had to be internal Banco Popular paperwork. Ok, so let me get this straight here; Banco Popular is disorganized. Banco Popular lost my mortgage paperwork. Banco Popular is unsure what is going on, so instead of giving me my money that I signed into a two year account (they have copies of the two year CD paperwork), they are going to hold on to it until they can get their business more organized.

I thought putting all that in writing would make me feel better. The only time my blood pressure even dropped a little bit was at the mention of our daughter. And now it’s back up again. Here is how I classify all this, and this is the end of my rant. I need to get back to work:
Puerto Rico Bank Banco Popular is Stealing From Us

I signed into face book, updated my status:
Departmento de Hacienda; Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico: Press 2 for English……..CLICK…ah, hello?

One of my friends saw this and informed me that it was Jose de Diego day and that EVERYTHING is going to be closed. Curious to learn more about why everything is closed, I googled Jose de Diego and read about this Puerto Rican public icon.

Jose de Diego was a founder of the Unionist party, a poet, advocate for the independence of Puerto Rico and known as the Father of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. He was born on this side of the island in Aguadilla in 1866. If you visit Puerto Rico you will see his name everywhere; street names, highways, schools and municipal buildings. Jose de Diego is celebrated on the third Monday of April every year.

Ya know, this Jose guy sure did do a lot of great stuff. He reminds me of the founding fathers of the United States and I instantly liked him. Next year, I’m closing my office for Jose de Diego day too.

In the past 6 months we have been slowly getting fruit from the trees we planted. Nothing that will feed the neighborhood (aside from the big ‘ole mango con fibre trees in the back yard) but we have scored some starfruit, peanut butter fruit, a couple small citrus fruit and a bunch of vegetables. So far, our biggest score, as far as mature fruit goes, has been a papaya tree that we didn’t even plant. It grew from seeds we threw off the back porch. We weren’t watering it or trimming it, the only thing we did was not cut it down by accident on one of my monthly (during the rainy season) 30 hour property clearing sessions.

Our papaya tree produced a great papaya last month (just one) and another one about two weeks ago…but the rats/birds go to that one before us. Yesterday, I cruised down to check out the tree with my morning coffee and there was a big beautiful papaya waiting for me to pluck it from the tree…so I did. I am going to give it another day or two to yellow out some more, and then we are going to eat it!

I have made several calls to PRT (Puerto Rico Telephone) informing them of the difficulties we have been having and they have tried to fix our problem from their computer center (in San Juan maybe?) but none of their fixes have worked. Finally, last week, they said they were going to send a technician to our house to check on the problem. I told them all the problems started with the wind storms and it could be our line and they said it was probably faulty wiring in our house.

I bet that line works in Puerto Rico all the time.

It didn’t work today, I informed them that our modem/router is hooked directly into the line the PRT service man installed in our house and that the phone does not run anywhere else and it’s still not working.

I called over the weekend to see what the status was and finally on Monday (after getting disconnected every time I hit 2 for an English speaking operator) our phone line went out completely. I unplugged our router and plugged in a telephone and it had no dial tone. Hmmm. That tells me there is something wrong with the phone line and not our Internet. I called back and was told that they were working on it but that wasn’t a good enough answer for me. I was escalated to a manager that has been trained to say; yes Mr. Rest, I understand and I’m so sorry. He doesn’t care about my problem and he certainly didn’t escalate the service call. I called back on Tuesday after no one showed up on Monday and they said they had a support ticket and someone would be coming over in the next 48 hours. I told them that we have commercial DSL because we run our businesses on it and that it was an emergency. The supervisor promised me someone would be out immediately…in the next 24 to 48 hours to check the lines.

For the past 5 days Summer and I have been working at friends houses, friends offices and Cafes and we still have no DSL at the house and we are still getting the run around every time we call PRT. I have been researching other Internet providers in Puerto Rico, but there aren’t many in our neck of the woods (West side Rincon) so our really only other option is to go with Satalite…which I am hesitant to use because I heard that our Internet will go down every time it gets cloudy.

On a good note, last night, Summer figured out we could mooch off of a neighbors wireless network and get three bars if we sit in the right spot on the porch.

Internet Update 11:51am Friday April 3rd: As I was driving home from Mark’s House this morning (FatAndTan Photography) I saw a little PRT pick up truck heading my way. I basically pulled into the center of the road so he couldn’t pass, asked him if we were on his repair list for today and he said yes…he followed me back to the house. He inspected our line at the pedestal (where all our utilities come in) and there was no tone (good sign, if the problem were the line running from the pedestal to the house we would have had to figure out how to run 250 feet of telephone line under ground to the house) so he went up to the main utility pole at the end of our street. He told me that the line was disconnected and that was most likely the problem. He reconnected it and just like MAGIC, our Internet is back up.

Puerto Rico Telephone is still on my shit list, but in time, all wounds heal. Let’s see if our PRT Internet service gets back to fast and consistent like it used to be.