Our newest baby chicks: 10 Ameraucanas and 6 Silver Laced Wyandottes:

The crate gets pretty gross really quick with 10 (I sold six) rapidly growing chicks pooping, scratching, spilling their food and splashing around in their water, so I started looking up better solutions for keeping chicks. Initially I was going to add a brooder onto our chicken palace, but I came across a better idea while researching DIY brooder ideas: the chicken tractor! The chicken tractor is portable, so we can keep the chicks closer to the house and move them around the yard, so that they can forage and fertilize the land, all while staying safe from predators and the older grumpy hens.

I wanted to use our left over building scraps to build the chicken tractor, so I walked around the property and grabbed a random piece of T1-11 that was annoying me by rotting in the yard, and I happened upon the old temporary screen doors that we finally recently replaced with permanent doors. They ended up working perfectly!

I had Stefan cut a couple of 45 degree angles so that the two screen doors fit together a-frame style. I used the T1-11 to brace and cap off the ends and I made a little box at the end where the chickens can get a little shade or nest. I found a couple of old hinges and made a little trap door on the end for easy loading/unloading of chickens, food and water. I then stapled some left over chicken wire over the screens. Originally I was going to rip out the screens, but since we found out that our cat likes to reach though chicken wire, pull the chicks heads through and gnaw them off, I decided that keeping the screens in would probably not be a bad idea…

Our new chicken tractor:

The chicken tractor isn’t exactly pretty, but I plan on painting it camouflage with the left over spray paint that we used to paint our trashcans recently. And the price was right! The total cost to build our chicken tractor was $0.00, and I got a bunch of scrap out of the yard while creating a useful addition to our finca. Chicken tractors can be used for chicks, or to quarantine/separate a sick chicken, contain chickens to a certain part of the yard, etc.

More pictures of our new DIY chicken tractor:

In other chicken-related news, we are getting tons of fresh eggs from the 5 older chickens and our Ameraucanas finally started laying green and blue eggs. Check em out!

Delicious fresh eggs:

Annie and I both work out of home offices, which has it’s advantages (especially when your office is as awesome as mine is), but the problem is I’m always getting distracted and now that everyone that used to work for me is now doing there own thing and working as independent contractors, I am in the office all alone. Occasionally, I feel less than stimulated typing code solo rocking out to my music. I spoke to Annie about it and she felt the same way…not to mention the distraction of hanging out with your kid(s) and having fun instead of paying bills is always a temptation.

Because of this, we opened The Cube in downtown Rincon. The Cube is about 1,500 square feet of air conditioned office space equipped with high speed Internet, desks, fax machines and other like minded individuals looking to put their heads down and get some work done. It’s been really cool, because when you feel like grabbing a cup of coffee down the street at the panaderia or coffee shop (walking distance) you can tap a friend on the shoulder and ask them if they need a break. It’s pretty sweet really. Prices start as cheap as $25 a week and The Cube offers community desks, dedicated work stations and private offices.

If you like the idea of what we are doing and ever come to Rincon from San Juan or anywhere else in the world, please Like our Facebook Page to help get the word out. No need to jam up in a cafe or bakery full of distractions and uncomfortable chairs when you can inexpensively post up in The Cube.

I am getting some attention getting post cards printed up, let me know what you think of them.

Back of Post Card

Post Card Concept

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!

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).

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 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!

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!

Sears Repair Puerto Rico is Lame

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.

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.

Renewable Energy in Palm Springs

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?