We’ve planted several dozen (50ish) citrus, exotic fruit and avocado trees on our property, and while many of them are flourishing and doing well, unfortunately we keep losing trees to careless weedwackers. Recently we’ve lost a canepa, tangerine, kumquat and avocado in the battle that is maintaining our property. No bueno!!

We made another trip out to the nursery and spent a couple hundred dollars on a new batch on injertado (grafted) fruit trees and this time, we are protecting our investment! Stefan came up with a plan of using PVC pipe to create little tree jackets to protect our trees from wayward weedwackers. While this is a great plan, it’s kind of a pain in the butt to go buy PVC and cut it to fit each tree, so I made a trip down to the $1 store and bought a bunch of plastic hair curlers. They are much easier to cut then PVC, and you can just add more curlers if the tree is taller. Hopefully this will work!

Our new batch of fruit trees:

Our trees wear fashionable light blue “armor”:

The town of Rincon does a wonderful job with their Christmas and Three Kings Day lights every year. This year was no different, aside from the fact that they had bigger trees to drape the lights across. The town planted all new trees and plants about 5 years ago and completely rebuilt the square. It looks great. Not only is it nice now, but much like our yard, daydreaming of how nice the square will be in 10 years with tons of shade from all the grown up trees it will be amazing.

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!

My iPhone doesn’t take the best pictures, but they work for the web and I always have that thing with me so I have been capturing a lot of moments on my iPhone. Here are my top ten (11) photos from the past two weeks.

As of lately, Summer and I haven’t really had much time to do much of anything at all. We are working, taking care of Sydney and trying to get a little free time in after the little munchkin goes to bed.

We have been cooking a lot at home; Indian food (plain yogurt marinade for the chicken), Mexican Baja style fish tacos, pasta, lasagna, grilled chicken, spicy stir fries. We have been having a lot of fun, eating great food, spending time together cooking and saving a lot of money because every $15 meal we cook lasts two days. Going out all the time was getting expensive in our little tourist town and we were getting tired of the same old-same old. Unlike Ocean City where I grew up, there is no back door with different pricing for the locals versus the tourist on a travel budget. We all pay the same prices.

One of our regular spots over the past year or two has been the sushi served over at The Pool Bar in Barrio Puntas (that’s the neighborhood on the windward side of Rincon). They have a great fresh salad (served with shrimp or ahi), delicious and creative sushi (coconut wasabi drizzled over the tuna roll) and an awesome seared tuna with beurre blanc sauce. Dennis and Carol, the owners, have been in Rincon for thirty plus years, raised their own family here and now have their adult daughter working the bar and their grandson keeping them in board games, skateboards and days at the beach. If it’s a hot night, go for a swim in the pool while waiting for your sushi or to wash off the strong buzz you tacked on with the Saki bombs you were doing. For Summer and I, soon enough it will probably be a combination of the above along with our daughter begging us to go for another swim.

Thursday Nights in Rincon

Jazz Night and Sushi at Pool Bar

I went over to get take out sushi for Summer and I last night. I didn’t call my order in ahead of time because I wanted to have a cold Presidente or two and listen to some live jazz while waiting. There was a good crowd with all the tables taken at 7:30 and a few people waiting at the bar to be seated. They started a new hibachi menu, but I didn’t go for any of those items, we stuck with sushi and salad (our usual). The Jazz was a refreshing change to the reggaeton, house music and nursery rhymes I am subjected to on the daily. I really like the live jazz, the band is a colorful bunch of guys and girls…and they make me tap my foot. I recorded some of a song so you could have a listen before you head over next Thursday for your sushi jazz experience.

I can hardly believe it, but the gym in our house is finally done! While we were in San Diego in Sept/October, we had the ceilings put in downstairs so when we got home, I started working on the gym since I am anxious to get back into shape after being pregnant and it sure it nice to finally have a permanent place to put our fitness equipment. This is what I had to do to finish our gym:

- Clean. There was annoying construction crap (spackle/drywall dust that took more then 4 floor scrubbings, stray concrete, etc) that I had to clean up.

- Paint. I painted the ceilings and soffits white, the walls light blue and one wall a bright blue.

- Install stripper pole. It might seem strange that I have a ’stripper pole’, but it really is the best excersize and it’s super duper fun. Like playing on the monkey bars when you were a kid!

- Install entertainment center. 32″ TV mounted on the wall, hooked up to a Mac Mini so we have internet access, DVD player, Wii Fit and stereo system.

So, there are all sorts of fun things to do in our gym now! We have a treadmill, stripper pole, Wii Fit balance board, Tai Bo/Dance/Fitness DVD’s, yoga ball, free weights and jump ropes. And most importantly, we have air conditioning in the gym (This may seem like a given for a house in Puerto Rico, but most of our house does not have A/C.)!

While I would consider the gym as being done, these are a couple of little things that will be done in the near future:

- Trim out the windows. But I havn’t figured out how we are going to do that yet.

- Organize/hide all the cords hanging from the entertainment center.

- Install grande mirrors on the back wall.

And one last thing that we will eventually do:

- Install Brazilian teak hardwood flooring. We have just enough left over from when we did the upstairs, so whenever we get around to doing the floors downstairs we will install that in the gym. But we are pretty burned out on construction, so the polished concrete floors are just fine with me until we decide to open that can of worms .

Here is a walk through of our gym today: