Category Archives: Pets and Animals

You’re Living in the Wrong Place!

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It’s one thing to say something to yourself, and it’s another to hear it from a complete stranger. We currently have two medical students staying with us in our spare bedrooms. I was welcoming them, showing them around and introducing them to the animals and showing them all of our tropical plants in our living room. “…This is the coffee tree with coffee berries that are turning red!”

And this is the banana tree, and the avocado trees, and the citrus collection, and pomegranate, and the Dracaena palm and the aloe vera, and the orchids and this here is our latest collection: a pineapple plant with a mini-pineapple growing on it:


Our pineapple plant we got at Home Depot in Greeley

After I finished with our little botanical tour in our tropical hotel lobby of a living room, one of them exclaimed, “It looks like you’re living in the wrong place! You should be living somewhere tropical.” How right she was. It is funny to hear a stranger point out the most obvious thing you’ve been working for. I suppose our house and lifestyle here really do point to our desire to live in the tropics with lots of warm-loving plants, chickens roaming about and people hosted at our home in the style of a guesthouse. We do it as best we can in Colorado, so I am sure when we move to Puerto Rico we’ll be ready to do the real thing in the right place. In the mean time, we’re starting to amass quite the collection of all things tropical right here in the wrong place! 🙂

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Schnoodle Takes a Digger

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Lately Schnoodle has been waking up at around 1-3am and wanting to be let out.  She barks until someone wakes up.   Her vision is deteriorating, her hearing is gone and it makes it really hard to communicate with her.  Her sense of touch works, and her nose still works pretty well.   Overall she still seems pretty happy to be around and spends most of her day asleep.


Schnoodle near the window well outside

Last night it was my turn to let her out.  I imagine taking care of old Schnoodle is sort of like caring for a newborn baby. So I let her out and she ran around in the fresh snow in the backyard.  I wait until she barks to be let back in and in a few minutes she did bark.  She wasn’t at the back door though.  She was about 10 feet off and standing near the window well.  I could sense what was about to happen.  She thought that the edge of the window well was the back step.

I put my slippers on and started to go outside to stop her.  Sadly there was no way I could have gotten to her in time.  She fell straight down into the window well.

She hit with a thud and then let out a yelp.  I ran inside and downstairs as quickly as I could.  I wasn’t sure how bad a 3-4 foot fall would be on our poor old Schnoodle!  I called for Cassie and opened the window in the basement. She had already gotten up so I figured she wasn’t too bad off.  I got a towel and wrapped her up and took her inside.

When I saw her fall head first and heard that thump, I really though that was the end of poor ol Schnood.  Amazingly, though she is doing just fine today like nothing ever happened.

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Removing Africanized Bees from Walls in Rincon Puerto Rico

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On our last trip here in May/June we managed to get ahold of someone from the University of Mayaguez to help us remove the bees that were in the walls of the upstairs bedroom in the wood house (you can read more of the Bee Backstory here). In summary, we found out that there wasn’t just one hive of bees, but FOUR! So our new university bee friends were able to remove one of the colonies, but couldn’t get the other three. When we came back for this trip we really wanted to get the remaining three hives out of the walls.

We tried calling our bee guy, Jose again, but he apparently didn’t have time or didn’t want the work, so we thought we wouldn’t be able to get the rest of the bees out this trip. Then we lined up the plumber to work on the sink in the studio cabana (we’ll write about that later) and just happened to tell him about the bees in the house. He said that while doing plumbing he often runs into bees in the water lines/boxes and knew of a guy who loved bees and could easily remove them for us (for a fee).


Staying away from the bees-at the beach

And so that is how we met Enrique. Enrique definitely does love bees and was enthusiastic and ready to remove all the rest of the
three hives right then and there. He went in to do the job with no bee suit, no gloves or any protection. He apparently just tore down the wall panels where the bees were located, grabbed the queen with his bare hands and the rest of the bees followed into the cardboard boxes. He made really quick work of it.

He told us they would be agitated in the move and that we might want to leave for a few hours to avoid being stung.  So in that time we went down to the beach and hung out, got some food and came back. In the same time it took the methodical, cautious and precise Jose to remove one hive, Enrique took out three! We returned and there were a lot of bees still buzzing around but Enrique assured us that it was safe to go into the house to see his finished work because the remaining bees wouldn’t sting if they didn’t have a queen to protect (I was still a little freaked out by all of them buzzing around my body).

He had removed all of the bees from inside the walls as well as their honey and comb. He offered us to keep the honey and comb, but we weren’t sure what to do with it. We did get to taste it, and it was really good -sweet and waxy! Britton managed to take a little video of Enrique showing us the removal and the honeycomb afterward. We are definitely relieved to have the bees gone and hopefully by tomorrow all the orphaned ones will realize their queen is gone and they will scram as well.  Although we are a little sad to not have all the thousands of little pollinators working on our fruit trees. Maybe someday we’ll get a hive of our own…just not inside our house 🙂

 

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We Have Arrived in Rincon!

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We got into Aguadilla at about 1:30am last night (local time).  The flight was uneventful to Newark and from Newark into Aguadilla.  We got our rental car and headed for the property.  It was pretty dark and traffic was light (obviously).  We got here and vines had covered up the front gate.  I got out of the car and started tearing them off by hand.  I got enough of them off, so that the gate would slide open and drove on in.


Rental Car This Morning

The weeds appear to have grown quite a bit in 8 months.  It’s about what I expected to see though and isn’t too bad.  We were able to drive the car right in over top of the ‘weeds’ and park.  I went into the small cabana not exactly knowing what to expect.  It looked about the same except the paint on the ceiling had continued to flake off, so there was quite a bit of paint chips on the bed and floor.   A quick sweeping took care of that.  We dusted off the bed and got out our covers/blankets we stashed from the last visit.  Other than a few weird noises we went to sleep pretty easily.

The Concrete “Cabana”

I feel that the first order of business will to be to get a trimmer and maybe some paint / paint supplies from the store.  That way we can start to carve out a nice spot for ourselves, then expand the spot as we move along.  We also want to get some plumbing done and maybe some more bees removed while we are here.

The bees that were removed on the last trip have stayed gone, so that’s a good sign that it won’t be a futile attempt.

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