Author Archives: Britton

Coffee Beans in Colorado?!

2 Replies


Schnoodle with some of the various tropical plants in our house -coffee tree is furthest left

Coffee Tree
A Healthy Coffee Plant has Nice glossy dark green leaves

We have had a small coffee plant for the last few years.  In the summer we put it in the humid greenhouse and it grows well. Then in the winter we bring it inside, where it lives..but doesn’t exactly thrive.   But this year we watered it a little more and… it started to bloom.

Cassie played the role of the honey bee and pollinated some of the blossoms by hand by touching the pollen from flower to flower. We hadn’t thought much of it until just the other day when we saw….Green coffee berry beans!


Colorado Coffee Beans

We will continue to let them grow and I doubt we’d have enough even for a single cup of coffee, but it’s still fun and having tropical plants around us invokes thoughts of Puerto Rico.  Of course the coffee plants in PR are a hundred times more fragrant and bigger!  Perhaps if we have enough beans/seeds we will try to grow another tree or two here in CO.  When we get to PR we might plant a whole acre of them!

Coffee Flowers
Little pom-pom white scented puffs of flowers soon turn into the berries

This is a coffee bush in Puerto Rico (makes our Colorado coffee beans look silly)

UPDATE: Click on links to see the red coffee berries turn into beans and new coffee plant seedlings.

What a Bloody Mess!

4 Replies

We woke up to quite the mess this morning. A bloody mess to be exact. It looked as if a massacre had taken place….


First thing we saw when we woke up this morning!

What happened? Well, apparently poor old Schnoodle had something wrong with her. The night before there was a little blood on the carpet, but we cleaned it up. We thought maybe she was just getting over her urinary infection. We had only about a week ago taken her to the vet. She was diagnosed with an eye infection and cornea problems, cancer or some sort of cysts, bad rotting teeth, a urinary tract infection, lymphoma, arthritis and some deafness. (Remember she is about 14 years old or in her late 80’s if she were human.)


Old Schnood

So I gave her a piece of an aspirin to help her with some of her pain (thinking that she most likely had some). That was a big mistake!  While we had just a little blood two days ago, this morning, it was like a massacre! There was blood not only on the pillow that she sleeps on top of on the floor, but also…


A bloody wall…


Bloody carpet...


And a Bloody Kitchen

But we still didn’t know what had happened to cause her to bleed so much and all over until we saw this:

Her water dish was bloody which meant that something had happened in her mouth. Perhaps she lost another tooth? We have no idea and she won’t let us look in her mouth. But the aspirin probably wasn’t a good idea in hindsight as it thins the blood.

It was pretty disgusting. And we were joking that it looked perfect for a Halloween haunted house!  We managed to get most of it out of the carpet with oxy-clean. Unfortunately it bleached part of the carpet. We’ve been talking about getting new carpet and I think this probably seals the deal. We are going to wait until we know what to do with Noodle though. We wouldn’t want another episode like that to happen. And tenants wonder why we charge more for pets! Yuck

House Hunters International?

8 Replies

I had a phone call recently.  It’s the type of call that is not “the norm”. I knew Cassie had emailed House Hunters International about the possibility of being on their show after she had heard from the Kruses that they were looking for couples who had bought a place in Puerto Rico. But I didn’t really think they would be so eager to talk with us so quickly! This is kind of how it went:

Melissa: Hi, this is Melissa from House Hunters International!
BK: Hi, this is Britton.  How are you?
Melissa: Good…We are interested in doing your story! Can you tell me a little more about it?
BK:( I told her all about our story, the property, why Puerto Rico…so on and so forth)
Melissa: That sounds great! Well, the next step before we line things up is to get a casting video from you.  I can send you some information about what we are looking for in it.
BK: No problem.  We can do that and have one to you in the next few days!

So these past few days Cassie and I (with help from Cassie’s mom the camera-woman -thanks Char!) made a short casting video.  In the video they just want to see how we live currently and why we want to move. They basically want to see how we look “on camera”.  Hopefully we come across well!

It would be cool to be on the show as it is one we definitely like to watch and I think we would be a bit different than their regular shows.  Most of what I’ve seen on there are people who have quite a bit of money to spend.  Cassie and I are very budget-oriented and one of our (my) criteria was that the place be “affordable”.  To me that meant not getting a mortgage. Also we were ok with having a fixer-upper, unlike most people that we’ve seen on the show.

We want to move down there in the next few years, not continue to work and pay for the thing over the next 15-30.  So, we save the majority of our income, we both drive normal little paid-off econobox cars, and we have invested in rentals in the hopes that one day we could use that income to live off of (see Fruitfulista for more on how we do this!)

I’d hope they would present us as the ‘fixer upper/saver/self-sustainability people’ and maybe tell the story of how we ended up with the property. One thing we were surprised about is that nearly all, if not all of the shows are re-enactments, so according to Melissa the producer/casting person in New York, we were perfect for their show!

So, here’s our casting video- wish us luck!…What do you think?

 

Quinceañera Party in Greeley

3 Replies

This weekend we had a chance to attend a Quinceañera for a girl that used to be our neighbor.  They moved a few years back but they always make a point to stop by at Halloween and it’s always cool to see them and how much they’ve grown!  Well the other week Lizeth stopped by and delivered an invitation to her 15th birthday (Quinceañera). I can’t believe she’s fifteen! She was just a tiny kid when she lived next door!


Cassie with our former neighbor Lizeth

It was held at Island Grove Park in Greeley.  There are numerous buildings out there that are used for a lot of different events.  There were actually two quinceanera parties going on at the same time in two different buildings. We accidentally went to the wrong one at first, but it was cool to see two different ways of throwing a similar party. Island Grove is also where the Greeley Stampede is held every year.

Living in Greeley has allowed me the opportunity to live closely with lots of people with lots of different backgrounds.  There are Russians, Germans, , Mexicans, Somalis, etc.  The Quinceañera is a pretty big Mexican celebration.  I hadn’t ever been to one before.

I’d describe it like a wedding.  It’s a pretty big production with lots of food, drink, music and dance.  The food was good.  Really good.  I love tortillas and meat and there was plenty of it!  In fact there were two buildings being used for separate parties.  From what I understand the whole family chips in.  Someone will buy food, someone entertainment, someone will rent the place, etc.  I imagine that makes these huge celebrations much easier to throw!  It would be pretty expensive for one person to pay for.


We got a visit by the Mariachi Singer that made Cassie turn bright red!


It was fun to see two different parties (Lizeth on the left and the other one on the right)

It really reminded me of a traditional American wedding -for one person instead of two.  Except instead of a garter belt they do a ‘shoe change’.  From what I understand this is a change from ‘flats’ to ‘heels’.  Traditionally in the past women weren’t allowed to wear heels until after they turned 15 and started womanhood. A Quinceanera is sort of like an old fashioned debutante ball. Then they have chamberlains and dance. There are supposed to be 14 pairs of young people dancing together, plus the quinceanera (the girl turning 15) and her partner to represent 15 or in Lizeth’s case, she just had the boys plus her.


After the traditional stuff, it is a big dance for everyone to join in on!