Author Archives: Britton

Getting Out and Enjoying the Winter

It is important to get outside and enjoy winter!  No not THAT winter.  Not that cold winter where you wake up in the morning inside of a sealed house pumped full of stale dry furnace air and under a set of warm blankets.  I am talking about a different sort of winter. One where you can go outside and really enjoy the day- where the lows at night are in the 70s and the highs during the day are mid 80s!

Cassie Palm sea
Winter in Puerto Rico

Both Cassie and I grew up in Colorado and it was perfectly normal to have the bitter cold months as a regular part of winter life.  Scraping the windows, shoveling snow and experiencing cold temperatures so cold one could feel their nostrils and eyes freeze upon stepping outside.  Months upon months were spent mostly indoors watching movies, football, playing video games and eating with the furnace and humidifiers chugging away.  I think all of those things were invented in the winter for the winter.  Possibly even Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years?  We would have some sunny days and it would warm up to the mid 60s but we knew it was a tease until the real warm up in mid June. Also of note was how brown and dead everything would get in the Colorado winters. The occasional snow actually added a little color!

Drill Rig
Weld County, Colorado in the winter: Dry and brown and lots of oil rigs

Light Snow Dusting Snowboarding
Winter in CO meant that going outside was a lot of work – and layers of clothing!

Now we contrast that with winter life here in Puerto Rico.  Winter temperatures are nearly perfect, humidity is low and we leave the windows and doors open all the time.  The biggest differences are when we look at the winter temps in CO and they dip to their lowest!  Right now it is a balmy negative 27°F!  When it would get that cold, I eventually wouldn’t even go to work.  I learned that it just wasn’t worth it.  What if I broke down?

snowy car
I used to climb into this ice box at -20 and go to work!

Plus there is the snow and ice that creates dangerous driving conditions and with the ever increasing amount of people on the roads trying to get to work it would just be a mess.  My commute to Longmont would go from 45 minutes to 2 or 3 hours each way.

Truck Broke Truck broke down in PR in December!  No danger of freezing to death.

The best way to experience the winter in CO was to go on vacation somewhere warm but if that wasn’t possible it was to be at home with food, entertainment and warmth.  This was always ok and cozy at first, but waiting for warm weather again took what seemed like an eternity.  We could only look forward to watching so many things on TV and enjoying so many indoor hobbies before we just wanted to be outside with a living world again.  Plus it was harder to stay healthy.  I think the lack of exercise and sharing the same air with everyone wasn’t the healthiest environment to be in.

Relaxing on the grass Cassie
Enjoying a relaxing winter day in the tropics

We came to the conclusion that we had a choice. We could try to convince ourselves that living in a freezer was ok or we could live in an endless summer doing the things we enjoyed the most (outside).  We chose the endless summer.  We still enjoy a bowl of chili when it gets “cold” (74°F), we can still watch movies and even football if we wanted to.  We can’t go skiing or build snowmen but beach sand and ocean takes its place!

Spanish Wall Cassie Ant Palm
Cassie at Spanish Wall in Rincón

There are lots of people on the island here that haven’t ever had the cold winter experience.  I doubt that they appreciate the year round nice weather as much as we do! It’s all in the contrast that we can say without a doubt that we now LOVE winter!

Britton yawn
Waking up and going to the beach on a wintry morning

Unrealistic Expectations

Things are going well for us here in Rincón.  We love living here more and more every day and we enjoy our new pace of life compared to our working lives back in Colorado.  We like to compare what we would be doing at any given time in our previous lives in Colorado to what we are doing here now.  There isn’t usually any type of direct comparison.  The situations we find ourselves in are so drastically different and there wasn’t any way we could have expected what it would have been like.

Iguana on coconut tree
Lizards in coconut palms -things we’d never see in Colorado

We did try to prepare for things we could have expected before moving; we envisioned what it would be like, we tried to plan and prepare and learn ahead of time.  We even bought the property before making the move.  But when it came right down to it though we had to throw away at least 50% of what we had imagined it would be like.  Reality fills in those blanks and often times will either exceed, meet or not meet the expectations that we set.

We have found that expectations are very important to happiness in our lives. When you expect something and it doesn’t happen it can lead to disappointment or frustrations, but when you expect too little, you may not shoot for the stars and go for your dreams. So there is a balance in there that is basically something along the lines of hoping for the best and leaving most expectations at the door while maintaining a positive outlook.

Turkey on Ladder
Are we all just turkeys trying to climb “the ladder of Success”? Or can we be content where we are?

We have had what some may consider very unrealistic goals for ourselves.  Retiring in our early 30s and buying land Rincón are just two of the major ones.  Since we have achieved both of those however, they have become realistic expectations.  I guess that is to say that if life isn’t consistently meeting the expectations that you have, then maybe you are not being realistic?

Everyone has their own set of challenges and problems to work through.  It can be difficult at times to realize how trivial they really are, but sometimes after stepping back for a few minutes when facing a challenging problem it can been seen how most things in life aren’t really that important in the end. We are all playing out roles that we have decided are important for ourselves. In our move here we chose to strip down to the bareness of what it means to be a human, as much as possible in this modern age. Things like giving up a telephone, internet and driving very often. And started doing things like eating from the land and learning a new language.  In doing so, we have found that most things that people worry about (including being constantly “connected”, having the newest cool thing, rushing around, eating commercial food and even proper grammar) are just distractions from this crazy thing we call life.

They are conflicts for our life drama to try and solve, they are stories we can tell, they are a spice in life, but they are not that big of a deal. Even the biggest “problem” is really not that big of a deal. How do I know? When we look back at our biggest challenges of the past with even just a little bit of time in between after resolving it we realize it was pretty silly to have worried about it. Another sign of the triviality of life’s ever present obstacles: Ever notice how unimportant other people’s problems are to you (unless they involve you)? So when we face a problem we take it on as a challenge and don’t expect everything to be perfect (whatever that is). We have learned  that when it comes to expectations, we can expect “unrealistic” challenges and so we try to take them on as a fun part of life. Of course, sometimes this is easier said than done, but it is a conscious choice that makes us happier.

“In the end, happiness is a matter of choice. Some people choose to be happy and others select a course that leads only to frustration and disappointment.”

It seems also that when we seek out happiness, we tend to find it. Maybe that is why so many people who come to Rincon find happiness. Unrealistic expectations? Or is reality what we make of it?

Road to Happiness

A Decision Has Been Made?!? Deconstruction

We have owned this property for over 3 years now.  When we originally had made the offer we put in a low offer because the wood house was going to need a lot of work.  Since then we have gone back and forth about what to do with it.  We live in the concrete cabana and have enough room for the two of us, but it makes it hard to have people visit for dinner or for longer stays for family.

House half small

We recently decided that we are going to tear it down.  We initially felt like tearing it down would be a huge bummer because of all the time and effort that went into building it.  Due to the odd floor plan and not having the master bedroom on the ocean side of the house as well as the entire thing being infested with bats, rats and cockroaches we were going to have to tear it down to studs anyway.  We are still going to keep it, we are just going to move it.

Wood House Deconstruction
House in Deconstruction Phase

The property consists of 4 acres and the cabana and wood house sit on a tiny ity bity corner.  So we are going to move the wood house and build a cabin on the other side of the quebrada.  There is sooo much room for us it doesn’t make sense to simply have the living space in the corner, we are going to spread out a bit.  It will open up the area in front of the cabana too.

In order to make the area more accessible where the wood house will be we want to build a suspension bridge that transverses the quebrada!  We have started the deconstruction of the house and figure it will be done in a few weeks.  The wood is being cleaned (having all nails removed and then power washed).   While this is going on we are also going to begin to clear the area where the house will be rebuilt.

At some point in the future we want to build a concrete house a little bit down from where the wood house currently sits, but first thing is first.  Should be some exciting things coming up in the next few months with some big changes for us!

No Roof

 

Líneas de Agua

We decided that walking up the hill to fill the chicken and turkey water was becoming a bit too tedious.  Granted it is good exercise, it is kind of a pain.  Since it is a pain the turkeys and chickens sometimes let us know that they are out of water by following us around.  The whole flock.  It is kind of funny, but also can be a reminder that getting them water is a chore.  The distance from the cabana to the turkey coop is about a football field (down, then UP hill).

We figured that since we put the coops along the property line, we could also drop in a new PVC water line along the border.  This serves two purposes.  Easy to water the birds, but also the plants.

It is pretty dry in Rincón during the winter.  It is nice because the humidity drops as well as the temps just a few degrees.  It really does feel perfect out, but the plants and especially the new plants have to be watered.  We have been dragging around 150ft of hose to do the task, but since we have expanded our area of planting, we think it is time to expand our infrastructure.

Truck with pipe
Truck with Pipes

We are now clearing/planting almost to the end of the property line on one side, we are putting down lots of grass seed and we spend quite a bit of time “down below”.  The mower, the chainsaw all the gardening equipment is starting to live at the turkey coop for convenience.  Having a water tap will be perfect!

A nice thing about living in the tropics VS a temperate climate is that I don’t have to bury the water lines.  It makes finding and fixing leaks easier as well as installation.  There really is no need to bury the line.  Not that it makes laying 400 feet of pipe thru the jungle easy, but if I had to bury the pipe I would probably not be doing it!

Laying Pipe
Ducking Under the Mandarin Tree

We have installed the new system and I had to fix a few leaks due to hooking up to some old PVC that was dirty.  Lesson learned, sand/clean the old pipe before cementing.  I should have known because I have worked with copper pipe quite a bit, oh well.  If you want it done right, do it thrice!

Water Faucet
New Faucet On The Coop

This project cost ~$150 more or less.  We decided to do this because it actually made our lives easier.  We had thought about installing a rain catchment system but did the calculations and decided that for the amount of water we use, it was far cheaper to use the water system already setup and maintained by the city.  Plus we have a reserve built up in the lines to our house, so there would be little to no gain and more maintenance and cost.  When we build the main house, we may setup a rain catchment off the gutters/roof.

In either case we planted lots of grass seed, planted new trees, transplanted trees and watered the birds with ease today!