The house is BIG: three bedrooms, an office, a kitchen and a living/dining room, two bathrooms, a hallway, a big garage, and on the top of it all a big yard. In theory there's a pool on the yard but in practice it is quite useless because there's no pump that would cycle the water and filter the water clean. So the pool was full of rain water, algae and trash and needs a good pressure wash before it can be used. There's also an avocado tree (can't wait the harvest season!). The rent is $800 per month, which is locally a bit expensive but still affordable, definitely less than any rent rates of larger cities, so why not have a bit extra space for possible visitors!
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| My new bed in a bedroom with turquoise and white walls. |
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| The anarchist oven that opposes order, regularity, and the overpower of zeros and fives. To select the temperature, you have to press for example 399 instead of 400 Fahrenheits, which then rounds up. |
It was really convenient to get a house from a leaving observatory employee, because inheriting all the furniture, electronics, utensils etc. is much easier, economic, and ecologic than having to buy everything from the shops as new. According to Linda, many of the local houses don't even include the fridge and the oven by default. In addition to Linda and Anthony's stuff that they don't want to ship back to the States, I got a couple of other ex-employees stuff, too. And a LOT of food. So this house came with everything that I might need, and a bit more on top.
One of the most interesting things that I inherited was five dogs: Bubbles the mom and 4 of its 5 puppies. The daddy dog was a stray dog, apparently a black retriever. They live on the yard throughout the year, which makes keeping them infinitely easier than having 5 dogs inside. Linda just got Bubbles fixed so she stayed inside until Thursday. But that wasn't so bad because it's already housebroken and can behave itself relatively well.
This last week I've just tried to train them to not swoop in through the door when I'm going out and to not jump on me. I've never had a dog before and even one dog's training can be difficult so imagine trying to train 5 puppies at once... A small spray bottle of vinegar has been very helpful with that though! And treats too but mostly the treats just excite them even more. So day by day, I think I'm making progress!
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| Bubbles (the mommy dog) |
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| Joy on the left and Bungee, Jumper, and Michelle above are ~4 months old |
It's been interesting to find out the variety of personalities of the puppies. Joy is the most shy and submissive one. She doesn't concentrate as well as Michelle and Bungee but she's very kind and sits down when I command. Michelle and Bungee are smart, proud, and persistent. Bungee is the least submissive of all and also the noisiest; if I go inside, she's the one that keeps whining the longest. She's also the one that always has her snout between the door whenever possible. Jumper is just lazy. She's the first to get bored on the training sessions and also the one that learns the slowest. She's relatively submissive and believes "No!" more easily than Michelle and Bungee.
First I thought that it would be impossible to handle all of them but even though I was right, day after day the idea of giving even one away becomes more and more difficult.
In addition to the dogs there's a few lizards in the house. And armies of ants. While in most places you'd probably like to keep your house to yourself and lizards and insects outside, in Puerto Rico you usually have two options and you choose the least worse. If the less worse is the one that eats the even worse options, you have a jackpot! Lizards eat mosquitos and other insects but not humans, so yes, I want lizards in my room. There's actually two even now just wandering around.
The sugar ants may crawl on me but are unlikely to bite and they also keep out nastier insects so I tolerate the sugar ants around as long as they come in tens, not hundreds and thousands (which happens whenever you leave any moist sweet or meaty food anywhere). One time I left my bag on an ant trail and it got first full of ants and then got overtook by other, apparently ant-eating spiders or other insects, which unfortunately do bite.
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| Fred the Lizard relaxing in an old A/C's power cord. George just disappeared under my bag. |
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| Trails of sugar ants appear in hours when you leave anything edible for them unguarded. |
It's quite common that sometimes the water is completely out. Or sometimes the electricity. My colleague just used a few hours trying to call to the water company a few weeks ago. He got put off until he claimed being Jesus Christ and insisted being connected to the manager.
My next challenge is to buy a car. The drive to the observatory is about 20 min and as I told in another post, I only have the green car, which I don't really trust. But until I get a social security number, I cannot really own a car, or have a regular plan for my phone etc. I tried to get it two weeks ago but they required a birth certificate (which we don't get automatically like in the US) so I had to order it from Finland and that takes a while. And then go back to queue for hours...
Call me a masochist but one of the reasons I like to live here are these quirks and challenges. They give perspective. If everything is always easy and works as planned, you become lazy and start whining about the smallest things, the "first world problems". Surviving through the challenges is like getting 5 puppies finally do as you say: very rewarding. When the environment you live in turns into a chaos, you start seeing the small bits of happiness as soon as you get out of the worst chaos.
Coquí report #5: Not so many coquís on my yard as at the observatory. But I did see one frog swimming in the pool!
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