John Hathaway

The sale of the condo closed on Friday! It really feels like casting off an anchor to be rid of that mortgage. But it does seem a bit strange to no longer have that connection to San Francisco. Not that we won’t still be connected to things there. We’re planning to go back for an extended visit with Charlotte from mid-November to mid-December.

We’ve been really lucky with all the storms lately. We got a couple days of thunderstorms off the tail end of Hanna. Winds were strong enough that we put away the outdoor furniture and closed down all the windows. We had lots of leaves and such in the yard, but no real damage.

Our furniture is supposed to arrive on Tuesday. (Fingers crossed!) We’ve been busy getting ready for that and spent much of the weekend painting. Much of the house has yellow floor tile. The previous owner had painted the bedroom walls yellow. And had yellow bedspreads! It was all a bit much. So the bedrooms are now white and feel so much brighter and cleaner.

Things were somewhat busy in Vieques over the labor day weekend. But now things will really slow down for the next couple months. We went to El Quenepo for their last night of the season with Alex and Glenn. I had lobster sushi and orange glazed, quasi-Korean-BBQ hangar steak. Yum!! They’re definitely our favorite restaurant on the island and we’re going to miss them until they reopen in November.

We also had dinner at newly-opened Blue Crab. Since there are no blue crab around here, I’ve been ranting about the name since I heard it. But since they do in fact serve decent crab cakes they are partially forgiven. The service was good; the food was OK. Unlike El Quenepo that puts together a coherent plate, Blue Crab does “pick 2 sides” (garlic potatoes, rice & beans, broccoli, salad). Their menu is pretty eclectic and in some cases these choices don’t match up well at all. Neither rice and beans nor garlic potatoes belong on the same plate with pickled ginger and wasabi!

But the favorite recent dinner would have to be the one at our friend Wico’s house. Wico is about 80, but is more youthful than many people half that age. He literally bounces with enthusiasm. He used to teach Spanish at a university on the east coast and now splits his time between Vieques and San Juan. He made “lasagna”, which was delicious, but was really more like eggplant parmesan with Swiss cheese. Four of the six there were bilingual, so conversation was a mix of Spanish and English and gave me some good listening practice.

I would have to quibble with the  food advice to “avoid the carb-tastic leaden plaintain mash that’s omnipresent in local cusine”. It suggests sushi and Mexican instead. That’s like telling someone going to Memphis to avoid the fatty BBQ and eat at an Italian place. Especially on vacation, you need to put both the diet and your normal food preferences aside and sample the local cuisine!

So 16 years, 4 apartments, 3 houses, a condo, 3 states and a territory, 5 cars, 2 dogs, and innumerable friends and memories later I don’t think there’s a thing I would want to change.

I’d love to share some pics from those early days, but they’re all in the shipping container with all our other stuff somewhere in San Juan. So, instead I thought this would be a perfect occasion to re-share some wedding photos.

We were married in February 2004 in the  first wave of legal** gay marriages in San Francisco. I was in Zurich for a professional conference when the whole things started and was sure that it would be shut down by the time I returned and we’d miss out. But happily things continued for a second week.

The day we were married at San Francisco city hall was the same day that Bush proposed a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, so the press was covering things with renewed fervor. We were interviewed by a CNN camera crew and they asked if they could shoot the ceremony. (Interview didn’t make it, but clips of the ceremony were on News Night with Aaron Brown.)

Since we’d been together for 11 years at that point, I didn’t expect marriage to have a big impact on me. But I found the act of standing up publicly to announce and confirm my love and commitment to be one of the most moving and powerful moments of my life.

             

**Later of course it was decided that this was not actually legal. While I’ll always be thankful to Gavin Newsom for taking a powerful stand, I would have to admit that  I don’t think this falls within scope of mayoral power.  I loved tone of the letter we got from the city, explaining that while they didn’t think it was right, we were not legally married. They offered to either refund our license fees or donate them to the legal fund to fight for gay marriage.

As a child I growing up in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, “mango” is what we called a green bell pepper. Little did I know at the time, mangoes are actually the number one selling fruit in the world.  Approximately 50% of all tropical fruits produced worldwide are mangoes.

Now we have two big, beautiful mango trees in our yard. Ours are the alcanfor variety (as in camphor, and they do have a hint of piney/turpentine flavor.) This seems to be a popular variety with the locals and we’ve given many away. And still we have WAY more than we could ever hope to eat. It’s really nice to be able to partake of nature’s bounty in this way...

...but...

...¡Basta Ya! Enough already!!

The downside to all this is that there are LOTS and LOTS of mangoes. And because most of them are high out of reach, we can’t get at them until they fall naturally. At which point they’ve often been partially eaten by a bird or iguana, are at least partly rotten, covered in a million fruit flies, and smelly. Mangoes are quite dense and make a loud “thud” when they hit, usually breaking open and oozing sticky sap all over that stains the concrete black.

Of course, often they make a splash instead. Because our trees overhang our pool. This was NOT a wise landscaping decision. It seems that the trees are dropping something in the pool most of the year: millions of tiny flowers in the spring, rotten fruit now, and leaves in the winter.

The final joy is that some people are allergic to the skins which make them break out in a rash. (But they can still eat the fruit.) Unfortunately, it’s looking like Chris is one of these people. Which makes the clean-up effort all the more fun. At this time of year it’s a daily (or more often) task. The last pic is the pile I picked up from the pool deck this morning.

Why does your coworker keep giving you those “looks”? Is your sister spending a bit too much time with the captain of her softball team? Have you been catching your boyfriend checking out other guys?

Just like you, I used to lay awake at night worrying about things like this. But not anymore! Now I’m using GLB test strips from Check4 to know for sure about all the Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals I inadvertently encounter every day. I’ve already been able to “out” 2 coworkers, my cousin, the guy at the sports bar who wanted to change the channel to gymnastics, and the (now former) pastor of my church!!! I just bought a second kit so I can have one at home and one for the gym.

Check4  has some other products you should check out too. I’m a big fan of the  PureWhite test strips. Unfortunately, the Check4Christ strips sometimes give false positives for those pesky agnostics.

Obviously, this is a joke. It’s a doctored photo of  the pool test strips we use from http://www.glbpoolspa.com/

(They also have another product whose name I find really funny: “GLB Strike Out” Wasn’t that the political action group I joined in college?)

But what if this was a real product? How well do you think it would sell? Discuss.

We’re in contract on the condo!!! We went back and forth a couple times on price, and while we’re not getting quite as much as we’d hoped, we’re getting a much better deal than we’d feared given the current market conditions. (And the damn Chronicle printing these sensationalist sky-is-falling type stories.) Getting rid of that huge mortgage and drastically lowering our expenses was a big part of the motivation to move here to Vieques full time, so I’m so happy this was able to happen quickly. We’re set to close in 2 weeks. Hopefully everything will go smoothly.

I just started with a new client, Glenbrook, a small consulting company focused on payments (e.g. credit card processing systems, bank transfers, etc.) They’ve been doing a series of in person seminars and want to turn their content into eLearning content that they can sell via e-commerce or to corporate clients. I’ll be helping them with choosing tools, a delivery platform, creating templates, and helping them to become fairly self-sufficient. Should be a fun project. They’re great to work with so far.

Vieques was without power most of Wednesday. Apparently a garbage truck hit a power pole and took out the electricity for  all of Vieques and Culebra. (Not sure how one pole takes out 2 islands.) With the fans off, the house was really hot. And no internet other than on our iPhones. So we really had no choice but to go to the beach. Life’s tough here! The fact that I’ve heard reports of outages in parts of both San Francisco and Orange County in the past couple days has erased any nagging feeling of “this wouldn’t happen if we were still in California.”

Vieques has trucks with large speakers mounted on them that drive around to make announcements about events, funerals, new businesses, sales, whatever. Most feature very loud salsa music. (The funerals usually go for a more reserved sound track.) Elections are coming up in November and the race for alcade (mayor) is really heating up. The incumbent  Dámaso  Serrano López and the young challenger Evelyn Delerme each have their own (possibly fleets of) announcement trucks plastered with their faces and slogans.

So when we were sitting out enjoying our evening cocktail, we didn’t really think anything of it when we heard the Dámaso truck coming up the hill. But started to know something up when heard “Barrio Lujan” (our neighborhood)  in the announcement. And then started seeing people walking down the street behind us.

A few minutes later about 20 people came walking up our street, now decked out in Dámaso  T-shirts and hats. One of them peeked in the gate and told us in English that the mayor was here and asked if we wanted to talk with him. So we got to say “mucho gusto” and chat for a couple minutes (again in English) about where we’re moving from, the fact that he’s visited San Francisco, and the recent Travel and Leisure award.  He left a 16 page booklet, all of which directly answers the question “What have you done for me lately?” (Images below)

I’m not sure that I’m very aligned with Dámaso’s politics, but it is kinda nice to be somewhere where the mayor does stroll up the street to talk to people. I wonder when Evelyn is going to drop by?

Back in April I decided to burn some Hilton points and spend the weekend in San Juan on my way between San Francisco and Vieques. I spent a great half a day walking from Santurce to Old San Juan and back, shooting about 300 photos along the way. Here are 20 favorites. (You can see more at  http://johnhat.smugmug.com/photos/swfpopup.mg?AlbumID=5716656&AlbumKey=pdudF)

                                       

I don’t usually get this emotionally involved in news stories, but this one has me really upset in so many ways.

A gay 15 year old was shot by a classmate in southern California. Horrifying!! It’s so sad, both on the level of an individual person lost, but also on the level of the continuing issues of homophobia and gun violence in America.

The parents are, since this is America, suing the school. And while I’m nothing but sympathetic to their loss, I’m finding their legal action to be really questionable. Why?  Because they’re not claiming that the school allowed a homophobic environment hostile to their son. They’re not claiming that the school should have protected their son from guns. They’re claiming that the school didn’t enforce the dress code. The dress code? WTF?!?

Here’s the AP story: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26218530/

I wonder if their lawyer told them something like this:

Well, clearly we have case against the school district. But, no, we don’t want to go near the homophobia issue or the gun issue. Those are just really too controversial. They’re issues that juries get all riled up and opinionated about. No, if we want to win this case, we need to go after something a bit less emotional and more clear-cut.

Now, indisputably, your son’s choice of clothing and the fact that he wore makeup put him in danger from his classmates. Clearly this should not have been allowed to continue. And following the doctrine of in loco parentis, it clearly was not your responsibility as his parents, but the responsibility of the school to control what he wore.

It’s easy to see how grieving parents are looking for someone, anyone, to blame. But, is it worth ignoring the real issues to make a buck? I guess their lawyer thinks so.