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.

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.”