John Hathaway

Our friends Jane and Dorian have always been a source of new and interesting things in our lives. In fact, they first introduced us to Vieques. Having recently sent their son off to college, they were planning to move there. We were very excited about the thought of all of us being in tropical paradise together,  but it was not meant to be. (Jane says we stole their lives. I say they reneged on the deal. But we’re all happy with the reason.)

Today they had two new things to add to my life: Bo's Barbecue in Lafayette and their amazing new son Parker!! We had a such great time catching up on the Vieques gossip, playing with Parker, eating brisket and ribs, playing with Parker, drinking Belgian beer, and playing with Parker.

I can’t wait to take Parker to Playa la Chiva for the first time!

We’ve spent the past many Thanksgivings with our friends Glenn and Amy and our god children Maya and Nicholas, so I’m very happy we are back in the SF Bay area to continue the tradition this year. As usual, everything was delicious: starting with warm cider with Maker’s Mark and prosciutto wrapped figs; on to the smoked turkey, sausage stuffing, and sweet potato/apple casserole; and finishing with pumpkin and berry pies. Yuuuummm!!

With all the crazy stuff going on in the world, I am truly thankful that we can share peaceful happy times like these with the people we love.

                         

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.

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.

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.”