American in Spain

This is a “viewer generated content” post. I didn’t take one single photo during my wedding.
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We’re back from our honeymoon! We’ve got plenty of wedding and honeymoon photos to share, but first we’ve got to get some of the pre-wedding family visit / birthday photos out of the way. My father has written up a much better explanation of events than my blurred memory could give you, so I won’t do much explaining here, and share his story soon.
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Just saying a quick “hola” from an Apple Store in a mall in Isla Margarita, Venezuela. We’ve got some great photos to share. Back soon!

For reasons that my regular readers will understand, this blog will be down for the remainder of October. Hopefully there will be some spectacular Caribbean beach photos to show you in November.

For years now, I’ve been told what a shame it was that I’ve been missing Maritxu (mar-EE-choo). Maritxu is a huge party in Mondragon held on the first Friday of October. Since moving to Spain 2.5 years ago, I’ve been out of the country for Maritxu in both 2005 (golfing in Scotland) and 2006 (New York City).
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We have purchased the gifts we will be giving to our male wedding guests. It should be a particularly nice gift for those guests coming from the United States, since it is something that they are prohibited from buying in or importing into the United States.
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I’m normally not much of a hypochondriac. I tend to catch the common cold about three times a year, but not much else. But let me tell you, there’s nothing like setting a date 14 months into the future where you have to be healthy and energetic and happy to make things start to go wrong. As the date has been approaching, I’ve become increasingly anxious about keeping my self healthy and unhurt. I have this fear that I’ll hurt myself doing something stupid between now and then.

This summer, a virus (HPV) that may have been lying dormant under my skin for up to a year, decided to attack me, resulting in a tumor!

Warning – This post contains graphic images of foot tumors and frowns.

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When I’m taking a walk on a sunny day, I often have that “Wow, that’s beautiful! I should take a photo!” feeling. It almost never happens when I’m sitting here in my office chair. But it happened twice yesterday.
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I miss Altoids. I didn’t really use them much when I was living in the US, but I bought a couple tins one time when leaving the States, and got kinda hooked on ‘em. I’ve never seen Altoids for sale in Europe. What they do have here are Fisherman’s Friends, which I would say are probably stronger than Altoids. Most of the flavors contain menthol and give your nerves that hypersensitive to cold feeling.

The other day, I was in the local tobacconist shop buying some cigars for my wedding guests, and I noticed they had a pretty extensive array of breath mints. (Makes sense, you stinky-mouthed smokers!) I saw an Altoids-sized tin and got a little excited. It turned out to be from another big player in the minty freshness word: tic tac (officially styled in lowercase). It’d been years since I bought some tic tacs, so I bought a tin.
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The other day I walked Marga to work. On the way there, we passed a new flower shop, and one particular flower jumped out at both of us. We both stopped and looked more closely at it. It was the deepest crimson color. Marga said, “Perhaps you could buy this for me on the way back home…”
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