American in Spain

I dedicate this post to my wife.
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On Saturday there was an exhibition of the local Colindres bobbin lace (bolillo) club. We went because one of our salsa dancing friends, Ana, is going to classes and participates in those events. She had an abanico, Spanish hand fan, that she was working on. It looks pretty doggone complicated to my layman’s eyes. Ana explained that, like most things, it’s pretty easy once you learn the tricks and have the patience to do it right. I sort of picture it as a sofa pastime, giving half your brain to the lace weaving and half to the telenovela. Ana says she’s been working on the abanico since January, but that she didn’t do any work on it in May because of the run up to her son’s wedding.
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I’ve been wanting to try my hand at writing a Greasemonkey script for a while. For those of you that don’t know, Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that lets you run any javascript that you want as if it were part of the web page you are viewing. The main point of this is to modify the document content somehow to make the page more to your liking (removing ads, adding useful buttons, etc.). The only site that I use very often that has a fairly wide selection of Greasemonkey scripts available for it is Flickr. So, without further ado, I present you with my script…
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The other day, I got out my little mini tripod, a wine glass, and a black 3-ring binder and made my first serious attempt at splash photography. My camera was set on the fastest shutter speed that will allow the built-in flash to function, which is 4 milliseconds. It turned out to be plenty fast enough. All the drops were made by me wetting my hand in a bowl and holding it about 20 cm above the wine glass. I tried to press the shutter right as I saw the drop begin to fall. With the time it took the signal to get from my eyes to my shutter finger, it came out about right. Let me know what you think.
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Another round of tilt-shifting has occurred. This time the photos come from my recent TUI Coventry post and some selections from an absolutely gorgeous set of photos that Hubbers took in Norway a couple weeks ago. You really should check out the entire set.
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Last weekend we went to a cheese festival, called Quesucada, in nearby Laredo. We missed it last year and regretted not going. It turned out to be nothing but a dozen vendor stands crammed too closely together such that you couldn’t see anything or walk comfortably. There was a bunch of shouting between the idiots trying to push a pram through the crowd and the idiots that insist on standing still in groups of 5 or more in the middle of the narrow path. So, needless to say, we won’t be intentionally attending any Quesucadas in the future.
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We had some pretty huge storms last week. The day after one of them, I took a walk and found some poor raindrop-bruised poppies and some bees buzzing around them. Poppy petals are pretty paper-thin normally, but these look particularly fragile.
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Two colorful photos I took last week. Several sets of houses around town have received new and colorful paint jobs and it has made a huge difference. They used to look old and rundown, and now they look less old and generally more happy.
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It’s strange how memory works. This photo, by Hubbers, reminded me of the place where he and I used to work in Coventry, England. Rather unbelievably, it’s been four whole years since I worked there, so I suppose it’s okay to share these photos.

As far as offices go, TUI was pretty nice. A huge open atrium housed a canteen that quickly taught us to bring our own lunches from home, as well as a Starbucks-certified machine and barista. As I recall, towards the end of my contract, we had worked out a system where Hubbers would just jingle some change together, causing me to Pavlovianly stand up and head towards the atrium. He followed shortly after. The coffee was overpriced, but the break from the monotonous work was priceless.
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A couple years ago we bought a Brita water filtering pitcher that we pass all the water we drink through. We don’t really need it, but the water does taste just slightly better after filtration. But the difference is so subtle that we can often go several months without changing the filter that you’re supposed to change every three weeks. My skeptic mind immediately saw through the “change every three weeks” logic. How spent a filter is depends on two things: 1) How much water you’ve passed through it, and 2) How dirty the water is. Time should have almost nothing to do with it. But, like I said, we’re pretty lazy about changing them.
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