American in Spain

Today was the chupinazo, the big party and celebration that marks the beginning of the week-long San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain. Marga and I have been to San Fermin twice, and we are fans of the festival. The chupinazo is also important to us because, exactly one year ago today, on July 6, 2008, right around noon, the two gametes, each containing half of my daughter’s DNA, fused together to form the strand of DNA that has guided the creation of a new human being. It’s amazing what that little cell turned into in only one year.
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Since moving abroad, I have begun a family tradition of eating hamburgers on the fourth of July as sort of a homage to my homeland. To Europeans, the hamburger is the quintessential American food. Like all stereotypes, this one is also false. I suspect that if you surveyed random Americans, less than 20% would name hamburgers as being “the most American food”. But I make a damn good burger, and I don’t mind feeding the stereotype a little bit.

Like last year, we invited some friends over for a little hamburgerfest.
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Someone broke into our house today when no one was home. The intruder climbed perilously over a wall (six stories up!) separating our balcony from the neighbors’, smashed through the glass of our balcony door, cutting his hand in the process, and climbed into our house. We found glass all over the kitchen floor.
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A friend of my parents gave us a “clay keepsake” gift. I had never heard of such a thing, but the value was immediately obvious to someone who has photographed his infant daughter’s body with a quarter for scale. The idea is that you flatten out some “clay” (really some kind of space-age polymer), press your kid’s hands into it, place it in the oven (the clay, not the kid), and what you get is a keepsake that will let you remember the size of your child’s hands at the time of the molding. Including the 15 minutes in the oven, the box announced that the whole process “takes only 20 minutes from start to finish!” Yeah, right…
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A tweet by Ze Frank got me watching some videos of Bill Shannon. On crutches from a disability for most of his childhood, he has invented a new style of dance. Ze, as usual, summarized it perfectly with only one word: Inspiring.
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