American in Spain

Nora has learned a new trick: climbing into her house through the window. Naturally, I set about to record a video of her doing so, and two unforeseen events occurred. First, Narcissus noticed herself on the camera viewfinder and had to run over for a closer look. And second, when I tried to use the excuse of “Oh no, your key is inside the house!” to get her to climb through the window, she did, but then she berated me for being such a jerk as to throw her key into the house. The result was a rather bizarre, but still cute video. (more…)

One of my most profound epiphanies about politics occurred almost five years ago, when this blog was in its infancy. I realized that, merely by definition of the two political parties’ values, the only way for the Conservative party to gain power is to make a lot of noise and reduce voter turnout. This is because the vast majority of people are, by definition, going to support more socialist wealth-distributing economic policies. This is an absolute political truth that has always been true and will forever continue to be true. The way the Republican party in the US circumvents this is to side with Religion and the issues like abortion and gay marriage that fall out of strong Biblical religious conviction. These issues, of course, fall along the Authoritarian-Libertarian political spectrum, which is orthogonal to the Conservative-Liberal economic political spectrum. (more…)

Three months ago, when I went on a ferry ride under the Golden Gate Bridge, my shutter finger got a little too excited and I ended up snapping several dozen photographs of the bridge. Part of the reason was that we were lucky enough to take the ferry on a clear afternoon, right at golden hour. Golden hour is a term in photography and cinematography referring to the first and last hour of sunlight every day, in which the sunlight, after passing through a larger portion of the Earth’s atmosphere than normal, takes on a golden hue, which makes the world seem warmer and generally more photogenic. I meant to post these photos immediately after blogging about the trip, but the intense series of four posts about our trip wore me out almost as much as the walk from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Golden Gate Bridge did. Here are just a few of the photos I took on that ferry ride.
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It was like flipping a switch. My cute loving toddler turned into a hateful monster.

Nora had a cold last week, so I got her some cough medicine at the local farmácia. It cleared up her cough, but also gave her an upset stomach, diarrhea and vomiting, which made for a terribly long weekend, during which she insisted on watching this video of herself about a thousand times, each time tearing up when her onscreen doppelgänger got upset.

Somewhere among the “Oh, poor thing, she’s so sick,” whining, twenty-four days before her second birthday, a special, dreaded, kind of behavior arose: The Tantrum.
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