American in Spain

The most important thing to happen this month, besides my parents coming to visit, was a series of four visits to the dentist. The first visit was the worst by far, and once we secured the association between going to the dentist and getting to eat ice cream in the morning before lunch, Nora was actually asking when she could get to go to the dentist again. If you’ve ever been to a dentist, you’ll know that they don’t like to let you leave without securing your next visit, so we’ve got another one planned for July to do a checkup and make sure all her teeth are adjusting to their new composition.
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Dear people who oppose ObamaCare,

I’m curious about your thinking about possible solutions to the messed up US healthcare system. One starting assumption that leads directly to opposing ObamaCare is that healthcare is not a right, that poor people should not be given healthcare and allowed to die simply because they are poor. If you agree that only the wealthy deserve to be healthy, then you are a cruel, inhumane person and please stop reading this letter.
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If you even remotely dabble in or read news about social networking, you may have heard of a recent hoax in which a graphic was passed around by millions of internet users depicting the digital readout from the time machine in the Back To The Future trilogy, with the date being June 27, 2012, the date the hoax image went viral. The creator of the image, a social medial manager by the name of Steve Berry, created the image to promote the Blu-ray box set release of the trilogy. This is not the first time such a hoax image was passed around the internet.
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If you asked me to list my top five favorite foods or beverages to consume in Spain, morcilla, goat cheese and red wine would make the list for sure. Morcilla is a spicy blood sausage. There are many types of blood sausage all called morcilla, but the most common and best is morcilla de León or morcilla de Burgos, which consists of pig meat, pig blood, pig lard, rice, onion and spices stuffed into pig intestine. The blood makes it jet black.

Recently, my wife came across a recipe for individual serving pies containing morcilla, red wine and goat cheese. When she mentioned it to me, I darted out to the store to buy the ingredients. Last Sunday, we made them. Needless to say, they were quite rich. Here’s the recipe:
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The town where I live is celebrating its annual San Juan festival this week. Most Spanish towns have a town saint, and for many of them, that role is filled by Saint John The Baptist. There are several things that I love about this festival. It amuses me that it’s really just a thinly veiled version of the pagan bonfire solstice festivals held across Europe (the bonfire is to shoo away the witches, in case you didn’t know).

Riffing off the Valencian falles tradition of building elaborate, yet explosive, parade floats to burn, the townspeople of Colindres also make little miniature floats, usually the size of small cars, which are wheeled, by hand, around town before finding their way to the designated place to be judged, doused in gasoline, and ignited.
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This morning, the children at the local school were having some sort of play day outside with events and competitions (those were the best days of school, weren’t they?), and there was some pop music playing. When I was coming home with the daily groceries, there was a song playing by a group called El Sueño de Morfeo (the dream of Morpheus). The song playing was their most catchy, breakout song, Nunca Volverá. I found myself humming it as I put away the groceries, and I thought about how nice it was to see them, by complete chance, for the first time back in 2006.
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The following is a document written by my father, Paul Rasmussen, about his trip to visit us in Spain in June 2012.

Tuesday and Wednesday, May 29 and 30, 2012

Our plan was to take the dogs to the kennel at 1:00 and to leave for the airport at 1:15. That plan failed when we discovered the Pet Parlor was locked up tight with nobody answering the door or the phone. I put down two extra bowls of water for the three dogs and gave them a stern lecture about the need for rationing, but one of them is a westie, and I wasn’t optimistic. On the way to the airport I called my friend Tom, but he wasn’t home. An hour later he called back and said he would take care of things, so we flew to Spain as scheduled to spend time with our our son, his wife, and our granddaughter.
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Have you ever heard the claim that some wine experts, when blindfolded, cannot actually tell white wine from red wine? My gut reaction was the same as everyone’s, “That’s ridiculous, they’re so different!!” But I know enough about psychology and illusions to know that the wine industry is mostly bullshit, and it’s very possible that we might be kidding ourselves. Ever since hearing this claim, I’ve been dying to run an experiment on myself. This past weekend, I finally had the time and wine and test subjects… My parents, wife and I drank wine blindfolded to see how good we were at sensing the wine in the glass without our eyes.
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Children are excellent mimics; it’s how we all learn to behave like we do. Everyone has heard the clichéd stories of how a child with verbally abusive parents will invent verbally abusive dialog between his toy dolls, or how a child of smokers will pretend to smoke. I like to think of myself as pretty introspective and self-aware; I know my personal vices and weaknesses. So I was surprised to notice, recently, a behavior in my daughter for which I am completely responsible, but was totally unaware that I was doing it myself.
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