American in Spain

The big news this month has been Nora starting school. Her Period of Adaptation will end at the end of September, and in October she will be going the full five hour school day. She has taken to it wonderfully! Before she used to ask me two questions every morning, “What day is today?” and “Do I have to go to daycare today?” On weekdays when the answer was affirmative, she would be sad. But now when she asks if she has school today, she gets excited. She loves it! She goes in without any complaining and comes out with a big grin on her face. We all couldn’t be more pleased about the situation.
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Dear President Obama,

No doubt you are missing that mindless chant of Yes We Can that your followers could repeat incessantly during your 2008 campaign. It was brilliantly open ended. If what “we could” do was elect the first African American president, then yes, we could. But now so many of your promises turned out to be harder to accomplish than expected, so you certainly can’t use the same slogan for re-election. Fear not, however, dear leader, for my three-year-old has written a new slogan for you.
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One day back in July, I was out with my daughter at the school playground and she was playing with a ball. She wasn’t throwing it very well, so I stepped in to fulfill my fathering responsibility of teaching my child how to throw a ball. I explained that you turn your side to the target, and step forward with the opposite foot as you pivot your body and transfer your weight before releasing the ball. Step by step, I pointed out how my body was positioned as I slowly mimicked throwing the ball.
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My wife brought back several kilos of grapes from her grandfather’s grapevine in Extremadura last month. They are very sweet and delicious, but, having grown up eating only seedless grapes, I have found it nearly impossible to adjust to eating grapes I can’t just chomp down on but have to be careful to either remove or swallow the seeds. I had no problem adjusted to eating olives with pits, but I think it’s the ambiguity between whether or not grape seeds are small enough to swallow or big enough to spit out that has kept me from enjoying Spanish grapes.
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Today we had a meeting where the parents of all the 25 kids in Nora’s school class had to go and meet the teacher, get information about the school schedule, and see the classroom and facilities. Nora has been getting up at 10:30 or 11:00 this week, but this morning I had to wake her up at 8:45 to make sure we were on time for the 10:00 meeting. She was not pleased. But when I told her, “We have to go meet your teacher!”, a huge smile broke out across her sleepy face and she sat right up, ready to start the day.
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Like many of my friends, I rarely watch live television anymore, aside from sporting events. I did, however, watch the closing ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics alone on my sofa. Except it didn’t feel like I was alone, because I had my smartphone, and many of my Facebook and Twitter friends were also watching the same event and making witty comments about what they were seeing. Though separated by vast distances, we enjoyed the spectacle much more than if we hadn’t had the social networks to unite us.

My friends in the United States, however, could not participate, since their Olympics coverage was delayed in a ridiculous prime time ratings power play by NBC. A few of them expressed annoyance at my “spoiler” comments about the event. And sure enough, when it aired in the US, there was a wave of social media commentary as they were witnessing the event. That’s when the idea came to me…
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On Flickr, I follow the work of this Finnish guy, named Janne Parviainen, who does absolutely crazy things with a trick photography technique called “light painting”, which involves opening the camera’s shutter and then “painting” with an LED in three dimensions. In the same way that a long exposure photograph of cars at night shows only the headlights and no cars since the cars don’t reflect enough light from one position to leave an image on the film or digital sensor, the body of a light painter is also invisible in such photographs.
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