American in Spain

Our most exciting event this month was traveling to the United States for two weeks to visit my parents and grandmother for Thanksgiving. Nora was very excited about the trip and behaved admirably. We got up at 4:00 AM on a Saturday, flew to Frankfurt, and then all the way to Charlotte. The second flight was 9.5 hours long, and Nora slept for only one hour. She quickly learned how to operate her in-flight touch screen entertainment system and watched the same episode of Baby Looney Tunes about a hundred times. After another hour-long drive from the Charlotte airport, we reached my parents’ house. Nora has been video conferencing over FaceTime with my parents for at least a half hour every day, and she took no time at all to acclimatize to them. At 8:00 PM North Carolina time, twenty-two hours after she had woken up that morning, I had to insist that she stop playing with her Grandma and go to bed. It took her less than thirty seconds to fall asleep.
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During my recent Thanksgiving pond hop, I had the opportunity to watch several movies during my 16.5 hours of air travel over the ocean. I was impressed with the selection available, with a few dozen older classics and about twenty “new releases”. With so many movies fresh in my memory, I figure I should tell you about them.
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Sometimes it seems to me like my parents are very often going to concerts and events around my hometown. So when we chose our dates to visit for Thanksgiving this year, I eagerly inquired if there were any events we could attend. Alas, there were none.

Aware of my disappointment, my parents contacted their friend, Clint, who runs Americana Stage, the organization that schedules, manages and hosts such concerts in various local venues. Clint suggested a “house concert”, which is still a fairly new genre of event. The basic idea is that you host a party in your house, but you charge all your friends an admission fee, and then you pay a band to perform in your own house. Not all houses are appropriate for such events, but the one my parents bought three years ago has a very adequate living room. The whole thing was a new experience for almost all involved.
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I had never heard of a “light field” camera until I began hearing marketing buzz about the Lytro camera last year. To be perfectly honest, I still don’t really understand how the technology works. I have a pretty good layman’s grasp of how normal lens optics work to focus an image onto film or a CCD sensor, and how and why focusing at a certain depth works, but the “light field” camera concept still seems a bit like magic. They say that it captures not only the intensity and color of the light hitting each sensor pixel, but the direction of said photon as well. Huh? And somehow this magically allows the focal length (what depth in the image is in focus) to be modified after the moment has been captured, just like they do in Hollywood movies and television where a detective tells a lab geek to “enhance this area of the photograph here” and they can now magically read the perp’s license plate. Like I said, it still seems a bit like magic, but it really, really works.
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My wife and I have been slowly expanding our culinary abilities this year via online recipes, trying about a dozen new recipes this past year. I’m pretty sure my favorite is this pumpkin almond risotto that she made once, and I have repeated twice. It is absolutely delicious and dead simple to make, although it does require some attention and stirring just before serving.
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As you may recall, Nora’s preschool class mascot is a big turtle, named Tortuga Tomasa. After some foul play incidents a decade ago, the mascot is now a stuffed turtle, and not a real reptile. We were told that every weekend throughout the year, the Tomasa would travel home with one kid in the class to be cared for at home. However, since there are so many children in Nora’s class, the policy was amended to have a child take the stuffed reptile home every single day to maximize participation. I was hoping we’d get lucky and have Tomasa for a weekend, but we got even luckier. Nora brought her home on a Tuesday, the children went on a field trip to a local zoo on the Wednesday (so Tomasa had to stay home), the Thursday was All Saints Day (no school), and then they had Friday off as a bridge day, so Tomasa stayed at our house for five days!
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For Halloween this year, I offered to give a pumpkin carving demonstration to my daughter’s three-year-old preschool class. The teacher was enthusiastic and coordinated with the English teacher, who was already doing some Halloween-themed vocabulary, for a date and time for the presentation. All I could get were some small pumpkins from my local grocer friend who frequents farmers markets. The only way to get a real lantern-worthy gourd is to know a farmer directly, which I do not. My daughter’s teacher, however, told me that she was going to her hometown for the weekend before Halloween, and she knew some farmers that grew big pumpkins, and she’d see what she could find. It was a success! She found two gorgeous beach-ball-sized gourds for me to carve.
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