American in Spain

My two year old now had the mental capacity to reason through simple causal statements like “Mommy is sleeping, because it’s night time, so we need to be quiet,” but the logical side of her brain isn’t yet powerful enough to override the emotional side enough to accept, “It’s night time, so you need to lie down in your crib, be quiet, and have the light off and no one else in the room with you.” She does, however, accept small bargains where good behavior results in her getting something that she wants. Lately I’ve been using this to my advantage.
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For a long time, I have been unable to understand the point of political and social demonstrations and parades and such. I have at least two posts to this effect. What does Congress care if a bunch of rainbow-flag-waving hippies are out on the National Mall? That’s not going to change anyone’s mind!

With the combination of a number of successful political demonstrations – the most successful being that of Egypt – in the first quarter of 2011 and a video lecture I saw on YouTube, I finally had an epiphany about why demonstrations matter, and how they can be effective.
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The Spanish news and gossip media has been aflutter lately with stories about the British royal family. It’s reminded me about a really bizarre phenomenon when it comes to names of members of the royal family. For some reason they are translated into their Spanish equivalent. For instance, the current monarch of England is called Reina Isabel. She and her husband, Principe Felipe have a son, Principe Carlos, who is next in line to the throne. Carlos has two sons, Principe Guillermo and Principe Enrique. That sounds so weird. In no other circumstance are names translated like this.
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Today I wanted to share two of my favorite brainteasers. It’s just by chance that they are so similar, both tricking you into thinking something is missing. Every few years, I forget the trick to the first one – because I’m smart like that – and it stumps me again. The latter puzzle is more of an optical illusion than anything else. Like all good optical illusions, understanding how it works doesn’t ruin your ability to see it.
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My blogrollmate, Simon, shared this article with me today, by a US citizen who has lived in Europe for a decade, about the superiority of American domestic appliances. I must say that, after having spent a decade myself living in four houses and a dormitory in Europe, I agree completely.

Allow me to address my experiences with a variety of appliances.
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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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Nora’s Spanish has taken some leaps and bounds in the past couple weeks, yet her spoken English is lagging behind, and I can’t help but blame myself for it. In the mornings, when I care for her for 3-5 hours depending on when she gets up, I speak only English to her, except when we are around Spaniards in the grocery store. She, however, chooses to speak Spanish to me. There are some exceptions. When she asks for a cookie, she says “Doh-chi!“, and when she wants to get down off of something (e.g. chair, sofa, stroller), she typically says, “Down!”, although she has recently taken to saying “Al suelo!” (to the floor).
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In the countries I’ve lived and driven in, I’ve noticed some differences between how people drive on the motorway (that’s like the “interstate” for you yanks). In England, people tend to drive with an unparalleled politeness. They will happily move over to let you pass, make room for you to merge in, or brake so you can change lanes ahead of them. Spaniards, on the other hand, are just as selfish as the Brits are selfless. In Spain, everyone assumes that you will also behave selfishly, so when you try to be polite to other drivers, they get confused or don’t trust that you’re really letting them merge. The Americans are somewhere in between.
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I was as creative in naming my blog as Dave Matthews was in naming his band. The thing is, I was a blogger long before I was a blog reader, so I didn’t really know that blogs were supposed to have interesting names, and I must say that I put the first thing that popped into my head for the “blog name” field in my original setup to the precursor to this blog. Oh well.

Anyway, a cool name for a blog popped into my head well over a year ago and I’ve been meaning to mention it. I don’t actually want it for myself, so I’m just throwing it out there for anyone to use it. At the time of this writing, all domain names involved are available.
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I’ve got some extra vacation time to spend this year. I’d like to travel somewhere, but I don’t have any ideas. For the longest time I really wanted an app to show me all the places I can go from my local airport on a given week, but no one had anything like this. Recently, however, I have been blown away by the Kayak iPad app, which does just that, plus price range and temperature range sliders, and even checkboxes for pastimes like skiing, golf, beach, etc. It’s amazing.

But what I really want, and I suspect there are clever people coding this as I type, is a way to combine information from my social networks, primarily Facebook, with flight searches to find the best deals to go see my friends.
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