American in Spain

We have had our first month of nocturnal ambulation. The first incident occurred while I was asleep in Nora’s room. Often, if Nora cries at night, I will get up from my bed and go sleep in the guest bed in Nora’s room. This enables me to calm her down without getting up using just my voice, nipping a possible crying episode in the bud. In the time it takes her to crescendo up to a cry that I can hear from my room plus the time it takes me to get up and make it to her room, sometimes the emotions have snowballed into a bawl that’s harder to quash. On the night in question, I awoke at 3:00 AM to the sound of latex on latex; Nora was rubbing a deflated balloon over my ear. When I opened my eyes, I saw her big eyes there on the bed beside me staring intently. I told her that she had to go back to bed, and I put her there with little protest. It was only in the morning that I noticed that many of the objects, like her bedtime books had moved across the room to various places during the night.
(more…)

On Kings Day, my family woke up excited to see what presents the Magi had brought us. We looked out our sixth story window and saw fog. But there was something strange about the fog; it was moving very quickly and…billowing. Smoke! One of the old houses that our bedroom window overlooks was billowing white smoke, and a fireman was perched on a cherry picker spraying water down into the interior of the house. It’s three hours later as I write this and they are still spraying even more water and more smoke is billowing out. I took some photos.
(more…)

My third and final living grandfather passed away today. He wasn’t my grandfather by blood, but by marriage and an immense amount of mutual respect and love.
(more…)

The big change in the offspring this month has been the transition to the Big Girl Bed. It went quite well, and she’s been very proud about sleeping in a bed and not a crib. I dismantled the crib and moved it into storage, which was sad in a “my baby’s all grown up” sense, but also because I did it on what would’ve been the due date had our second pregnancy made it to full term. Nora hasn’t really fallen out of bed yet, but she has “oozed” most of the way out several times. Since the bed is so close to the floor, I often find her sleeping with only part of her body on the bed. My hypothesis that a nightlight would provide some visual stimulus and reduce nocturnal disorientation terror seems to have been correct.
(more…)

Nora has taken very, very well to her potty training that we started in June. We’ve had just three bed wettings in the six weeks since returning from her three-week summer vacation and going “off diaper” 24/7. We’ve had a few bowel surprises that weren’t quite anticipated in time to “RUN TO THE POTTY!!” (an exclamation heard often lately). About once a day she lets enough drops of “pee-pee” escape to require a new pair of panties, but the outer garment almost never needs changing. Quite often, she’ll head out of the room like she’s going to get a toy, only to utter, five minutes later from behind a closed bathroom door, a “Poppy! Come limp my bottom!” When I enter, I find her sitting on the toilet with a gigantic, er, “creation” in the bowl beneath her.
(more…)

This morning when I was walking Nora back from the town’s Friday market, a man was wandering around asking people if they knew when the race was coming through. What race? The human race? As I went about my daily errands, I gradually learned, through eavesdropping on people, that the Vuelta a España would be passing through town. This is huge!! It’s one of the biggest international cycling races, sort of Spain’s version of the Tour de France (vuelta = tour or lap). Then I remembered that I had heard that they were finishing one stage in the nearby town of Noja. Apparently the parties thrown at the end of each stage are absolutely amazing, and worth going to even if you don’t care about the sport at all, so if you’re a heavy partier looking for cheap holidays abroad… I learned that they were leaving Noja at 1:45 PM and that they were expected to go through Laredo at 2:10 PM, which would put them smack in Colindres at around 2:05 PM.
(more…)

Over the past fortnight, several of internet friends have asked me that important question that any adult relationship eventually reaches: “What is it that you do, exactly?” One of them asked if I was a professional blogger, which is flattering, and, now that I think about it, I can see why one might think I should be getting paid for all this gorgeous content. But no, I have a day job.

Initially I was going to write a narrative of my job history for the last decade, but I realized that would be more than anyone really wanted to read, so I’ll just talk about my present job.
(more…)

Yesterday, as I was packing to return from my weeklong vacation in Extremadura, I received an image on my mobile phone from my friend Andrés, back in Colindres. “You’re famous!” he said, and included a photo of an article in the regional newspaper for Cantabria, El Diario Montañes. I was so surprised! When I got back to Colindres the following day, I went around to various bars to see if they still had yesterday’s newspaper. I was surprised by how few of them had already thrown it away. I did find it telling, however, that the bars that still had the paper were establishments that I already considered less cleanly than the rest. I had to get two of them because the first one I got didn’t have the page with the article in it.
(more…)

On June 2, 2011, we went into Santander to visit a private obstetrician, the same guy we visited with the first pregnancy. His professionalism and caring way of treating us impressed us both times we’ve seen him. About halfway through the sonogram, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you.” He took the time to carefully explain all the developmental deformations the fetus had, listed the many possible causes, and described the sum of deformations with a phrase I will never forget: “incompatible with life”.
(more…)

In the protest of the British salt tax in colonial India in 1930, the leader of the protest at the Dharasana Salt Works, Sarojini Naidu, told his followers, “You must not use any violence under any circumstances. You will be beaten, but you must not resist: you must not even raise a hand to ward off blows.” When the protesters began pulling away the barbed wire protecting the salt pens, the police began beating them with steel-tipped lathis (an Indian martial arts fighting cane). American journalist, Webb Miller, described what he saw that day:
(more…)