Another time, I was downstairs working when I heard someone get up upstairs and go to the bathroom. Then I heard the person leave the bathroom and close a bedroom door. It had to be my wife. Two minutes later, the stairway light came on. I went to investigate and found Nora standing at the top of the stairs – blocked by the toddler gate, thankfully – peering down at me silently. I put her back to bed. Later the next morning, I mentioned to my wife that she’d woken up Nora the previous night, and she said she’d never gotten up. So perhaps Nora went to pee on her own? Who knows…

I have taken another step back from Nora’s regular bedtime routine, opting to sit on the floor out in the hall, rather than on the guest bed while Nora falls asleep. It’s a step in the right direction, and Nora seems to be taking to it well, although sometimes she will get up and come check on me and be ordered back to bed.

Our bedtime routine has also taken a turn for the adorable. When I tuck her in and give her a hug, she usually says, whether I have or not, “Poppy! You haven’t shaved today! Tomorrow you can shave, okay?” Then she demands to kiss my nose, each eye, each ear, and hair. These moments are so precious to me.

The magi brought Nora a cash register, complete with toy foodstuffs and money. She absolutely loves playing with it, saying often, “What do you want to buy?” When her playmate chooses an item, she says, “I have to scan it!”, and she presses the button on the toy bar code scanner, causing a loud BEEP sound. Then she declares, “You have to pay!”, but is more than willing to open up the cash drawer to give her playmate some money to pay for the item. Her business model is slightly flawed, but then she’s not in it for the money. Occasionally, the bar code scanner gets magically transformed into a telephone and she holds it to her ear and talks to Rubén, who, despite actually existing, has taken on a primary role in her cast of imaginary friends that she talks to around the house.

This month we had to bid a fond farewell to Nora’s favorite daycare worker, Nela. Nora and Nela have always had a special relationship. For instance, Nela was the first person to be allowed to braid Nora’s hair. She had decided to leave daycare work, for which she’s certified, and start a children’s clothing store in town. We will still see her around, and Nora would be “graduating” out of daycare this September anyway, but it’s sad to see her go. I took this photo of the two of them on Nela’s last day.

Several times this month, upon seeing me open the cabinet where we store Nora’s medicine, she has said, “Poppy, what are we going to do? [cough! cough!]” I suppose that, after having to deal with a sick child that refused medicine to the point where she had to be held down with almost all my weight, I’ve got to be in favor of pharmaceutical companies erring on the side of “too appetizing” for medicine, and pretend hypochondria is just a consequence we’ve got to accept.

This month I learned that two-year-olds still fall for the “Please close the door…no, from the other side” trick. Sometimes when she’s in my office picking items off my desk, asking inquisitively, “What is this? To do?” I have to ask her to leave so I can continue working, and this trick is working wonders at the moment.

I recall learning this song before I knew what the heck a submarine was, and I’m pretty sure that Nora still doesn’t even know what “yellow” means. It holds a special place in my marriage because of a special night in a bar in the Scottish highlands when we had a particularly fun time singing it in a large crowd. The fact that we can learn songs without having any clue about their meaning still amazes me.

Nora is definitely to the age where one must be careful of everything said around her, because it will be repeated without filter to anyone she has even a little confidence in. Her mother brought home about fifty 1, 2 and 5 euro-cent coins, totaling maybe 2€, from a jar she’d been throwing loose change into at work. Next thing we know, Nora is saying, “Mommy took a lot of money from work and gave it all to me!” to everyone in the local supermarket. Of course they know that Marga’s not an embezzler (or do they!?), but every single one of them remarked about how Nora’s phrasing didn’t make it sound very good.

How much longer is this post? A little bit, but not too much.

I recently had to following conversation with Nora…

Erik: Ow! Don’t hit me with that toy.
Nora: Why?
Erik: Because it hurts, and I don’t like things that hurt, do you?
Nora: A little bit. Sometimes. But not too much.

She’s not really a moderate masochist; this is her canned diplomatic response to any question requiring a yes/no or quantitative answer. e.g. Do you want some juice? How much do you love Poppy? Are you a Democrat? You have to admit that it’s a clever, if utterly meaningless, response you’d expect out of the most agile politician. She’s not yet three; no need to commit to any positions yet.

The state of the offspring is strong!

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The house with the brick ground floor is the one that has burned down. I walk by it every day. I’ve shopped in the store to the left, but the building to the right has been abandoned with aging Banco Santander decals on it for the six years I’ve been living in Colindres.

Because of the weather today, the smoke is completely invisible from ground level.

But seen from above, you can clearly see just how much of it there is.

The house is totally gutted. No, I don’t know why there’s a bathtub on the neighbor’s balcony. It’s been there ever since we bought our house.

The neighborhood is filled with that thick acrid smell that triggers strong emotions in anyone that has ever experienced a house fire. My closest brush with a fire was when a dorm room at my boarding school burned down. No one was hurt, but it was a traumatic night, and the emotions are still vivid.

I hope everyone got out okay. Disasters are always sad, but it’s especially poignant when it happens on one of these days when Society expects us to be joyous.

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On Monday morning, he didn’t wake up. They took him to the hospital and he was said to be in a coma, although he was breathing on his own. My wife, Marga, drove to see him and whisper her goodbyes to her sleeping grandfather. On Tuesday, he briefly gained consciousness, and on Wednesday he was awake and lucid. Not only was he now conscious, but he had been semi-conscious for much of the time he was in the coma, able to recall who had visited him and what they had told him.

This is the last photo taken of Nora with her bisabuelo (great-grandfather). It really makes my heart ache that Nora will most likely not remember him at all. Hopefully the constant exposure to my photos will help.

Te quiero muchísimo, Abuelo. Soy mejor por haberte conocido. Nunca jamás te olvidaré.

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Nora’s favorite story, by a considerable margin, is Little Red Riding Hood, which she had been told in Spanish before I started reading it to her in English. In Spanish, it’s called Caperucita Roja, which is quite fun to say. She hasn’t managed to say the English title in its entirety yet, but rather asks to be read “Riding Hood”.

When I read her the stories, I’m pretty sure that she doesn’t really follow the plot yet, but the verbal part of her brain loves to hear adults talk, and she’s found that asking for a story to be read is a good way to get an adult to string a bunch of words together. But if you quiz her about the content of the story afterwards, she fails the quiz. But she does understand that wolves are scary and should be avoided, which is always an important forest survival skill.

Her imagination is growing every day. Imaginary beings are appearing around the house, needing to be herded and controlled. Right after Halloween, the house became infested with witches which needed to be watched out for and commanded, with all the fervor of an exorcist, to “Stay in that room over there and don’t come out!”. The other day, after I had read Little Red Riding Hood to her for the thousandth time, she uttered this complex concept full of consequences:

Poppy, don’t go into my [play]house, because there’s a wolf inside. And if you go inside, it will eat you. And then Nora won’t have a Poppy and Nora will cry.

That statement shows a pretty solid understanding of cause and effect and the ability to predict the consequences of possible actions.

She continues announce that she’s “going to work” with her backpack on heading to the room down the hall where she stays for sixty seconds before returning to pass around the imaginary money she earned to everyone. Apparently her lessons in Capitalism from when she was four days old didn’t sink in.

One day Nora and I went to drop off some dry cleaning. When you run errands with a child in a small town, your child ends up being given a piece of candy by just about every shopkeeper. I normally let her eat one or two, but if she’s given more, then I make her save them for later. Nora was riding in her stroller unwrapping her candy as we headed to on errand. Without me slowing down at all (because I didn’t know of her intention), when we passed a trashcan, I saw Nora’s arm reach up and drop the candy wrapper in the trashcan as we sped past. I was so proud, and I showered her with praise. That’s the kind of inference from past evidence and visual-motor control that it would take fifty PhD’s two decades to teach a robot to do.

The state of the offspring is strong!

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She treats her dolls with “tender authority”. If that’s a mirror on our parenting, I like what I see.

Despite a concerted campaign in favor of my name being “Daddy”, I am now 99.9% of the time called “Poppy” or “Papi” (same pronunciation, different language, different spelling). Even when I tell her to “Say ‘Good morning, Daddy,’”, she responds, reluctantly with the attitude of a 15-year-old being told to clean her room, “Good morning, Poppy.” Oh well. Any points she loses there she regains in spades when, randomly when we’re walking down the street, she’ll burst out, “¡¡Papi guapo!!” (Handsome Poppy!).

Her ability to translate between the two languages continues to astound me. Sometimes she’ll say, “Dame un vaso de leche porque tengo sed“, which always prompts a “What?” or “In English!” from me, which will make her sigh and say, “Give me a glass of milk because I’m thirsty.” Depending on how professorial I’m feeling, I might demand “the magic word”, in which case she’ll sigh again and prepend or append a “please” onto the request. The fact that both her parents can understand the Spanish and help her get the English right surely must be helping the process along. Most mornings before we leave home and I begin uttering Spanish, for politeness, in front of other Spaniards, she and I can often go the whole morning without more than a dozen words in Spanish.

Nora’s big into making plans and announcing them. She will often declare, “I’m going to go look for something, you stay here.” If I inquire about the nature of the object she is seeking, it becomes clear that the details of her plan have not extended that deep. Sure enough, she goes off into the other room and fires off an, “I’m coming! I’ll be right there!”, before returning a minute later with some object that was less than a meter above the floor and not bolted down in the next room.

She treats her stuffed animals and dolls with what can best be described as “tender authority”, speaking quietly to them (always in Spanish), but sometimes taking a firm tone when the stuffed bunny rabbit isn’t being still or sitting down or going to sleep like she has willed it to. I must say that if the way she treats her dolls is a reflection on our parenting, I’m very proud of what I see in the mirror.

There are times when Nora is just whiny for no reason, either she’s tired or just cranky, when she will sort of “half cry” for minutes on end. She understands, when told, however, that crying without a reason is unacceptable in the company of adults and she must go to another room. Most often this is my office, since it’s usually empty when I’m at home parenting. When I ask, “Where do we go to cry for no reason?”, she’ll respond, “The office”, think for a second, and say, “I’m going to the office to cry.” And she does it, too. She gets up and goes to the office, closes the door, and bawls for a bit. On rare occasions, she’ll be so proud of her corralled weeping that she’ll come back into the living room to proudly announce, “I’m in the office crying”, with the implied, “if you guys need me for anything…”, before returning to sob some more.

Last week, Nora and I were going about our normal morning routine. I got her dressed in a nice green dress, and then we went into my bedroom so that I could get dressed. She dramatically announced, “What can Poppy wear today??” While I got dressed, she performed her usual task of moving random objects between her bedroom and ours and vice versa. It’s not odd for us to find our alarm clocks huddled in a circle with some stuffed animals in the corner of her room. When I was ready to go, I told her to come, and we went downstairs and out for a walk and to the store. While in the grocery store, Nora was idly playing with her dress, and suddenly Nora’s friend, Tona, the fruit lady, exclaimed, “But this girl doesn’t have any panties on!!” The half dozen housewives in the shop burst out laughing. Sure enough, there she was, going commando in the fresh produce section. I asked Nora where her panties were, and she said, very matter-of-factly, “At home”, with a “where else would they be?” look on her face. I was barely more amused than mortified, but I made a mental note to do a panty check before leaving the house in the future.

One cute artifact of her bilingualism is that she will often pronounce her consonants in English like the Spanish consonants. One day I said something like, “Look, a car!”, and Nora responded, “No, Poppy, it’s a carrrrr“, rolling her R like the Spanish do. And then, this past weekend at the beach (yes, at the beach in October!) when we were playing in the sand, she kept asking me to “dig a hole”, but she pronounced the H like the guttural Spanish J. “Dig me a jol!” She’s pretty wild about going to the beach. She absolutely adores running in the sand and dancing in the surf.

She understands some general conversion rules for guessing what words might be in English for concepts she knows in Spanish. The first time she asks to draw with a pencil or announces what she’s going to draw, she always says, “I’m going to pint a horsey!”, guessing the English for “pintar” (to paint or draw). And when she wants something cleaned, she will often say “limp“, an attempt to anglicize the Spanish verb “limpiar“. Her drawings don’t yet look like anything, but any persons or objects that are in her short term memory from the day before are possible subjects.

Her counting abilities are pretty minimal, but we haven’t emphasized it much. She can make it to about five before she starts guessing that nine or seven might come next. There’s no sense about colors yet, either. She’s memorized that “The sky is blue”, but couldn’t do better than chance at identifying any other object as being blue. Occasionally she’ll say, “That white car” or something and be absolutely correct, but further interrogation reveals it to be a lucky guess.

The last school year that Nora won’t attend started in September, so the streets are delightfully childless in the mornings when I’m taking care of Nora. The side effect is, however, that everybody and their nephew thinks it’s reasonable to ask Nora, “And why aren’t you in school?” It’s not like she’s nine or something, sheesh!

The state of the offspring is strong!

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Upon considering several places from which to view the race, I decided that seeing them cross the iconic Colindres-Treto bridge would be a good place, so I walked down to the harbor and picked a spot. It was still only 1:40 PM, but all the benches were occupied and people were generally milling about around the road. On my way to the bridge, I saw people setting up signs cheering on some guy named Cobo, whoever that is…not that I could name any pro cyclists beyond Armstrong and Contador.

I got to the bridge and found the usual group of men that are there on all sunny days, standing around doing a superb impression of the intro to King of the Hill, with their fishing lines hanging off the bridge. Finding a place to attach my GorillaPod to film the race was tricky, but eventually I settled on a metallic structure near the bridge. Then it was just a matter of waiting. Soon, normal civilian traffic ceased and all the cars were police vehicles. I passed my time practicing a panning motion blur photography technique I’ve been wanting to try. If you track a moving object with your camera as you press the shutter with a slower than normal shutter speed, you should get a shot where the subject is in focus and the background is blurred. That’s the theory anyway. It’s quite challenging in practice without a tripod.

Then…the race arrived! It lasted for all of about 15 seconds. Well, more, actually; according to my video, the time from when the first cyclist passed until the last cyclist passed was a full 16.1 seconds.

About a zillion cars with bicycles on top passed, with license plates from all over Europe, and then the road was open to civilian traffic again.

My HD video camera attached to a metal scaffold to film the race.

The view of the harbor 90° to the right of the previous shot was too pretty not to capture.

The leader, it turns out, is this guy named Juan José Cobo, a local Cantabrian man from Cabezón de la Sal, who, after today’s Stage 19 of the Vuelta a España, is leading the race overall. Go Cobo!

Something about this picture gives me the impression that the cyclist is hovering just above the ground.

The pack.

This is that motion blurring effect I mentioned.

Cool, huh? I definitely need more practice.

Some of the license plates the drove by. Belgium, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, and…Moldova???

The local Peugeot dealership is rooting for Cobo.

The whole experience was pretty interesting, in that it was somehow a superposition of excitement and boredom. I think that, even more so than most sports, watching cycling live is much more about having a good time outside with friends than actually seeing incredible athletes.

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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.

The company I work for sells medical supplies and mobility equipment. Our biggest sale items are: lift chairs, those recliners that can lift you up to a standing position; stair lifts, those chairs on a track that go up and down staircases; and mobility scooters.

What I do, specifically, is write the computer code behind the website that displays the products, allows you to add them to your shopping cart, enter your shipping and billing information, and place orders. Plus all the other bells and whistles that make a successful modern day e-commerce site, like product reviews, recommended products, and little questionnaires to help customers find the right product. But the part of an e-commerce website that a consumer sees is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the curtain, there are dozens of administration pages where other company employees can edit the products, make sweeping price changes across a set of products, and maintain product options as they are added or discontinued. Then there’s the whole branch of code specifically for what is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which involves getting as much useful information about your products into Google and Bing and Yahoo as you can, through uploading of product feeds and tweaking of special keywords on each page. Since the major search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, keeping your sites ranking highly (i.e. appearing on the first page of search results) is a never-ending battle.

Telecommuting is an interesting way of life, and it’s certainly not for everyone. You really can’t beat the 30 second commute from bed to office, but you have to be the kind of person that doesn’t need human face-to-face interaction all the time. I spend most of my workday in constant communication, via instant messaging and VOIP calls, so it really feels like I’m just in the next cubicle. We collaborate splendidly with screen sharing applications. If someone has a problem they want me to look at, I can just pull up their screen and see what they are doing, and even take control to show them what they’re doing wrong, and vice versa. I do miss out on some inside jokes and office gossip told at the water cooler, but I don’t mind missing the other office chatter about sports or last night’s television lineup.

One interesting consequence of working on the other side of the ocean is that I am six timezones ahead of my coworkers. In the past, I have worked standard european office hours, and only coincided with the other office people for a few hours each day, enough to exchange ideas and discuss projects.

Since becoming a father, I have chosen to shift my working hours to match up exactly with the eastern US workday, working more or less from 2:30 PM to 11 PM, but sometimes other odd hours. The truth is that I have a lot of flexibility in my schedule. I have tremendous respect for my employer’s understanding that what’s important is that stuff gets done, not what hours of the day it gets done in. There are some times and some tasks where you can finish the task sooner, and with fewer errors, if you take a twenty minute nap first. I strongly believe that my employer benefits from me having this freedom. Just last night I was up until 2 AM working on a project I really wanted to get finished while I was channeling the flow.

My current work schedule allows me to spend all morning with my daughter (who is two at the time of this writing) before taking her to daycare for only a few hours before her mother can pick her up in the afternoon. It’s working out really well. I hope things won’t change too much when she starts school.

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Americano en Colindres

Erik Rasmussen cuelga en la red su particular punto de vista sobre la realidad española

Erik Rasmussen es la otra cara de la moneda. Si a veces a los españoles nos cuesta imaginarnos cómo es un país desconocido, no digamos cómo será para los foráneos imaginar el nuestro.

Erik Rasmussen es un estadounidense que lleva seis años viviendo en España, en Colindres (Cantabria), pero escribe en inglés. Nada más llegar, y ante la temible pérdida de contacto con su familia, abrió un blog: American in Spain (erikras.com), cuya principal fuente de lectores son ellos, los Rasmussen que ha dejado atrás.

El blog de Erik no es de los más transitados de la red, ni de los que más seguidores tienen en Twitter, pero sí es abundante en contenido. Es, de alguna forma, una correspondencia transatlántica íntima, pero a la vista de todos, y subraya, además, todas esas pequeñas perlas de nuestra tierra que no hacen más que escapársenos a simple vista.

Por ejemplo: Erik opina que los españoles no sabemos utilizar las rotondas, y lo explica en una extensísima entrada, fotos incluidas, en las que detalla para sus congéneres la «peculiar» manera de circular por estos lugares. O la querencia que tenemos por esos gatos dorados de saludo sempiterno que venden los chinos. O la relación de su hija -está casado con una española- con su próxima hermana. O el poco espacio que una aerolínea deja entre asiento y asiento. Todo desarrolladísimo: incluso detalla para lectores poco enterados la polémica que salpicó al jugador del F.C. Barcelona Sergio Busquets en mayo de este año, cuando una cámara le captó lanzándole la palabra «mono» o «morro» al madridista Marcelo.
Erik Rasmussen es una especie de corresponsal extranjero, de veraneo permanente (un fan de las tapas), transatlántico y con un particular gracejo. Desde Colindres, con color.

Now in English:

American in Colindres

Erik Rasmussen publishes, on his personal web page, his own point of view on Spanish reality

Erik Rasmussen is the other side of the coin. If sometimes it’s hard for us Spaniards to imagine how it would be in an unknown country, how it must be for foreigners to imagine our country.

Erik Rasmussen is an American who has been living in Spain for six years, in Colindres (Cantabria), but he writes in English. As soon as he arrived, to counter the frightful loss of contact with his family, he opened a blog: American in Spain (erikras.com), whose primary readers are the Rasmussens he left behind.

Erik’s blog is not one of the most visited on the internet, nor the one with the most Twitter followers, but it has abundant content. It is, in some form, an intimate transatlantic correspondence, but available for everyone to see, and it furthermore underlines all those little pearls of our land that easily escape our notice.

For example: Erik thinks that we Spaniards don’t know how to use roundabouts, and he explains it in a very extensive entry, with photos, in which he details, for his counterparts, the “peculiar” way people circulate in these places. Or our haunting of those golden eternally waving cats that are sold in the Chinese shops. Or the relationship between his daughter – he’s married to a Spaniard – with her next sister. Or the lack of space an airline leaves between seats. Everything is extremely well developed: including the detail for uninformed readers about the scandal that dirtied F.C. Barcelona player Sergio Busquets in May of this year, when a camera caught him shooting the word “mono” or “morro” at the Madrid player Marcelo.

Erik Rasmussen is a species of expat correspondent, on permanent summer vacation (a fan of tapas), transatlantic and with his own wit. From Colindres, with color.

To Alejandro Carantoña, let me know if you ever want an interview or a foreigner perspective on something. You can contact me by commenting on this blog.

UPDATE: This article was in El Diario Vasco (The Basque Daily) too!

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Needless to say, it has been a rough week for us. I can say, however, with total certainty that losing a fetus that you’ve never met cannot be compared with the loss of a child. It is disappointing to have the happy future you have been planning for months be ripped away from you, but I have no doubt that we’ll be just fine.

The termination took place this afternoon. It would have been a boy.

Rather than feel sorry for us, I ask that those of you that do have fully formed children, give them an extra hug today and appreciate your good fortune. Our two year old, Nora, has been a beacon of happiness for us in this storm.

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Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow.

Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down. When every one of the first column was knocked down stretcher bearers rushed up unmolested by the police and carried off the injured to a thatched hut which had been arranged as a temporary hospital.

There were not enough stretcher-bearers to carry off the wounded; I saw eighteen injured being carried off simultaneously, while forty-two still lay bleeding on the ground awaiting stretcher-bearers. The blankets used as stretchers were sodden with blood.

At times the spectacle of unresisting men being methodically bashed into a bloody pulp sickened me so much I had to turn away….I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs…

Bodies toppled over in threes and fours, bleeding from great gashes on their scalps. Group after group walked forward, sat down, and submitted to being beaten into insensibility without raising an arm to fend off the blows. Finally the police became enraged by the non-resistance….They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and testicles. The injured men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to inflame the fury of the police….The police then began dragging the sitting men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them into ditches.

While not nearly as violent, it should be obvious why what happened in Barcelona, an important city in a free western democracy, reminded me of the revolution in India.

A few observations:

1. The sitting protest is genius. As the parent of a small child, I can confirm that when a human doesn’t want to be moved, sitting down and refusing to stand is the most effective measure.
2. I don’t know about you, but the constant sirens really raised my adrenaline as I watched it.
3. Trying to look at all sides, I almost feel sorry for the cops, who have been told by their boss to clear the street so a car can pass, and they are stuck in a terrible situation: either refuse to do your job and possibly get fired (which sucks, especially in this economy!) or be brutal. Both terrible options.
4. I really love that technology has made it to the point where news – and video evidence! – of any authoritarian brutality is zoomed right to hundreds of thousands of people so quickly. This can only be a good thing for our global society.

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