American in Spain

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.
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Today I discovered a macro feature of my video camera lens that I had forgotten existed. The first thing I did was pick up a one dollar bill that I have on my desk for some reason and examine POTUS1′s face. Impressed, I decided I needed to record a video of something very close up. Not having an ant farm or a pet praying mantis, I decided the best subject for my first macro video should be my gorgeous greenish-yellow eyes. It took a couple attempts to figure out how to best, without too much effort, keep the camera and my head from moving around too much. I ended up sitting on the floor with the camera resting on my desk. Clearly, this level of intimacy required some creepy background music, so I found some.
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My parents have three dogs: Buster, Sam and Blue. I learned almost a decade ago that Buster was the most likely to actually bite someone when I got a little too rough playing with him and I got a tooth to the bridge of my nose. It didn’t break the skin, but it was sufficiently scary to give me a sense of cautious respect when dealing with Buster. We knew from our very first visit with Nora that Buster should never really be in the same room with Nora. Buster is the alpha dog of the house and is pretty much completely deaf, as old springers often are.
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Recently there was a soccer match that I wanted to watch, but that was not broadcast on my basic cable television. Investigating around the internet for a site that would stream the live game, I stumbled upon a very well designed website called watchlivefootball.tv. If you go there, you will see a nice listing of today’s fixtures with the time the match starts, the players, past results for each team, and the logos for each team as well as the league or tournament the game belongs to. It looks very professional. On each match page, there is a video player. When you click play, you are presented with this:
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The weather today has been very, very odd. Everyone is using the word huracán for what is in store for us tonight. Nora and I spent much of the afternoon outside in the unseasonably warm temperatures and brisk breeze. We saw several dumpsters that had been tied down to keep them in place. There were a few strange occurrences, such as when it rained from a perfectly blue sky.
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After eleventh hour gourd procurement last year, this year my local grocer friend, Andrés, who regularly visits farmers markets to buy fruit and vegetables, had his eye out for the perfect pumpkin for me to carve. And sure enough, he came through with the perfectly shaped pumpkin. Last night I carved it into a jack-o-lantern.
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This is quite possibly the creepiest blog post I’ve ever posted, at least on a personal level. I’ve always known I would do this, and my regular readers might share in my surprise that it’s taken me so long to do it. Yesterday, in a curiosity-fueled effort to speculate on what Nora might look like as an adult, I morphed my face with my wife’s. Morphing is always creepy, and even more so when it is done with faces that you know very well.
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Recently, as I was adjusting the canopy over Nora’s stroller, an object fell out and onto the ground. I picked it up and gasped! It was quite possibly the most horrible little doll thing I’ve ever seen. My mind reeled as to how my loving wife, who I thought I knew pretty well, could attach such an evil little doll to our child’s pram. Later that night, I confronted her about it.

Her response was, “Oh my god! I’ve never seen that thing in my life! You brought it into this house?!” Reassured by her innocence, I began to ponder how such a thing could have happened to such a well-intentioned family. The only reasonable conclusion is that someone has put a curse on us. A dark, dark curse.

Below I present the doll thing that I found. If you have small children or pets in the room, encourage them to look away.
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Since becoming a member of a Flickr group called Scary Beings Eating Themselves, I’m always on the lookout for such a photographic subject. Well, last Saturday in Burgos, we had a little run-in/altercation with one such scary being. Below I present the photographic evidence.
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The video they can’t stop showing on the Spanish news cycle today, besides the one where Obama thanks a member of the Spanish royal family for being in attendance when she was not (what’s Spanish for faux pas?), is of a restaurant in Jávea, Alicante, where a tornado came by and took the roof off while customers were eating inside. Clearly Spain doesn’t have the kind of tornadoes that the US does, because no one was sucked out and thrown miles away, but it’s pretty darn scary enough as it is.
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