American in Spain

Today we had two important firsts in Nora’s life. One good and one bad. Let’s look at them in the order that they occurred.

Nora’s been putting anything and everything she can into her mouth lately. When she grabs your hand or, if you get close enough, your nose, she’s going to close her fingers around it and pull it towards her mouth. Several times I’ve been holding her and thinking about something else and found that she was biting down with her firm gums on my finger…hard! We’ve been monitoring several white teeth just under the surface of her gums for over a month now.
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The other day I took Nora out for a walk. We stopped at a bar with a terrace, and I ordered a glass of wine and opened a book. Nora was content to observe the other patrons. By bad planning, I was situated right next to one of these coin operated amusement vehicles, the kind that the kids get in and the machine moves and plays music when a coin is inserted. That is when the following events took place.
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Last night I woke up because Nora was making some noise. She was in bed with me because she’d been feeling a little ill (or at least acting that way). I calmed her down. Then I realized I had to pee, so I got up, made sure she was securely in the middle of the bed, put the covers over her with her little head sticking out as I have several times before, and went to the bathroom.

Bladder comfortably empty, I returned to the bedroom and… SHE WAS GONE!
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A couple days ago, in the Basque valley town of Mondragón, where my in-laws live, some notices were posted on the entrances to all residential buildings. It read more or less the following:

Over the next two months, we will be going house by house collecting signatures for a petition to the mayor’s office to release prisoners that are either gravely ill or that have already served their time.

Seems like a good cause, doesn’t it? Well…
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As I have been learning more and more about the way our economy functions and how bankers have gotten us into this “credit crisis”, there has been something nagging me, a distant voice in my head shouting and pointing to the elephant in the room, the big obvious problem that no one is talking about. I have been unable to put my finger on it, and have been actively trying not to think about it. But it keeps coming back. We all hear the figures. The US national debt is increasing by three billion dollars each day. Congress proposed a 700 billion dollar “bail out package”. The question that no one ever asks, and has been nagging my logical mind is: Where does all that money come from?
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