American in Spain

Last week I was going through some old photographs and noticed a whole set of photographs from my June 2011 Ireland trip had gone unpublished. Our drive from Waterville to Kenmare was a gorgeous drive overlooking picturesque Irish cliffs. It was so breathtaking that we had to pull over several times to take photographs. There are several repeats in the photo set because all four of us were snapping pictures. All of the photos can be seen on Flickr, but I’ll share a few of my favorites here.
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I am a member of the Laredo Club de Golf, the 2010 winner (I did not participate) of the Spanish Championship Between Clubs Without Courses. It’s tough, you see, to have a golf club without a course. We live in a little pocket in northern Spain where there are very, very few golf courses. In fact, the Laredo Club de Golf has more members than any courseless club in Spain. As a member of said club (membership dues are practically nothing without a course), I was invited to play in the 2011 Laredo Club de Golf Championship, played in LLanes, Asturias, nearly a 75 minute drive from Laredo. Due to my own timidity in my spousal “escape for 9 hours on a Saturday” permission submission, it was only two days before the event when I requested to participate. The captain of the club, Pedro, was quick to act and I was immediately entered. So it would come to be that I would get up at 7:45 in the morning on Saturday and drive 75 minutes west to the neighboring province of Asturias to participate in the 2011 championship.
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My photography walk last Saturday that first went by the fishing harbor then turned inland. My camera and I admired autumn’s fanfare and the sunset’s long shadows. Some may search for the exotic with expensive holidays to Sharm el Sheikh, but with the right eye and attitude, a simple walk around the place where you live can be an exotic adventure.
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For more months than I’d like to admit, my DSLR’s CCD sensor has been dirty. There were just a few specks of dust, but I had to digitally retouch almost every single photo to remove the digital noise they caused. A couple weeks ago, I decided enough was enough, so I took my lens cloth that came with my sunglasses, flipped up the mirror (the R in DSLR) and wiped off the sensor. Of course this didn’t work at all. Every time I tried to wipe it, I added more debris than I wiped clean. I had to break down and order a sensor cleaning kit, which consists of some Q-tip-looking things the size of the sensor and some sensor cleaning liquid, which smells like it may be entirely made up of rubbing alcohol. I’m guessing that cleaning off the sensor is just something DSLR owners have to do every couple years, like replacing the tires on a car.
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It has become very popular lately to post photos of people with profound sounding quotations without thinking about what the words actually mean. If you use Facebook or Twitter or other social sharing sites, you will undoubtedly already know what I’m talking about. It’s sort of the visual internet’s version of a soundbite.
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A few years ago, I came to the realization that modern two-party democracies are like pendulums. Just as gravity will pull a pendulum down towards the center, building up enough momentum to push it to the other extreme, so human voters’ innate human ability to find something to be upset about will pull their votes away from one party and build up enough momentum until the other party has a majority. Rinse and repeat.
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You know that thing women do with their lips after applying lipstick, rubbing them together, presumably to even out the lipstick? Since I’ve never needed to, I’ve simply never learned to do that. When I try, I look like an idiot – more so than usual – and those facial muscles get exhausted in about two seconds and hurt for another minute. Some of you have already started doing it while you read this, and the rest of you will now. Go ahead…
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I’ve been a fan of The Onion for a long time, so I was quite distressed to see that they’ve put up a paywall. Now, when you view more than five articles in thirty days, it pops up a box asking you to pay $2.95/month or $29.95/year for full access. My personal philosophy is that content should be monetized by advertisements and the minority of people that choose to use technology to block those ads just have to be accepted as a loss. With a little HTML investigation, I figured out which elements need to be hidden from the page to disable their fairly weak attempt at securing their content behind a paywall. If you have the popular AdBlock plugin (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) installed, you need only add two rules to your AdBlock settings.
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There’s been a bit of an online privacy storm lately over the fact that Facebook doesn’t remove all the cookies from your browser when you log off. Every three or four months, there’s a big “OMG!! Facebook is EVIL and breaching my privacy!” wave that runs over the online community before everyone forgets it and keeps using the service.
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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.
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