American in Spain

I had never really drunk much alcohol before going to Denmark as a naive 20-year-old. There in Scandinavia, I fell in love with the two main lagers available, Tuborg and Carlsberg. Upon returning to my homeland, now of legal drinking age, I sought them out, only to find no sign whatsoever of either brand. Once, shortly thereafter, I was on a business trip in Chicago when I entered a bar that had a neon Carlsberg sign. I rushed up to the bartender and asked if they really had Carlsberg, but he told me that hadn’t had it for a couple years and that the sign was left over from some publicity from ten years earlier. Apparently Carlsberg had stopped exporting to the US just before I’d learned of its existence.
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Not counting my office, our house has two bedrooms, one large, and the other freakin’ enormous. Ever since moving in, we’ve been sleeping in the smaller of the two for several reasons, the main ones being the gorgeous view and the fact that it’s exterior, with no neighbors’ balconies nearby. When it became clear that we’d be having a third resident in our house, our irrational greed took over and we both agreed that, “There’s no way we’re giving the baby the biggest room in the house! Over our dead bodies!” Actually the whole house would be hers since she’s the sole heir. So we moved into the bigger bedroom, set up the crib in there with the intention of banishing her to the smaller bedroom when the time came, and we lived like this for eight months. Until…
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Sitting is like riding a bicycle, it seems. Once you get it, you’ve got it for life. Nora’s been doing quite a bit of sitting since mastering the ability a week ago. She does still fall down eventually, but she’s gone for at least fifteen minutes a couple times. Yesterday she was looking so adorable in her long-sleeved flowery blouse and purple corduroy dress that I had to record a video of her sitting up. The trick, I learned after three takes, was for me to be down on the floor behind the camera making goofy faces. When I hit stop on the camera, my neck was killing me. I can see where she gets her hatred of the prone position.
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T-shirts that say funny things on them aren’t very big in Spain, for babies or adults. Also, Nora has just now gotten big enough to wear the ones she has, right when t-shirt weather has ended for the year. So she probably won’t get to wear hers very much. But the other day I put them on her and took some photos, because I think they’re cute and funny.
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I recently found myself in a dark room with my iPhone and a cold pint of lager. For reasons still unclear to me, I set my beer down on top of my iPhone, and the result was amazing. A beer lamp!

In short, Apple has manufactured not only the best mobile phone on the market, but also the most awesome coaster ever!
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Now that Nora has mastered the art of rolling over from her stomach (prone) to her back (supine), she felt it would be best to spread this knowledge to other babies around the world. There are only four steps, and she demonstrates them clearly in the following instructional video.
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Nora’s academic career is off to a pretty dismal start. She got her first report card from daycare. Imagine the disappointment on her parents’ faces to see that she’s getting an F in Sitting. Her daycare attendant informed us that, for her age, she severely lacks the muscle tone needed to maintain herself in a seated position. She said that she placed Nora in a walker, and Nora pretty much just slumped over. The attendant gave us a book about exercises that we need to be doing with Nora and told us how to practice with her. Needless to say, we were pretty shocked and devastated. But, like good parents, we set her up a strict regimen of regular beatings homework time to practice.
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Last night at eleven o’clock our power went out. I’m unfortunately accustomed to this because our circuit breaker is incredibly weak and about twice a month flips to the off position out of sheer laziness. So I got up to flip it back on, but it was already in the on position. It was at that point that I noticed how dark it was outside the window. After fumbling through the darkness towards the window, I looked out into the blackness. It had been raining with low clouds all day, and there was no light reflecting off the clouds from Colindres, nor from nearby Laredo or Santoña. The entire region was blacked out!
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For my entire life I’ve had to live with a last name that no one pronounces like I do. I’ve lived in four different countries, and practically no one says my name correctly to my ear. There is only one correct way to pronounce “Rasmussen” in American English! Why is it so hard? Because so many Americans don’t understand the pronunciation rules that guide the phonetics of English.
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The brainchild of my blogrollmate, Lance, he and I and three other people he knows are participating in a photoblogging project that we call Obiter picta. From the About page (as a lawyer, he couldn’t resist the Latin play on words):

Obiter dicta are incidental words, things said in passing. Obiter picta is a collaborative photo blog updated Tuesday through Friday. The participants’ contributions are not coordinated in advance. Any consonance or dissonance perceived in the themes, content or composition presented here is coincidental.

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