Erik’s Blog

It’s been over a week since I’ve seen my daughter, and I miss her a lot. Her grandparents will be bringing her back on Sunday. If words from the front line are to be beleived, Nora is being extremely well behaved, is being polite to strangers, and even offering up her cheek to be kissed by total strangers (giving kisses is reserved for loved ones). Perhaps this kiss reception was learned with her “friend” Carla.

Carla is the daughter of one of Marga’s best friends from Extremadura. Nora and Carla first “met” last June in Madrid. Even though Carla was born 25 days after Nora, she is waaaay more advanced than Nora by just about every available metric. She walks freely, speaks several words, follows instructions, and gives people kisses…man, does she give some kisses! Carla’s parents suggest that it might be from spending 7 hours in daycare every day (Nora spends 3) with older kids that challenges her to excel. Nora won’t be where Carla is now for another four months.
(more…)

I am unable to watch this video without laughing. It’s my favorite video I recorded last weekend. It demonstrates both how Nora does a good job of commanding her mother to do her bidding and just now irritated she gets when her great-grandfather does or says anything. I declined to subtitle it because the conversation is so mundane. At one point, she does call him something that sounded to all the Spanish ears like “malo” (bad).
(more…)

Last Friday, August 6, my wife and I headed down to Extremadura to see our daughter, Nora, who had been down there the entire previous week with her grandparents and great-grandfather. It was a little disappointing not to be able to present her to our friends down there, as most of them had already seen her earlier in the week. She clearly recognized us (whew!), but was pretty unenthusiastic about it. We were immediately merged into her ordered hierarchy of people she likes to be with:

1. Mommy (Marga)
2. Abuelo (her grandfather, Juan)
3. Abuela (her grandmother, Marce)
4. Daddy (Erik)
5. …everybody else…
6. Bisabuelo (her great-grandfather, Ramón)

She spends a good portion of her time in her great-grandfather’s house prohibiting him from touching things. If he puts his hand on a chair or table or toy or glass, even if the object is across the room from her, she will race over (still holding someone’s hand) shouting, “No no no no no!!” and remove his hand from the object in his home that he had the nerve to touch. It’s actually pretty cute, and I think she understands that it’s a bit of a game. He certainly does.
(more…)

Here are a few photos from my summer vacation in Extremadura that fell through the cracks. As the title implies they are mainly of grass and pigs.
(more…)

During our evening walks in the Extremadura summer heat, I enjoyed taking my camera along and capturing the beauty of the sunsets across the huge horizon-to-horizon sky. Here are a few pictures that didn’t make the cut for my previous HDR post.

One of the cool thing about taking an entire fortnight of vacation and spending much of it outside in the evenings for an astronomy enthusiast is that you get to see one complete half of the moon cycle, from new moon to full moon.
(more…)

The point of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging is to, via post-processing, more accurately capture the wide range of colors and tones that the human eye sees as it saccades around the scene. Current camera photon sensing technology is just not as good as the human eye at capturing a wide range of light levels. The typical procedure involves taking three or more photographs of the same subject, with minimal camera movement, at various exposure levels, e.g. one where the shadows are underexposed, one where the highlights are overexposed, and another middle range. Then, using a computer program, the images are aligned and the detail from the shadows in one exposure is combined with the details of the highlights of another exposure, thus giving you detail across a wide range of light levels.
(more…)

On the penultimate night of our summer vacation in Extremadura, we went, at my insistence, to a local restaraunt that we call El Cruce because it’s at a crossroads, but that is really called Hotel Trajano. The food was excellent, as always, but so was the company. My camera got passed around the table, and my sister-in-law, Belén, took several portraits of the attendees. She’s a good portrait photographer.
(more…)

The following is a document written by my father, Paul Rasmussen, about his recent trip to visit us while we were vacationing in Extremadura, Spain.

On one of the trips that Betsy and I had taken to visit our son, he told us that we would have to experience vacationing in Extremadura in order for us to really understand his life in Spain, so in December we traded all of our airline miles for two tickets to Madrid in August of 2009. After spending Wednesday night, August 5th, in Madrid, we grabbed a taxi to the bus station that serves the southern part of the country, and took a four hour bus ride to Don Benito. We arrived at 8:35 pm, and were promptly met by Erik and Marga, Marga’s parents Juan and Marce, and Nora, our four and a half months old granddaughter. I was surprised that they had all made the 45-minute trip from their home in Higuera de la Serena, but I really shouldn’t have been. To Spaniards, family is very important, and we were family.
(more…)

The part of Spain we go to in the summer is very, very dry. In the summer, it can go for months at a time with zero precipitation. 2009 was my seventh year going there, and I think I’d seen it rain twice, never for more than an hour, in previous years. One day this year, August 13, it rained all morning long, bringing the temperature from 28° down to 22° for a few hours. By lunchtime, however, the ground was dry and the temperature was back up to its regular 33° or so.
(more…)

We made it back today from our annual pilgrimage to my wife’s family’s ancestral home in southern Extremadura. This was an extra special year, not only because it was the first time we were there with a baby in the family, but because my parents got to visit and experience the small town life of Extremadura first hand rather than just reading about it on my blog. Having Nora with us meant not taking many touristic day trips as we have in previous years, so we spent most of our time walking around town wearing a path in the cement from bar to bar. Since my energies were focused more on translating and hosting my parents, I didn’t take quite as many photos as previous years, but my parents did bring over a new HD video camera that I purchased just before their travel, so I have some good video to share…if I can only figure out how to clear enough disk space to properly edit it.
(more…)