Erik’s Blog

One of Nora’s new favorite games involves clothes pins. In Spain, most people live in apartments and almost no one has a clothes drier, so everyone dries their clothes by hanging them from their balcony, which is often overlooking an internal courtyard of the building, not the street. As a result, every Spanish house has a bag or basket of clothes pins on their balcony. The game involves her mother placing her on a window ledge to the balcony where we keep our clothes pin basket. Nora proceeds to pull clothes pins out of the basket and throw them on the floor, expecting her mother to pick them up. They have a great time playing this game.
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The old favorite game of Blanket Face continues to be a success. It’s particularly more fun now that Nora knows how to remove the blanket or other cloth item from her face herself. The sheer relief of being able to see and breathe again delights her to no end.

Yes, this seems to have turned into a video blog lately. This is mainly because a certain someone won’t let me leave her alone for more than two seconds in the mornings these days. Oh well. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a 24 frames-per-second video should be plenty, right?
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Every year in the harbor of Colindres, they hold a Carrera de Artefactos Navegables, which translates to “Sailable Artifacts Race”. Basically they race handmade contraptions that float, very often involving plastic barrels normally used in the salting process of the town’s anchovy industry. Rowing is a big sport in northern Spain, dating back hundreds of years when fishermen rowed out to see to hunt whales. This race puts sort of a comical twist on the sport.

We saw the event the first year that we lived here, missed two years, and then went again this year. I’m always blown away by the creativity and detail of the designs, which are only meant to float and impress for about an hour. Prizes are awarded for creativity and originality as well as speed around the course, with various different categories, depending on the number of occupants the craft can hold. Below are some photos I took of the participants in 2009, and a high definition video that should give you an idea of the fun of watching the event.
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Interesting. So #1 was too easy, and #2 proved too ambiguous and difficult. I agree that "grains of some powdery stuff" was about as close as anyone could reasonably get to the answer. Hopefully #3 will strike some balance between too trivial and too impossible.
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It’s time for another close-up identification competition. The answer and winners have been posted on the previous post. The name of the game is to see if you can identify what the picture below is a close-up of. This one’s a little harder.
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Today I’m going to try a little blogging experiment. For a while, I’ve been considering some kind of quiz format where I take a picture of something, crop to just a texture or shape, and have you, my readers, guess what the object might be. Frankly, I’m not sure how fun it will be, but I figured we should give it a shot. If you are in favor of this idea, the best way to show your support is to participate by guessing. If popularity drops to only one or two guesses, then the idea might have to be discontinued. Let the games begin!

I will post the answer and the winner one week after the original WTCU post, with the chance of a possible clue mid-week if no one is close. (more…)