On Saturday afternoon, we took a stroll around the center of Burgos and visited the Burgos Cathedral. To get there, we had to walk a little along the Arlanzón River that runs through the center of Burgos. It was a beautiful day and a wonderful walk. I now invite you to walk along with us with this slightly picture-heavy post.
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My parents and grandmother are leaving home today to come visit us. They will arrive tomorrow evening and meet their granddaughter (and great granddaughter) for the first time. They bought their tickets on March 23, four hours before Marga went into labor. Needless to say, they (and we!) are pretty excited about their trip. Seeing a baby via video conference and actually holding a baby are two completely different things.
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Today is Good Friday. Before you read the rest of this post, I want you to hold the answers to two questions in your head: 1) What day of the week did Jesus die? and 2) What day of the week was his tomb found empty? Got the answers? Good.
Yesterday at lunch, I had more or less the following discussion with my in-laws:
Me: "Mmmm! These are good beans! Is that a bit of a meaty flavor?"
Wife: "No. We’re not having meat today, tomorrow, or the next day."
Me: "Why not?"
Wife: "Because Jesus is dead."
Me: "Jesus has been dead for a long time."
Wife: "Because Jesus is symbolically dead.". . . some bean consumption . . .
Me: "But Jesus isn’t even symbolically dead yet. He symbolically dies tomorrow on Good Friday."
Mom-in-law: "It’s like the saying goes, ‘Christ died on Thursday, was buried on Friday, on Saturday came the glory, and on Sunday he ascended.’" [that's loosely translated]
Me: "No, I’m pretty sure he died on Friday."
Wife: [with a "drop it!" look on her face] "If the saying says it, it’s true for us!"Me: "Okay."
After lunch, I wandered over to the Good Friday wikipedia entry and saw that I had been correct. Christ died on Friday. Score one for me!
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In the Roman Catholic tradition of assigning saints to days of the year, March 19th is the date assigned to Saint Joseph (or San Jose in Spanish). It is also the date that Father’s Day is celebrated in Spain. I think it’s because Joseph was such a good dad that he stuck with his sexless marriage and raised a son that he knew wasn’t even his, just like his father-in-law did.
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Somehow I managed to live in Spain for four years without ever learning the word for magnet. The Spanish word for magnet is imán. After learning this recently, I thought nothing of it besides a chuckle about it sounding like some sort of bionic implant or sex toy from Apple. But then I was listening to a radio broadcast about Islam and I heard the word iman mentioned several times, so I looked it up. Iman (إيمان) is Arabic for “faith”, one of the tenets of the religion of Islam.
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Today is the big commercial gift giving day in Spain. The three Mage Kings paraded around town last night. It’s pretty boring this year, but I suspect it will be a lot more fun to see through a child’s eyes in the coming years. Marga came home yesterday and played the "craving" card to get a roscon de reyes a day early. Since she got the prize last year, she had to pay for it, but it hit me this year, so I’ll have to buy next year. I explained this tradition last year.
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We spent a lot of time in Laredo this past weekend. I vaguely recall Laredo’s Christmas decorations being pretty disappointing in previous years, but this year they’ve done an excellent job. The first two photos are of one single nativity model, but there was a concrete column preventing me from making a continuous panorama. The detail was incredible. There were even goldfish swimming in the river.
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I have submitted several of my own blog posts to Digg over the years. The ones I think are particularly clever (The Solution to Iraq), or funny (McCain-Palin Morph), or useful (Widgetize Anything), or artistic (Desk Traffic), or nerdy (Distance to Horizon), or political (Can Sarah Palin really see Russia from her house?), or satirical (Spain Discovers Mars). Most of those received between one and three diggs. My record was 12.
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Bill Maher was on The Daily Show the other day. He’s a funny guy. He was promoting his new movie, Religulous (“religion” + “ridiculous”) that, as you might suspect, is all about making fun of religion. You can see part of his visit on The Daily Show on his website. He was great, but then he went and said the following.
“I’m not an atheist. I’m not certain, and I don’t think we can know for sure.”
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine. Most people that say they are agnostic are really functional atheists, but they are making an epistemological argument to avoid confrontation and accusations of having faith or dogma.
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My lovely wife walks by this apple tree twice every day on her way to work. I’ve walked by it with her during evening walks as well. It’s frustrating because the apples are so ripe and perfect-looking, but we can’t reach them. She could get her hand through the chain link fence, but the apple could not. Personally, I have no moral qualms against taking fruit from someone else’s property as long as the owner isn’t harvesting it. Stealing prickly pears? Fine. Stealing carrots from Mr. McGregor’s garden? Not so fine.
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