The weather today has been very, very odd. Everyone is using the word huracán for what is in store for us tonight. Nora and I spent much of the afternoon outside in the unseasonably warm temperatures and brisk breeze. We saw several dumpsters that had been tied down to keep them in place. There were a few strange occurrences, such as when it rained from a perfectly blue sky.
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After eleventh hour gourd procurement last year, this year my local grocer friend, Andrés, who regularly visits farmers markets to buy fruit and vegetables, had his eye out for the perfect pumpkin for me to carve. And sure enough, he came through with the perfectly shaped pumpkin. Last night I carved it into a jack-o-lantern.
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This is quite possibly the creepiest blog post I’ve ever posted, at least on a personal level. I’ve always known I would do this, and my regular readers might share in my surprise that it’s taken me so long to do it. Yesterday, in a curiosity-fueled effort to speculate on what Nora might look like as an adult, I morphed my face with my wife’s. Morphing is always creepy, and even more so when it is done with faces that you know very well.
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Recently, as I was adjusting the canopy over Nora’s stroller, an object fell out and onto the ground. I picked it up and gasped! It was quite possibly the most horrible little doll thing I’ve ever seen. My mind reeled as to how my loving wife, who I thought I knew pretty well, could attach such an evil little doll to our child’s pram. Later that night, I confronted her about it.
Her response was, “Oh my god! I’ve never seen that thing in my life! You brought it into this house?!” Reassured by her innocence, I began to ponder how such a thing could have happened to such a well-intentioned family. The only reasonable conclusion is that someone has put a curse on us. A dark, dark curse.
Below I present the doll thing that I found. If you have small children or pets in the room, encourage them to look away.
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Since becoming a member of a Flickr group called Scary Beings Eating Themselves, I’m always on the lookout for such a photographic subject. Well, last Saturday in Burgos, we had a little run-in/altercation with one such scary being. Below I present the photographic evidence.
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The video they can’t stop showing on the Spanish news cycle today, besides the one where Obama thanks a member of the Spanish royal family for being in attendance when she was not (what’s Spanish for faux pas?), is of a restaurant in Jávea, Alicante, where a tornado came by and took the roof off while customers were eating inside. Clearly Spain doesn’t have the kind of tornadoes that the US does, because no one was sucked out and thrown miles away, but it’s pretty darn scary enough as it is.
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Today we had two important firsts in Nora’s life. One good and one bad. Let’s look at them in the order that they occurred.
Nora’s been putting anything and everything she can into her mouth lately. When she grabs your hand or, if you get close enough, your nose, she’s going to close her fingers around it and pull it towards her mouth. Several times I’ve been holding her and thinking about something else and found that she was biting down with her firm gums on my finger…hard! We’ve been monitoring several white teeth just under the surface of her gums for over a month now.
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The other day I took Nora out for a walk. We stopped at a bar with a terrace, and I ordered a glass of wine and opened a book. Nora was content to observe the other patrons. By bad planning, I was situated right next to one of these coin operated amusement vehicles, the kind that the kids get in and the machine moves and plays music when a coin is inserted. That is when the following events took place.
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Last night I woke up because Nora was making some noise. She was in bed with me because she’d been feeling a little ill (or at least acting that way). I calmed her down. Then I realized I had to pee, so I got up, made sure she was securely in the middle of the bed, put the covers over her with her little head sticking out as I have several times before, and went to the bathroom.
Bladder comfortably empty, I returned to the bedroom and… SHE WAS GONE!
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A couple days ago, in the Basque valley town of Mondragón, where my in-laws live, some notices were posted on the entrances to all residential buildings. It read more or less the following:
Over the next two months, we will be going house by house collecting signatures for a petition to the mayor’s office to release prisoners that are either gravely ill or that have already served their time.
Seems like a good cause, doesn’t it? Well…
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