Last Sunday evening brought an extremely unique blogging experience. I made eye contact with someone on my blogroll and neither of us realized it until a minute after it happened and we had already passed each other.
This blog has already manifested itself in actual face-to-face interaction several times. There was the guy from [...]

Marga’s cousin, Andoni, got married on September 6, 2008. It was interesting to watch because it was so similar to our own wedding. The bride is from France, so there were a bunch of French people attending that didn’t speak Spanish. The church and restaurant were both places that Marga and I [...]

Most days, I get to watch a few minutes of my favorite Basque celebrity television chef, Karlos Arguiñano. Karlos has a daily television program where he cooks a recipe and tells jokes. He’s the kind of person that is so funny that you’re laughing before he even gets to the punchline. Recently, [...]

On Tuesday of this past week, we went to a free concert on Laredo’s beach. The main act was El Arrebato. The name of the band means ecstasy or rapture. Indeed.
The opening act was a band called Mario San Miguel. The lead singer was quite entertaining, making jokes, etc. They [...]

Ever since learning about their existence, I have been looking to spot some anticrepuscular rays. Every sunset and sunrise I’ve seen in the last few years, I have looked to the opposite horizon, but not until this month have I witnessed the phenomenon first hand.
Anticrepuscular rays are visible sun rays that converge on the [...]

To finally wrap up my coverage of this year’s trip to Extremadura, I’m including some photos from an evening walk we took on the last day. There’s a rural park that we walk to sometimes.
Warning: This post contains broken glass, lambs, and wood carving.

2008 was my sixth year going to Extremadura in August. One tradition that happens every year down there is picking higos chumbos (prickly pears). I used to think they were called higos chungos, which would mean “terrible figs” (chumbo doesn’t mean anything outside of American Spanish colloquialisms). According to Wikipedia, this particular [...]

Several days of my summer vacation in Extremadura were spent tackling the huge mess that was my wife’s grandfather’s attic: a lifetime of “this could be useful later!” items and the dust they have collected over the years. I learned the trick of splashing some water on the floor before sweeping to avoid being [...]

During my recent trip to Extremadura, I took walks in the evening right around the 9:30ish sunset almost every day. For most of these walks, my eyes were glued to the absolutely stunning skies. Coming from the north of Spain, visiting relatively flat, relatively treeless, relatively small housing in Extremadura reminds me [...]

During the first few days of my summer vacation, I spent some sleepless nights. To take my mind off my troubles, I spent quite a bit of time outside in the corral (an open area behind the house) gazing up at the cloudless night sky.
The following photo is a one-hour exposure looking towards Polaris [...]