Erik’s Blog

Previously on The Activity Mat Chronicles…

You are about to witness what Nora does all day between the eating and the pooping. She’s always been a fan of the supine position, preferring it to any inclined sitting position. And with her recent interest in physical objects, both looking at them and, to a somewhat lesser extent, manipulate them, she’s been enjoying the stimulus provided by her activity mat. She’s also a big fan of pulling her dress up to her mouth and sucking on it. Her dresses spend most of the day soaking wet from slobber. We joke that we should buy her cheap dresses and really elegant underwear, because it’s the underwear that’s most visible.
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A friend of my parents gave us a "clay keepsake" gift. I had never heard of such a thing, but the value was immediately obvious to someone who has photographed his infant daughter’s body with a quarter for scale. The idea is that you flatten out some "clay" (really some kind of space-age polymer), press your kid’s hands into it, place it in the oven (the clay, not the kid), and what you get is a keepsake that will let you remember the size of your child’s hands at the time of the molding. Including the 15 minutes in the oven, the box announced that the whole process "takes only 20 minutes from start to finish!" Yeah, right…
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This video has been sitting on my computer for a month now, and I finally got around to uploading it. No doubt we all look similarly twitchy and ridiculous when we speed up video of us falling asleep, but I think Nora looks particularly so. It’s not a great video, but I figured I’d share it anyway. It’s funny to watch her belly go up and down in the times when she’s not thrashing around.
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Ever since I knew I would be a father, and even before we bought a stroller, I’ve wanted to make a video like this one. I’m really quite enamored with my adopted town here in Spain. It’s a wonderful size, it’s got all the amenities you could need (stores, bars, restaurants, etc.) and has some picturesque vistas. After living here for four years, we have walked down every street, and several dozen of the 8000ish residents greet us as we walk around town. There’s no doubt that, should we ever move, I will miss this place. So I’ve really made this video for me to remember Colindres by in the future, but it also serves to show my curious readers the kind of atmosphere we have here.
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Marga’s coworkers gave us an "activity mat" as a present when Nora was born. It’s one of these things where you put the baby on the floor and toys dangle above her and she spends hours and hours getting visual, tactile, and aural stimulation. At the moment, however, Nora’s brain hasn’t formed the neural connection between her body and the outside world stimulating her nerves. I just don’t think she understands that she is an object in the 3D world she is perceiving. Like a guy with a virtual reality helmet on who forgot or doesn’t know to put on the gloves to interact with the virtual environment, Nora spends most of her time gazing in wonder at the world around her. All of her behaviors that seem like she’s grabbing for something or pushing something away, I think, are still instinctual reflexes. The only "activity" Nora partakes in involves either the beginning, middle, or end of her digestive tract. Thus, the activity mat remains a future activity. Yesterday, however, she clearly expressed an interest in lying on a flat surface so she could stretch her long legs and arms, so we pulled out the activity mat, sans dangly bits, and plopped her down on it. For almost an hour, she was delighted to lie there and kick at the air.
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The first time I heard the phrase "IKEA nesting instinct" was in Edward Norton’s narration of Fight Club. I’d never heard of IKEA, despite living in Scandinavia at the time. When we bought our house in England, almost all the new furniture we bought was from IKEA. Our first load of new flat pack furniture required the use of a rental van. We went to IKEA once or twice when we first moved to Spain, and we haven’t gone back or made any domestic layout changes for years.

So this time I saw IKEA with somewhat fresh eyes. What amazed me the first time, and amazed me again this time, is the sheer efficiency of the whole store. The entire retail is as well designed and consumer-driven as their furniture. Presumably they’ve made some iterative modifications to The IKEA Process over the lifespan of the company, because they’ve really perfected the process of maximizing sales of cheap, not-at-all-ugly furniture in bulk. I’m very impressed. (more…)

This is what passes for snow down here at sea level in Northern Spain. It did actually stick to the hillside you can see through the window for almost 24 hours.
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Just like any of you men out there would do if you really loved your wives, as a birthday present for my wife yesterday, I aligned the moon and the planets. You know, just to show her I care.
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It’s that time of year again, as the hour hand approaches the six, my computer screen is showered with sunshine, forcing me to lower the shutters. During the warmer months, there is a building blocking the sun from entering my office, but the analemma of the sun has moved it far enough south at sunset that its rays invade my workspace. Yesterday, I had a premonition that it might be a good idea to set up my camera pointing west. I was right.
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A couple days ago, I heard a low rumble in the distance. When I heard it a second time, I knew what it was, so I rushed to the balcony to retrieve the clothes from the clothes line (yes, that’s how we dry our clothes in Spain). The sky was a turbulent dark mass of churning water vapor. Electrical storms are fairly rare here, compared to where I grew up, so I jumped at the opportunity to attempt some lightning photography. I ran to fetch the tripod, camera, and timer, and carried them all upstairs. The problem was that the storm was coming from the south, and the only windows I had available were east and west. I chose east, and pointed the camera to the southeast, hoping that the storm would pass on that side of the house. I set the camera for automatic shutter speed and to take photographs every five seconds. And I waited…
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