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, [...]

Crowds gasped as they looked skyward. Many ran for their lives, while others couldn’t look away. As the leading anglo-photojournalist in Colindres, I bravely ran for my camera. The glowing orbs hung there in the sky, quivering slightly, as if they were watching us. Then, as quickly as they had appeared, [...]

I had a pretty bizarre dream the other night. I was working for the Obama campaign and they needed a new spokesperson. In a rather random pointing motion, Barack chose me out of a crowd of people. “But, I have no idea how to be a press secretary,” I protested. “No [...]

Whenever we go south to Extremadura, we always bring back liters upon liters of extra virgin olive oil and wine. I don’t actually have any photos of the place where I bought the wine I brought back, but I do have a good anecdote.
We traveled to the nearby town of Esparragosa de la Serena. [...]

In the bathroom where I shower, we have a glass shower stall. After about a week of use, it gets little dots over it and must be cleaned. These are calcium deposits from the water that remain when the droplets dry.
When I was a kid, I always thought it strange that my grandparents [...]

The other day, someone found my blog from google.bg. Rather than think, “Oh, that’s Bulgarian Google. I know someone who is moving to Bulgaria,” the first thought that I had was, “Hey, lowercase ‘bg’ has a rotational ambigram equivalent!” For those of you that are not typeface junkies and haven’t read Angels and [...]

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Google_Suggestions_Should_you’;Google is really funny sometimes, mainly because it provides an unbiased algorithmic mirror of society. While chuckling about people that find my blog by asking google 20-word complete sentences, I was going to run a search, for the sheer irony of it, for “Should I search with complete sentences?” But the [...]

It’s not much, but over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed several visitors coming to my blog, particularly from Germany and Austria, searching for things like “What does ‘a por ellos‘ mean?” and “What does ‘podemos‘ mean?” The answers to those questions are, indeed, here on my blog, here and here respectively. These [...]

On Saturday there was an exhibition of the local Colindres bobbin lace (bolillo) club. We went because one of our salsa dancing friends, Ana, is going to classes and participates in those events. She had an abanico, Spanish hand fan, that she was working on. It looks pretty doggone complicated to my [...]

On Monday, May 12, Marga sprained her ankle. She went to the gym, for the first time in May, paid her entire May subscription fee, and half way through her aerobics class, she sprained her ankle. Somehow, she managed to jump up and land with her right foot on top of her left, [...]