50's housewife, more fish and storm chasing

Some days Lily just wants to wear a dress. She'll come home from school, happen upon a dress in a laundry pile or in a cupboard and ask me to put it on her. Then it gets worn until bedtime, when we invariably pass through a tense, albeit brief, moment of strife when the dress must come off. On her last dress donning occasion, she also rediscovered the cooking gear she got for Christmas. The result was June Cleaver.


Having left arrangements to the last moment, Matt ended up kindly passing Mr Fish onto our friend Claire for safekeeping while we were away in the UK for the holidays. Upon our return to BCN, we took about a week and a half to finally go pick him up. Claire had offered to keep him if we didn't want a fish anymore, but in the end, we thought Lily would miss him. We then bought two more fish and a bigger aquarium. Lily cannot be happier. She hugs the tank and sighs, "I loooove my fish sooo much."



The lighter orange fish is the original Mr Fish, the new orange one has been named Kankro, and the black one is Emro. These last two are from a cache of weird names Lily uses lately.

We've been in the international news the last couple days. Or rather, the deadly hurricane-force winds ripping through southern France and northern Spain have been. Howling wind has sounded on and off for for days. It raged all night Friday and Saturday morning we awoke to a wounded city.

Before Oli and Lily arose, I went out to get pastries and fruit. Our courtyard was a sandstorm, I could just barely move forward into the wind, motos were strewn about and a massive quantity of garbage and recycling dumpsters was piled up at the end of the road. Elderly couples clutched one another and some turned back, abandoning their plans. On my way home, with the wind pushing at my back, I was actually blown past our gate and had to clutch onto the garden wall to drag myself back to the entrance.

Things calmed down later and we went for a walk to assess the damage.




Later Matt went with us to the center and we walked past Port Vell to see how downtown and the beach had fared.