How I spent my Christmas vacation (in no particular order and without New Year's photos)

Amendment

I just found these photos on Oli's computer in a temporary folder where I had put them, meaning to blog them.

Oli's parents came to visit us in November and we took the scenic cable car from Barceloneta beach to Mont Juic.

PS - There was a fire in the city on this day and we got an aerial view of it before walking past it later in the day.

Predictions

Some of our blurry New Year's photos, taken just as the camera battery was dying, offer a glimpse of years to come:


Kevin wins the 2020 elections to become the first president with hair cancer:



Canoodling with dubious environmental and bank lobbyists causes whispers on Capitol Hill.



I can't think of any amusing predictions about this photo, but I welcome yours.

I just wish you'd asked first

I feel Colin’s recent post. The cold tummy feeling is also creeping up in me as we part ways with our Chicago friends again. As I wrote in some of my Christmas cards this year, in the last few years, late November has brought a certain building excitement as I know the time to reunite will soon be upon us. I think that we have moved on to a new stage in our friendships in which we can take comfort in the knowledge that despite distance and diverging interests, our good old friends are out there thinking about us as much as we think about them at happy and sad times, that we can and will all come together from time to time to discuss life’s joys and challenges and to dance, dance as if we were…dancers.

Check out the nice New Year’s photos on Colin’s blog.

Cold tummy feelings aside, I just know they’re going to find a cure for hair cancer in 2008.

Happy New Year. Let’s take it on with moxie.

Who's watching the watcher

I just wanted to clarify that the "Art of the YouTube resonse video" post below was erroneously posted by Oliver under my name. I would almost certainly never write, "Who's watching the watcher?" Almost.

~

kid quotes

Home for the holidays and hanging out with my niece (4) and nephew (6), the following interesting phrases have come up:

While eating ice cream -
Marisa: "Ow, that nut just hurt the special part of my mouth."
Jacob: "Oh yeah. You mean by where the spitmaker is."

After spending 15 minutes outside re-wiring the Christmas lights on his own, crying due to coooold hands -
Jacob: "I had to stick my hands in the snow to touch the power strip."

And the best ever, while riding to school with his mom at 8:30 in the morning -
Jacob: "So Mom, did you know that people were trying to kill Jesus?"

Chomsky would love this stuff.

Settling in?

So perchance we are finally settling in. We made a trip to the Encants outdoor market that's open on the weekends in search of a few items to warm up our emptyish apartment. We found a nice blue wooden chair for Lily there. Later at IKEA, we found a mismatched table and red chair to go with the initial find, a felt mobile of bunnies and sheep, and a rug with roads and castles on it. So, all-in-all, Lil has had a pretty cool learning area added to her now-much-cooler play area. In the street the next night, we found a cool worn blue wooden table which is playing the role of end table for the time being.

The little table and chairs have helped focus Lily's oft bountiful energy such that we can actually get her to sit and talk ABCs and animals for 10 minutes or so at a time. She has also taken a great interest in writing in the last weeks. Grasping her fat crayons like pencils, placing her elbows firmly on the table and hunching over her paper so that her nose is only an inch from it, she spends long periods making wispy strings of pretend cursive. She also reads nonsense stories to us in a garbled Lily language, running her finger over the words on the pages of books or backs of DVD boxes. And finally, she loves listening to nursery rhymes, and I quite enjoy watching her drag the big nursery rhyme book from the coffee table to our bedroom at bedtime.

Lily home video

Poor Elmer

Today Lily was doing really well with her diaper off, running over to the potty a few times during the morning to do pees.

Later I went to make a cup of tea, leaving her playing in the family room. After a minute, she started shouting and crying, so I went to go see what was wrong. I was completely shocked to find Lily had shat on her toy elephant, I think by accident. This however, was not the source of her stress. The shit on her hand was.

It will be a while before I recover from the sight of that turd on poor Elmer the Elephant’s hind wheel, and I don’t know if Elmer will ever be the same.

Art of the YouTube response video

Watch our friend Dave's Art of a Bike Messenger video, filmed on the streets of Chicago:




And our response video of Lily watching his video:



I would like this post to initiate a discussion of the implications of this revolutionary type of response video and leave you wondering: Who's watching the watcher?

Get involved with Skype (Americans!)

Us lonely travellers stranded out here in the entrails of oblivion quite fancy a good old skype conference call, with video if you prefer, on the day of the Giving of Thanks. I know most of you have got a decent internet connection and laptop so why not download the program and enjoy some live video conferencing with Lily, Angela and myself.

My username is 'olibeaks', Angela's is 'AJRuiter' and Rooney's is 'Kevin-Rooney'. Get involved.

Home for the Holidays

Hi. We're here cooking dinner with Kevin Rooney, who, it seems, will be our flatmate for about 9 months. Actually, he's cooking and Oli and I are hanging out near him. Our internet connection comes in strongest in the kitchen, so I'm reading up on all the Chicago blogging I've missed out on in the last months and I sure do miss you guys. Heavy Metal Drummer came up on my playlist earlier (the Seeleys were just here for a few days and brought my computer out from England, so I can finally listen to MY music) and I was all, "Oh, Chicago and being a young and whatnot" (That's not a gloss but is actually what I thought.).

Let it be known that Lily and I will arrive in Chicago on December 14th, and Oli on the 21st. We'll be about until the 8th of January, staying in Tinley Park but planning to make visits to other parts of the Land of Lincoln.

Lily says, "Hi guys."

~

Tibidabo

Those of you who read Angela's January 2005 entry "Tibidabo: The Last Temptation of Chaos" on her old blog (http://valesoyamericana.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_archive.html) may particularly enjoy this video.

Selling up and moving on, with Radiohead

Potty on, Wayne. Potty on, Garth.

And potty on, Lily. We had our first pee on the potty today.

I had tried the whole no diaper in the house thing while we were in the Barceloneta flat, but that just led to Lily holding in poo and pee and doing them slyly on our balcony when I had to pay attention to cooking dinner. So I figured she needed a little more time to be comfortable and would open up (haha) to the potty thing with time.

In our local Oriental Bazaar shop Lily fell in love with a little plastic potty (in photo), so we bought it right away. At home, she would sit on it from time to time, then jump up after about a second to see if anything had materialized. Now that we are more settled and she likes her potty, I set yesterday as the day to give real potty training another go.

Yesterday I once again realized that long periods of diaperlessness wouldn’t work as she holds it ‘til I look away. But short periods when it’s quite certain she’ll have to go (after waking up in the morning, after nap, when making grunting poo noises) do work. So now at these times we pull the potty into the family room (the bathroom is next to our flatmates’ room and they don’t want to hear me talking about pee-pee and poo-poo for ten minutes at a time) and play with other things until Lily has to go.

This morning was the first go with the new method, and what do you know, within two minutes she sat and peed. I was so surprised when she stood up and there was actually pee in the potty that I spilled my tea everywhere, including on me. I was able to snap a quick shot, seen here. My tea in the background is actually all over the table and floor, but you can’t really tell. Let’s see if we can get a same-day repeat but all the same, well done Lily!

Ye fotos

At the beach with Timo
The most Euro couple ever in the background
Practicing parkour
Dwarfed by sculpture
Riding mom while she gets a 7euro beach massage
A man we sat and listened to for an hour on Montjuic
Listenin' to tunes and eatin' snacks

Our home in blurry photos

The main living and working spaces and our nice view.
Side note: Lily now says "nice," but only to mean "niiiice," not that something or someone is kind.

Big Ol' Blog

‘Ello, ‘Ello. From the land of Joan Miró, Antoní Gaudí, Manu Chao and that lady who said she was a 9/11 survivor but wasn’t, we greet thee.

Please share in a collective moment of thanks as we once again have the internet, in the form of a strong free wireless signal pulsing through two rooms of our home. Now we can call people via Skype (to land lines even!), read the news, listen to NPR and BBC radio, and just generally communicate with the world beyond that which lies within our skulls.

We’ve actually had this internet connection for two weeks now, the length of time we’ve been in our new place….it just took me that long to find time to write anything.

So below is a big ol’ blog regarding logistical challenges we have faced in the last month. I have a lot of further bloggin’ to do on topics such as:
- The quarter-life crisis I am going through that makes me cry (both happy and sad tears alike) about once a day when I a) think about my childhood or b) wonder what the hell we’re going to do with our lives
- Leeann and Violet, a British mum and her daughter who is exactly Lily’s age, who we met at the park and now hang out with. They’re fun.
- Lily’s development. She’s so cool!
- How I went through (and probably will continue to go through) unexpected culture shock and hated Barcelona for a while there and really wanted to tell Catalan people to stop telling me how to do things and looking at me like I was a freak
- Me being an at-home mom now and doing all the things that Oli’s mum and my mom do…and wanting to perhaps not be working at all anymore

So, the amazing flat I wrote about weeks ago didn’t pan out because the little old man who owns it was afraid of foreigners as he went through a long court battle with the last tenants, and if the same were to happen with us, the court battle would take twice as long.

While all the paperwork was pending on that place (before we were told no), I found us a short-term rental for three weeks in a duplex in Barceloneta, the zone along the beach, so that Oli and Lily could come out to Barcelona in time for Oli to begin work. This duplex had been rented by a girl from Toronto and a guy from NY. The girl would be in Toronto for a few weeks and the guy wasn’t finished with his previous place, so they both wanted to sublet for the month of October. The place was just finishing being rehabbed. When I saw it, it was still under construction, but the girl told me the agency had guaranteed it would be complete by Oct 1, and we would move in on Oct 2 or 3. Being Spain, I highly doubted it would be ready on the 1st, especially when the girl added the word “guaranteed,” but I was desperate for a short-term rental that wouldn’t cost me my first born and I figured what wasn’t complete in the flat would be finished soon. Boy, was I surprised when on the 3rd it looked hardly complete and had no furniture.

Acually, the IKEA bed and wardrobe in our room had been assembled. By our second day in the place, a table and credenza had been pieced together in the kitchen, and IKEA dishes added. The kitchen chairs were to arrive within a week, but never did materialize in all the time we were there, so we always sat on a manky mattress on the floor that we stole from the IKEA fold-out couch on the second floor of the duplex. We learned that furniture is really important, especially when you have a child you’re trying to feed. Thank God we had Lily’s little booster seat with slide-on tray.

In addition to the lack of furniture, there were men from Mexico who came at 8am each morning for a week to finish the work, but all they finished was painting the staircase leading up to the flat, using a very nice rag-roll effect. While they were doing that, we were noticing that none of the doors that opened to the outside (the balcony doors and main entrance from the building stairwell) closed completely, that the washing machine leaked water across the kitchen during the spin cycle (we became accustomed to mopping the floor being part of the laundry-doing process), the air conditioner hadn’t been installed (large pipes protruding from the ceiling were the first clue), and that the hot water only worked for about 5 minutes (no side note needed).

On top of these odds and ends within the flat, it seems I had failed to notice on my preliminary visit that two buildings on that small street were under construction, meaning that at 8am each day, hammering began, and that at 2:30, immediately after Lily would go down for her nap, men would begin hoisting a bucket up on a pulley in the building next door yielding a horrible repetitive squealing noise. After a week of this, construction of some sort began in the flat below ours, producing hammering each day at exactly 2:35pm. In our last week in the place, scaffolding was erected in front of a third building on our street, and further work began there. Between this nearby construction and that which had taken place within our duplex, the grooves in the modern gray clay tiles of our flat were perpetually filled with a dust that we could not eliminate with all the sweeping and mopping in the world. Thus, our feet were perpetually filthy and the floor perpetually covered in dirty shmeers, particularly after running the washing machine.

Yet, when we moved, we knew we would miss Barceloneta. It has lovely old buildings and a great big market for buying fresh food. When you’re in your apartment, sure, you can hear everything happening in the street and see other families making dinner in their places just across the way, but it was kind of nice to always have signs of life around. Heck, all Oli had to do to get the current football score when we had no TV was hang his head out the window and ask the boy Alex who lived across the street and up two floors. In the road we quickly made friends with our favorite old ladies who would call up , “Mi vida, mi vida! Cántame algo!” to Lily when she would sing on our balcony. And, we were five minutes from the Mediterranean. Ah.

Our compatriot in all that duplex and Barceloneta had to throw at us was Georgia, a Romanian girl doing a master’s in English studies here in Barcelona. She, too, was subletting while looking for a longer term apartment for her and her boyfriend Mirce who would come out to join her at the end of Oct (Mirce is a successful events/concerts organizer whose last thing to organize before coming out to Barcelona was a Beyoncé concert sponsored by Coca-Cola. He just took Georgia to London for the week to meet up with some agents, see the Cinematic Orchestra, see Sigur Ros play live before seeing their documentary, then head out to the VIP party to meet the band.). She, too, suffered in that duplex, had little time to look for a new place, and was well loved by Lily, so when the agency we were working with showed us a flat we liked enough to take with time running out on us and all, we invited her and Mirce to come rent our third bedroom.

So, now here we are in a modern flat on the 11th floor, the top floor, of a giant building, with a balcony looking out to the sea. We’re very near to where Oli and I used to live, but more centrally located in this barrio/zone. It’s a very family-friendly area, but most of the city is as the city planning here is excellent; that’s Catalans for you (except when it comes to immigration; see below). You’re basically never far from a library, park, market, or civic center and each zone of the city has guides available that tell you all the activities and resources the city and other private organizations have available for residents to utilize in that area. Right behind our building is the train station that takes one down to the cities south of Barcelona, which have great beaches. On the other side of our building is a giant park with a lake filled with ducks and fish, a grassy tree-covered area, sporty area, and playpark complete with coffee bar for the moms. While we weren’t expecting to live in a modern-ish apartment, we’re getting happier and happier with it and are really enjoying the area we live in.

On the other hand, we’ve noticed a few things don’t work in out flat. The washing machine floods the back utility balcony it is on, and water spills on to the utility balconies of the flats below. I didn’t know this and the first and only time I used the machine, the result was furious ringing of my doorbell by two separate neighbors while Lily was napping and I was desperately trying to mop up the water faster than it could escape onto others’ balconies below. I always think of such clever things to say to rude Spanish people ten minutes too late. In English I have that margin down to five minutes. Anyway, other problems include: two of the burners/hobs of the stove don’t work, the bidet doesn’t work (we don’t care), and if you turn on one of the heat/aircon units, the electricity in the apartment goes out. The toilet also began to leak at the base today……

So I emailed the agency about all this and a week later, they called me (there was a two-day holiday in there, so in reality, it only was a four-day delay). Basically, the typical Spanish repair process has begun and in about six months, we might have one or two things repaired. Our friend Timo has been trying to get a leak in his bathroom repaired for nine months. Once every three months the lampista that works for his flat’s managing agency will come out, peak through the little hole he made in a tile and grumble about not being able to figure out the problem without a better view. Timo once suggested the lampista take off a few tiles, but he said that was ridiculous because then he’d have to put them back up. On the last visit the lampista did figure out what the problem was. So maybe on the next visit he’ll fix it?

In addition to flat trials, I’m still trying to sort out my immigration status. I went at 7am to wait in line with the other immigrants last week and when the doors opened at 9, I immediately got to go see someone….who instantly told me my American marriage certificate wouldn’t do, that they needed something from a British authority recognizing our marital union. The woman suggested I take my American marriage certificate to the British consulate and get a letter written saying we were married. This was good enough she said. Hm, this letter written by Jemma Smith of Pikey-ville, UK would do, but not my stamped and water-marked marriage certificate…. I repeat, hm. Having been througb Oli’s immigration process in the US, I knew this was crap and that consulates don’t do such things, but I called the British consulate just to check. I was right, so now I have to start over and call the Catalunya immigrant hotline to find out what exactly they want from me. Mind you, none of this is written anywhere and no one ever knows what to expect when they go to any public office here. You kind of start at the office where you pick up the application, then just ask people who may or may not know where you go to process the application and present documents, that you may or may not know you need. Personally, I just think the immigration lady I spoke to that day was on her period.

~

the mighty boosh

Moved into our new flat. Happy days.
It's funny, but after 4 weeks in Spain I find myself needing to learn some set phrases for situations that frequently occur. You might imagine this to be an exchange at the market, introductions to new people etc. You would be wrong. I need witty invective to dress down seriously rude Catalan people who don't wait for you to exit the underground train before barging their way on (even when you have a stroller/pram), who try and run you over in the street (happened today) and who lack every common courtesy familiar to those of us from the civilised world.

In other news, we played some ronders on the beach today (pre-cursor and girl-like version of baseball) with some colleagues from our school. We're living with some delightful Romanians who organise festivals and beyonce concerts when not transporting Ikea furniture for us. Got a hair cut the other day. Thought it was good 'cause he gave me a face massage, but when I got home I realised he'd given me a Spanish. This is long at the back of the neck and on top, but short at the sides. Disgusting. I'd rather a Wicker Park side parting and tight jeans combo any day.

Other than that, Barcelona is fuckin' A and I'm glad to be back. Feels very much like home.

I left my camera in the rain so bought a new one and took some photos in B&W. This is them:

Not captured by gypsies

In response to emails asking after us, know that we are alive.
We've just been busy and currently living in conditions lacking regular access to internet and phone.

As a quick update:
The dream flat didn't work out. The owner is old and afraid of foreign renters due to a whole court battle incident he had with the last tenants.

The same agency showed us another place in the same area and although it is a newer apartment lacking the old charm, it has all the appliances and space we need, and has a spectacular 11th floor view to the sea. Nice.

Kevin Rooney will likely be living with us for a bit while he settles into BCN. He's in a hostel now and traveling for a couple weeks as of this weekend, but will return thereafter to make a life for himself here. Betsy and Casey were just here passing through and we had a nice day at Park Guell. Michael McAndrew also gave us a random phone call last Saturday at 8am noting that he was in BCN and wondering if we wanted to hang out. So really, even though we're living in a flat that is under construction (story for later), we've had a lot of distraction and found temporarily living 5min from the sea a happy repayment for the crappy home conditions.

Oli works A LOT. Things will get easier once we have internet and phone, and my computer comes over form England.

My classes are good. I teach 14-year olds and adult beginners. I love my beginners and forgot how easy it is to teach the zero level because every class they have such a high learning curve and are not yet disillusioned. Teens are teens.

I actually must go now and plan a lesson based on High School Musical. My students have demanded a lesson that includes some of its songs.

Oh! Lily is such a big kid -
She wasn't eating vegetables and fruit, just bread and meat, for a while there. I realized if I offered her something, she would always say no, but if it was mine, she wanted it. So now I just prepare food in front of her or with her and wait for her to ask about it. It has worked and today she had cucumbers, carrots and green beans at lunch. Laura Hartrich will understand the immense implications here and how good I feel right now.

She speaks loads and we have little conversations. She even says "sí" or nods her head, a big improvement over weeks of "no" being the response to everything. Everything. She speaks more Spanish now, not just caca, but also pan and bús. Every day when we go in a panadería, we get something free because of how cute she is asking for pan over and over.

OK, more soon. High School Musical calls.