Buying text books, the kids and internet music. A day in the life blahblahblah

Into a neighbouring town, to get school books for the girls. Very limited success and a grumpy temperament. The list came sometime near Christmas...and I didn't go until today, the first full business day after New Years. What with being away and all, the husband didn't even think to go. Well, they have to order them, and they won't be ready until next week sometime....the school cannot be too uptight as this IS Spain, and this is normal. I am not at all bothered about this, and neither are the kids.

I may not bother buying the English language texts for the girls, indeed I am a little confused that they are going to be in the English classes at all, I was under the impression that they would be doing extra Catalan lessons at that time. They don't appear to be doing Spanish lessons at all, so I am a little confused. Why would they be taking English lessons from a non-native speaker, and not taking Spanish? I mean really. I am busily learning Catalan, but on a global level, Spanish is a far more useful language that Catalan, and I intend to start to study it pretty damn soon. If we can get the cash together I will try and take lessons while the kids are at school.

We will have to talk to the school about this.

The only book I managed to buy, I thought was a Catalan dictionary. Turns out it is a Catalan - English dictionary designed for Catalan speakers learning English. Great! I have managed to spend a little of our scarce cash on a book describing a language we already know in a language we cannot understand. Nice shootin' TEX

Might as well go back to bed. Shaping up to be one of those days where I am bad-tempered, and correspondingly nothing goes right. Stems from me I believe not the world. That doesn't seem to help though.

....later. Life improved, nothing like lunch and three or four cups of tea to change a person's outlook on life. Went off the the medical center to start the process to get health cards. Nationalized health care here. There are as many forms to fill out as you might imagine. To quote the two year old nephew, "yucky yucky yucky."

The younger daughter loves to play soccer, well, to kick a soccer ball around so went off to do that. Like a fall day here, sunny, just needed a warm shirt. Very nice. There is a great park nearby, it has a kids area with carved wooden animals for the kids to ride on, like those springy horses, but rough carved out of wood. Very cool. Never got the nephew's over there while they were here. That's OK, they'll be back.

Pandora...asked a question and got no answers, so here's what I found out when I signed up. It is a music sight, you sign up and can create up to 100 "radio stations" these are essentially random play of tracks that relate to music and musicians that you have selected. For instance we created a crooners station with Sinatra, Torme, Dean Martin, Dinah Washington.... and we get some from them, but also other performers that are in the same genre. You can get rid of individual performances and encourage others. So while you don't have any control over the individual songs, you can program the station to the kinds of music you like to listen too. That said, there appears to be no classical. It had never heard of Mozart. Nor does there seem to be much variety in the style of music beyond fairly mainstream. I'm having trouble getting the Cajun/zydeco station set up. It keeps getting confused. Maybe, once again, I am a weird nerd in my tastes, either that or I am just to old and it is aimed younger. Since we have no stereo, and essentially haven't had one for 4 years, and only have about 10 cd's (the rest are stored in the basement of our house, with everything that isn't stored on the boat....) this is a nice chance to hear some music, it is also a good way to find artists you may not know who play the kind of music you might like at least some of the time. I may not have much luck finding African and Caribbean drumming music though. Of course you can listen while you do something else, it's a seperate window.

OK, go here to discover that the Catalan's are not the only ones with some unusual-to-my-eyes traditions.