It was smashing!

I feel almost British when I say that!


I was off at a wedding this weekend, I had to fly out for it, and it was MARVELOUS!!!

Below you can see the ring bearer, who was an absolute delight, though a little freaked out and left early.

It was all a wedding should be, lots of guests, a beautiful ceremony, unbelievably fantastic food,

wonderful to see some of my extended family, everyone had loads of fun....it was great....

It was an absolute delight all the way round, chatting, walking the dog, buying books, visiting, eating wonderful food, from the roast dinner on the first night which was amazing, to the fry-up breakfast on the morning of the wedding, to the wedding food itself, which was sublime, to the hot cup of tea I was woken up to this morning....oh my goodness, that was one of the best cups of tea I'd ever had....

Mmmmmmmm,

There were also some outstandingly delicious cupcakes make by my Aunt, but I was so excited by those that I didn't get a pic...and this was the second round of cheese, I must have been so excited by the first that the picture is all blurred!

My family, I might add, are universally interesting and funny and it was so great to see them again....and frankly to get to know some of them much better.

I came back DRIPPING with books, I must have bought more than 20, and as I went off with only a fairly full normal school size knapsack, it was quite a trick getting them all home, along with the two pairs of tights, three pairs of stockings and five pairs of socks I also picked up.   You see, the airline would only allow ONE bag per person including handbags....you can tuck a book into a lot of odd places if you have to.  For instance, with a good cuff, they will stay inside a coat sleeve....makes you look a mite oddly muscled, but it all worked out!

Wonderful wonderful weekend, and a big fat THANK YOU too all my family who made it so great.

Fabulous to see you all again!

nice to be back with my family in Spain too....and the weathers just a wee bit better as well.

Hi ho, Hi ho, it's off away I go......

Away for the weekend....

Hope you have a great one, I'm gonna try...

Cheers

O

Mac! HELP!!!!

HELP!!!

Mac users....I cannot believe that TextEdit in Mac is the only word processor...the thing SUCKS!!!

How do you make a document in Mac????

I am going back to the old PC to work because this is so completely unacceptable.

There must be another way.

Melodrama

Two minor new bites before the post begins...

1.  I gave a 2 hour professional development lecture in CATALAN!!! Woot on ME!

2.  The Architect seems to be developing a sixth sense about how long he can leave me stewing before news of the next stages reaches me.  Phoned just before I started writing the e-mail....clever man!

Ok, off we go,

I am not a big fan of that whole Celine Dion/Chere big-voice/bid-drama style of music.

Some of my neighbours are.  Indeed a lot of the Catalans and Spanish are overall.

*yech*

My personal theory is that it comes from the flamenco tradition.  All that wailing and emoting gets you used to melodrama.

We were in a bar yesterday and a video came on, and it was a - what do you call it, not a duet, but, well.....let's call it a fusion.  It was a flamenco singer and a black American gospel group singing together.

While the idea of flamenco/gospel takes a moment to get used to, there is common ground there where they can work.  The biggest difference for me is the fundamental pessimism and agony of flamenco vs. the basically upbeat nature of much of the gospel repetoire.  I am going to get roasted for that statement, because like most generalisations there is a lot in it that is not accurate, but gospel music seems to me anyway, to aim at being uplifting, while flamenco is wailing about the horrid.

It did work though.  I wish I had gotten the group's name so I could link to it on youtube for you.  It was pretty fantastic, in an odd way.

I do wish the kid downstairs would switch off the Cher though.

Home entertainment

Oooh, I just discovered a great new game.

I had turned out eldest's light, and she was lying peacefully in bed when it occurred to me.

What exactly would happen if I were to open the door to her dark and cozy bedroom and lob in a doggy treat...of course I would have alerted Chuck to said treat before the big toss so he was poised, no, eager for action.

Can I just assure you that it was very entertaining.


So entertaining that I shall be waking her up this way in the morning.

Heh heh heh.

Tibi DAAA bo

I have the worst time pronouncing that word correctly.  Tibidabo (which is fun to say till you realise you can't figure out how to say it right) is a theme park in BCN.  If you saw Maria Christina Barcelona, a bit of the film was shot there.

We have never gone, and today just seemed to be the day!

If you're from TO you'll get this.  It is Center Island rather than Canada's Wonderland.

Lovely setting - the views are amazing, lower key, less expensive and more kid friendly.

We cheaped out and didn't go for the 25 Euro ticket that gave us access to a lot of rides the kids would never go on - except maybe the roller coaster that looked great, and even sturdy!

SO...

Here's some of what we did!

The view of the city from the cafe at the top which was expensive-ish and mediocre, weirdly didn't serve coffee.  However the sunshine and the view more than made up for any deficiencies.

They had a double decker carousel.  Never seen that before.  Weirdly, this one didn't have music !?!?!?  Still very very lovely.

They have the coolest ride!  It is a model of the 1923 plane that first flew from Madrid to BCN (or vice versa).  You get to ride in it!  It's LOVELY inside and a lot of fun!

Here's the secret...it is hung on the end of a permanent crane and goes round and round in circles pulled by it's own prop!

The roller coaster we didn't ride on but we watched it while we were waiting.  There was another ride...a crane, essentially, with a long swinging arm.  They'd load four idiots people into a basket at the outer end of it, raise it up above the horizontal and let it go!  I would pee myself. Sad to say, but there it is.  No thank you!  The roller coaster though?  I could go there.

They had a museum of carnival robots (?) what are these things called.  You know, you put in some money, they move around and something happens.....this lady tells your fortune.

Hollywood would tell me that I should find her creepy, though I honestly didn't.  These two displays below were creepier.

Yeah, you're right, that's a hanging.  The floor drops out from under him and he disappears.  Good and dead.  The one below?  The French guillotine.  The head actually drops off into the bucket below when the blade drops.  I find the priest a touching addition, no?

Finally the view from the top again as the clouds filled in over the day.  We aren't looking over BCN here anymore, rather more inland.....you'd guess that from the mountains and the lack of Med.

Good fun I have to say, and lovely.  I'd go back again!

Hope you had a great weekend!  Seen any creepy carnival tricks lately?

House reno photos!

We went off, I think much more successfully this time, to look at house reno stuff.  I think I have found what I would like.  Details must of course be finalised.  Thought I'd give a peak of what we have in mind:

This will be for our bathroom floor.

This will be our bathroom sink...it is one of those sit on top jobs, that I for one, really like.

This will be the shower floor.  We will have a curtain not a glass door.  Hate those.  We will have to build a bit of a step to keep the water in  The walls will be white tile with a dark green trim, the step will probably be the same green.

This will be the floor in the girl's bathroom.  You have to work with me here a bit and ignore the plain tiles, only the blue ones will be down.  They are a good size, 9 by 9 inches or so...

and this will be their sink.  It too is a sit-on-top-like-a-bowl number, and I sincerely hope it will hide the toothpaste spit marks.  Their bathroom will have a tub with a shower in and a curtain.  The walls will be tiled white with a blue trim the same as the floor.  They want blue paint.  No problemo.  The sink looks nicer in real life than in the photos.

The downstairs bathroom and the rest of the house will have the tile on the right which is the one that most closely mimics what we have already....The one on the left is machine made, the one on the right, hand made.  The price difference isn't that big and we don't need many.

The sink in the downstairs bathroom:

We also have a problem in the main passageway which you can see from the street and, well, everywhere.  We have to tear up a strip through the whole length as the drain runs under there.  The drain, which drains the toilet as well, is a brick runway.  Bricks are porous.  Pause for a moment and consider the smell.

Yes.

We have to tear it up.  the problem is that the old tiles are old and we are not going to be able to colour match, so instead we are going to use tile work to make it look like it was always there.  A kind of tiled carpet.  Imagine my delight when I found these:

We'll make a pattern with those and it will look like a carpet.

In the dining room at the back, we'll have these on the floor:

Same pattern, deeper tone.  Blue grey colour that I love.

In the kitchen for the doors, we'll probably use these:

and for the back splash I want to see if we can find something that will match the tiles that are in there already.

I didn't have a chance to eat breakfast before we went off, so I was a little hungry when we got back.  We stopped at the corner store and picked up lunch.  I had chicken stuffed with dates and bacon (OMG),  espinacs catalanes, which is spinach with raisins and pine nuts plus veggies that looked pretty average but tasted amazing.  I am not sure what they did.  I'll have to ask.

Then I had a nap.

OMGoodness, life is shaping up pretty nicely today.

and most welcome too.

A remarkably calm rant about the state of our local health care.

Spent most of the day running in slow germy circles getting Eldest checked out at a hospital.  She's had a stomach ache for days, and the anti-biotic she was given wasn't doing anything.  She is doing much better now just so ya know.

There is something inherently dreary about wandering about in hospitals.  You come out feeling so...contaminated.

It was interesting the sheer number of grandmas and grandpas who were at the hospital.  Couples too.  I don't remember having gone to the hospital together on a working day when the kids were young, though maybe memory fails. It is probably a function of driving with a sick baby.  Simply easier if done in tandem.

There were a whole lot of grandmas and grandpas though.  Mom seems to bring a certain amount of moral support with her.  Especially those with young babies.  Never thought of getting my folks to come with me, I must say.

Though now that I think about it, both my Dad and the Man did end up coming with us one time...Youngest was sick, and they returned home with Eldest, who threw the MOST unholy hissy fit when it was time for them to leave.  Went on the entire way home and a good portion of the time once they got there.

Interestingly, at the hospital, a very prominent and excellent one here,  EVERYONE could speak to me in Catalan.  Not like the doctor/quack/dipsh*t I had the misfortune of seeing the other day with eldest.  When I asked if he could please speak Catalan, he said he couldn't and just continued on in Spanish.  Cabron.  (Not polite at all in Catalan).  He did NOT go and get someone to translate, he did not even try.  The women at the front desk did the same.  The village where we live is very very Catalan.  Barcelona is clearly less so.  The hospital is obviously able to pick and chose it's staff much more closely and hospital policy is obviously quite pro-Catalan as most if not all of the signs were in Catalan, and many only in Catalan.

The only person we got who couldn't speak Catalan to us automatically and instantly asked for someone to translate (unlike our local *ssh*le), and judging by his name and look (never a good idea, but work with me here) he probably spoke Arabic.  A much needed language within the hospital, so if he can successfully communicate with those patients, I can forgive him his Catalan.  Especially as he immediately got someone who could talk to us.

THAT my friends, is the rudiments of good health care.  Along with soap in the bathrooms, which - I kid you not - my local health center didn't have.  There was a sign outside the room about the importance of hand washing in preventing the spread of H1N1/ GripA; no soap inside.  The bathroom had been just cleaned.

I kid you not.

Found some pics.

Pretty, no?  Saw it last weekend I think, or the one before, it's been languishing in the camera what with all the illness I have been meandering through.

The tile below we are probably going to get for the two upstairs bathroom floors.  They are very small bathrooms, think maybe two square meters of open floor space.  I think I like it, though I'm not totally convinced yet.

This tile, which I really like, is a ridiculously expensive hand made tile.  Debating it for the kids bathroom, remember please that we are looking at MAYBE 2 square meters of floor....

What is really holding me back is that it is slippery, and I just don't want that.

Pretty though.

I find it totally freaky that the mac can lift images off of my phone without the phone's permission.  Weird, no?

Chuck that for a waste of time.

I have spent a fair amount of today at a low boil, some of today boiling right over and my trigger has been a little touchy for a while.  I think this has been a part of getting sick -gradually - being sick, and now recovering from being sick.  Either that or the world has just not been set right and it is p*ssing me right d*mn off.

Seems time to check back in on the good stuff.

Good stuff; sometimes hard to remind ourselves.  Right now I have about 5 rants stewing around in my head, but Beth over at Blind as a Bat has a list up of of things she's loving right now.  This will be a useful discipline.  At the moment it is tough to come up with much.  She's got 12 things up, let's see what I manage.

.......truita de patates

........my boss and co-workers

........my family (so predictable it doesn't count)

........swear words so I can use them (in three languages)

........the mountains, sea and sunshine.

........teenage students (some might question that one, but sometimes they are fantastic)

........my bed.  So comfy....

.........Chuck the whining dependent dog.

OH!   This is making me sick.

I just am not feeling like doing this.

Onwards and upwards...I was in the bar across the street yesterday and noticed a man come it, at 5pm.  He bought a pack of smokes, then he ordered an espresso with anise...that would be the alcohol.  He knocked that back...50/50 espresso/liquor...topped off with a smoke.  The perfect recipe for the drive home.

When I asked about this I was told this is actually more normally drunk at breakfast.

Silly me, I thought Wheaties was the breakfast of champions!