Asturian livestock

The first time I saw this pony, it was walking down the main street of town, led by a nine-year-old girl.  It turned that both girl and pony belonged to the lady who managed our property.  The landlady would ¨talk even under the water,¨ as they say here, so I heard all about veal from agricultural subsidies to favorite recipes.  No animal of hers would ever go hungry, she said, though some people buy the animals, collect the subsidies and spend the money on an expensive vacation.  She was very loving, and just about hugged and kissed me to death, especially after 16 people arrived on our last day who had booked for 14 people, didn´t want to pay and screamed at her and abused her.  She cried on my shoulder.  One of their group was a baby and the other a priest.  I guess the families thought they shouldn´t count.

Girl and pony like to walk, so that´s how they spend their summer.

To every Spanish person who asks how the trip was, I say, ¨Asturias has the most beautiful cows in the world.¨  They all sigh and wax poetic about before I get a chance to.  ¨Their beautiful honey skin, their big brown eyes, their dainty black noses... They all just look so healthy.¨  Here´s some AG facts for my Uncle Terry: they eat the calves at 8-12 months here.  The grocery stores all have lean veal, instead of nicely marbled 2-year old beef. 

  I told my Spanish teacher to look up Texas cows and up came pictures of spotty, boney, buck-toothed, bad-tempered looking cattle.  My point exactly.

The landlady also had these little mini goats.  The meat is apparently very much in demand, so she breeds them and sells them.

Whenever the road got really narrow, you would see a sign, ¨No livestock on the road,¨ but there was always cow poop there anyway, and actual cows on this winding road.

I chatted with one set of neighbors who were bringing in the hay.  They cut the hay with a weed-eater  on the steep hillsides and then turn it by hand.  One lady had a mule on the main road up to the pass, though farming with mules was not the norm, and it was the only mule I saw.

Asturias beaches

Our friends from church took us on a nice tour of beaches, all within an hour of each other.  Tony is the representative for a company that makes disposable containers.  Starbucks, for example, is one of his clients.  So he travels a lot and meets locals, who show him lesser-known spots.  One thing you take for granted in the US is good-quality paper products.  Tony´s company bought Solo, of red Solo cup fame, and hopes to ¨enter the consumer market,¨ here, which means there will be plastic cups in the grocery stores that don´t crumple in your hands.

We met our friends at the Ayre Hotel in the city of Oviedo.  It looks like the Starship Enterprise.

This beach had sand, though others did not.

It also had caves and this crack in the rocks that the boys shinnied right up.

This is the geyser beach.  The rocks were riddled with dozens of these scary deep holes.  When conditions are just right, the water enters from below and shoots up in a geyser.  We didn´t see any geysers, but we heard a lot of noise and saw some puffs of spray.

It was really windy, but apparently not enough for geysers.

This is a weird inland beach.  The ocean is ahead, past the rocks.

Panorama of geyser beach.  We then went to a fishing village for lunch.  My rule of eating out with locals is to eat what they eat.  In this case it was a bean and sausage stew followed by grilled baby squid.  I will take my squid fried in the future, thank you very much.

North of Spain country house

All my Spanish friends ask how my trip to Asturias was... I tell them we went to the end of the road and then some.

Our house has been very nicely refurbished.

Notice the beautiful woodwork.  The chairs with real wood loints seemed to be held down by magnets, they were so heavy. I would have been swooning and plotting how to get some, except that they were not actually very comfortable.

Nice picture of a flower that Troy took...he actually took all of these, which is why I am so late getting them downloaded and posted.

Two families still have their family vacation homes in our little village, and there was one more down the hill, along with a 87-year old woman who lives there year round.  There was a little advertizing postcard that said we could rent our house during the ski season.  ?¿!¡Huh?¡  How would we GET TO the ski resort?  How would we eat?  But it turns out they plow up to the one resident whenever it snows, and they will plow on up the last mile if we call and ask them too.  We would still have to walk the last 400 yards.  And the mail and grocery guys deliver right behind the snowplow.  Maybe it is not impossible after all.

Down the road was a place to swim.

I would take this kitchen pass through in any future house I have.

How low can you go

Success!  I promised some improved photography and here it is.  The ivy is perfectly clear with the fence fuzzy in the background.  

 A couple of shoots of lavender are clear and the rest fuzzy.  If they are all clear, it just looks messy.  Yes, I have a two lavender bushes that I run my fingers over every time I come up the front walk.  Don´t hate me.

 As I said before, I was not happy while I was taking the 152 shots, the best of which you see here.  For Troy, the consolation of listening to me complain was seeing me rolling around on this horrible pebbly sidewalk trying to get shots of something besides Cuddles tail.

 I had shots of Cuddles with mulch, Cuddles with sticks, Cuddles with pine cones, Cuddles with weeds, Cuddles with ivy, Cuddles with roses, Cuddles with dandelions, Cuddles with nerf darts.  I had no idea he could find so much to play with in such a short time.

 His favorite spot, as you saw above, is at Troy´s feet.  Here is the opposite photography effect, where you want everything in focus.

 This flower is the size of my thumbnail.  Lucky for you, none of the pictures of ants an the lavender came out.

 Wyatt and I went for a Mommy Date to a rooftop terrace bar.  I cannot believe we have such a fabulous place just five minutes from our house.

He got a non-alcoholic fruity cocktail that tasted like raspberries and blackberries blendered with sugar.  Yummy!  I got tinto de verano, aka sangria, aka wine cooler.  But it sounds so much more exotic if you call it Summer Wine.

What Frozen Things Do in Summer

Hopefully you have all seen the movie Frozen and get the joke that Cuddles looks like a snowball, basking in the summer sun.  The boys went for a sleepover with new friends, twin 12-year old boys.  Their dad went so far as to go for an interview at our school, but they decided to go to the American School.  Bummer.

What I am doing meanwhile is making beaded jewelry with friends.

This friend had been eying chunky jewelry in blue and orange on ETSY, so she knew exactly what she wanted. 

     Meanwhile, I have a new computer, a new camera and a new steam cleaner, all at once.  You who know me know that I am NOT the early adopter, so this is a lot to figure out all at once.  I took Troy´s camera to a photography class.  I guess I was hoping for someone to know something about  a photography club.  The title of the class was ¨Get out of Auto,¨and it was exactly that: how to set the settings manually.  The first thing the teacher said was, ¨I hope you brought your manuals.¨ I was thinking, ¨I am in class so I don´t have to read the manual.¨  I left the class very frustrated, never having budged those settings, and had to look it up in the manual.  But this morning I figured it out and hopefully there will be good photos in the near future!  My friend above had a ghastly green tint to her, and I already cleaned that up.

     Wyatt took over my laptop for Minecraft, so Troy very kindly set up the Macbook Air for me.  He is probably already regretting it, because he has to listen to me screech and complain every time I turn it on.  Cut and paste?  I have to look it up.  Right click?  I have to look it up.  Screenshot?  I have to look it up, plus I have to look up more stuff because I don´t understand the instructions.

     The steam cleaner I would call a polisher, for after you have already cleaned.  Troy thought it would make my life easier.  And maybe it will, but it hasn´t yet.  Instead of trying to CLEAN with it next Monday, cleaning day, I will have the boys mop the floors with it.  That is actually what it is designed to do.  

Birthday

Thanks for all your birthday wishes :-)

I went to the new hipster neighborhood for breakfast, and Wyatt had this perfectly carved bird for me when I came home.  

Troy told me they were working in the basement on a mat for weight-lifting.

But really they made me a cake, with three kinds of chocolate melted over it that says MOM or WOW. 

They had me completely fooled. Tristan even kept the secret when I decided to make brownies to go with the ice cream. We had perfect cool weather, I updated a bunch if computer stuff, we played tennis and swam, Troy took me out for the fried peppers that I love... Thank you again. 

Filial love

We are back in Madrid, settling into summer routine. Wyatt is in a delightful stage of filial love and self-sacrifice.  He was nagging me to use my computer to play Minecraft, but then flopped on the sofa and said, "I guess it is good that Mama wants to learn Spanish."  Then I told him that there was a time before cancer that I wanted to be in heaven. He knew immediately what that meant. "But what about me, what about us?"  When I said, like a cancer patient I saw yesterday, that I love life and appreciate small things, he said, "I want to give you a hug and a kiss. No, two kisses."

And thirdly, his favorite quote right now is from that book about cancer kids, when you realize that the whiney girl narator loves her mother: 

There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars