Friday, November 2, 2018

Recovery Day

I walked Shelley and Scott across the bridge this morning where they caught an uber out to the airport. I thought it would be cheaper over on that side of the river since it's a much easier drive, but the ineffable uber pricing algorithm charged about the same as just picking them up here in Triana. Oh well, so much for trying to game uber. Regardless, even though uber is pretty new here, it worked out fine and they're in Bilbao this evening.

Scott kindly agreed to take a misbehaving computer back to the US and mail it to Rachel where she can manage the warranty exchange and bring it back to me in December. All of that avoids a costly international shipping charge.

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I spent a relatively quiet day catching up on a lot of odds and ends, but avoiding serious brain work. I call it productive procrastination.

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This afternoon I joined Laura's language school teacher on another cultural event. We went back to a gallery we'd visited earlier, but with a different exhibit. The exhibit was a collection of paintings that were finalists in a nationwide contest. My favorite was this one:


Up close, you can see that it's made of thousands of hand-drawn straight lines. It's like looking at a cloud, different shapes emerge as you look at it for a while. Laura's teacher, Lucia, after asking us what we thought, revealed that the winning canvas was this one:


I initially didn't really like this one, but after looking at if for a while, it grew on me. Now I really like it. Unfortunately, I didn't record either of the artists' names.

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Coming into the building today, one of the painters working on the building started talking to me in Spanish. While I still can't speak the language with anything approaching proficiency, I was able to understand him when he said that next week they would be working in the smaller courtyard and since we lived on that courtyard, we should keep our windows closed. I was able to utter enough Spanish to convince him that I understood him. I guess that's progress.

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Managed to talk to Emily for a while today. She sounds good and kindly pointed her camera at Benji for a while so I could enjoy some domesticated rabbit antics.

Supposed to warm up tomorrow and be sunny. Looking forward to that. It was a cold week.