Pizza Day

Laura made pizza for lunch and pizza for dinner. For lunch, she employed a technique we've used before here in Sevilla--she used pitas as crusts for "personal" sized pizzas. I've always liked them, but she is less than thrilled with the pitas-as-crust recipe. This afternoon, she found some yeast and made a pizza dough of her own. We had that for dinner:

I managed to snap a picture before it was gone. I liked this one too. Plus, you can't have too much pizza.

***

Other than pizza, it was a pretty low-key day. Did some laundry, some math, continued reading Everybody Lies, talked to Rachel briefly, and watched a bit of Netflix.

Birthday Weather

Today was my 52nd birthday (and Emily's 25th). With the weather sunny and 70, this is definitely the best weather I've ever experienced on my birthday. Following a long tradition of trying to get photos of Emily and me together on our birthday, I screenshotted our phone call today (sorry Em):

Here she's explaining how she's hoping to apply machine learning algorithms to predict which of a certain class of chemical compounds might be worth exploring a bit more deeply. She just came off of a two day workshop on applying methods of machine learning to materials science.

Laura made me a nice birthday card. Around the border are random facts about the number 52:

I also had phone calls from Keith and Jo-Anne today.

***

While not for my birthday, there was a fun group of women singing as an ensemble in the street in front of our building. They were accompanied by one of the regular street guitar players:

They were having fun with their heart-shaped balloons.

***

I took a chance and ordered a new pair of running shoes from amazon.es. They arrived in the dropbox over at the mall today. Laura and I walked over and picked them up this afternoon. They fit pretty well (which is always the risk of ordering shoes in the mail). I ran with them this afternoon too. So far, so good.

***

Laura made me a goulash (beef) poured over gnocchi for dinner. It was excellent. Overall a good finish to a good day.

Everybody Lies

Another lovely day in Sevilla. This in contrast to the misery that is currently the weather in Walla Walla. Nothing but cold and snow there for the next few days. Here, though it was never really winter here, it's clearly moving back to warmer weather here. The beautiful weather along with it being Friday afternoon had lots of people hanging out by the river:

Happy people, enjoying each other's company and the end of winter, such as it is.

Also along the river, the tourist boats were dodging a plethora of rowers:

Not everyone was happy today though. On my way back from walking with Laura to her school for class, I passed this little guy:

He was not pleased. It was cute, so I surreptitiously snapped a photo.

***

I got a birthday card from Kathy and Ric today. It was in a padded envelop with a bag full of Milk Duds. Happy birthday to me! Unfortunately, as appealing as the Milk Duds were, the guy on the birthday card kinda made me lose my appetite:

Thanks Kath.

***

I started reading Everybody Lies by Seth Stevens-Davidowitz today. This is another data science book. This guy specializes in drawing conclusions about people, culture, societies, etc using Google search and other internet usage data. The unique aspect of this kind of data is that most people use Google unguardedly--thinking that a query, post, or click is private and anonymous (in fact, it mostly is). You can learn a lot more about people this way, especially with respect to sensitive topics like sex or race, than you can by giving them ordinary surveys. People lie very systematically on traditional surveys. For example, it's believed that pollsters missed out on the Trump phenomenon because people didn't want to admit that they were going to vote for Trump. So far, it's been a good read, but I'm only two chapters into it.

San Juan de Aznalfarache

This afternoon I walked to San Juan de Aznalfarache. It's a small city across the river to the west of us here. It's not that far in the grand scheme of things--only about 2.5 miles. It was a nice clear day for a walk with temperatures at about 70 degrees. The bridge across the Guadalquivir is mostly a pedestrian/bicycle bridge, though there is also a one-way lane for public transportation. The "sidewalk", which appeared to be bolted onto the bridge as an afterthought, was less than reassuring:

The river was low and muddy, but flowing to the south towards the Atlantic ocean about 50km downstream:

The bridge appears to be a drawbridge, now defunct. This massive cement block suspended above the bridge deck is a counterweight for the part of the bridge that raises up:

Here is the cantilever part beneath the counterweight:

Beneath the bridge on the other side of the river was a community garden. The gardens looked well-tended and productive--even in February:

There's a monument in the center of the city (which I neglected to photograph) called Monumento Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. It's up on a hill and has a set of switchbacking stairs leading up to it. I climbed the stairs and took a picture of Sevilla. The only real standout building in the Sevillian skyline is the "lipstick tower". Oh well:

Back on our side of the river, the retired streetcar a few blocks down from our flat looked good in the bright afternoon sunshine:

This evening, Laura and I had a quick dinner at one of the thousands of carry out Mediterranean food places around here. Love me some falafel. 

***

I finished reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. I really liked his closing remark, so I'll put it here:  

Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity.

 

You've got mail.

We don't get much mail here, but in the past two days we've received 3 cards! Yesterday, we got a thank you note from my sister's family for Christmas. Today, I got two birthday cards, one from Betty and one from Jim. Jim's even had a lottery scratch-off in it (we didn't win, not sure what we'd have done with it if we did win):

***

Spanish class was interesting today. We had two new students. Judith, from Maine and Katie from Pittsburgh. At the end of class, Judith seemed to think it was too advanced for her, but Katie seemed ok with it.

***

When I got home from class, Carlos, our neighbor with two children, was fixing the lamp shade in the courtyard that one of his sons broke a couple of weeks ago with a ball. As I was passing by, he called out and asked if I wanted any oranges. I said sure! Turns out they recently purchased a small vacation home about 20km east Sevilla and there are some orange trees on the property. It's the time of year to collect oranges around here and Carlos has an abundance. He gave me a bag of oranges. I figured they might be good, but probably hard to peel and lots of seeds.

Boy was I wrong. These were pro-level oranges. Sweet, seedless and easy to peel. He could sell them in Walla Walla by the bushel. Of course, there's just the little problem of transportation and marketing. I'm glad he gave some to me.

***

Also on the way home, on the bridge (the best bridge), there was a guy playing an acoustic guitar with a background recording of Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits. I love that song. I stopped and listened. He was quite a good player. Here's a bit of it: