A Little Something Old

It's been a while so I thought I'd but up a little favorite of mine for you to enjoy.

The Shirt Adventure

Initiation for the Freshman at University

Baptism

Canary Islands

Got back from the Canary Islands on Sunday. It was a good trip. Filled with good meetings and successful egg drops. (Well at least our egg drop was successful...) It was my first time on an island. I say that knowing full well that Japan is an island, but it was my first time on something that felt like an island if you know what I mean. Some of the beaches were rocky (like hurt your feet rocky, not fun to climb on rocky) but my favorite was a black sand beach with super soft sand with very clean water.

The biggest adventure was the journey back. Paul, Timon, and I, along with another lady, were flying back to Madrid. (Although the flight was never delayed on the big board, the plane didn't arrive at the gate until 5 minutes after we were suppose to depart. Turns out someone had smoked in the toilet, meaning he had to be arrested when the flight landed.) The actual flight was uneventful, til the last 10 minutes. We were close to the ground, going in for the landing, when the pilot jetted the engines and we shot back up. The PA system come on saying this was very normal. (Ha ha yeah.) turns out the tail wind was "just outside the safe" landing speed. So we circled around and landed going the other way on the other side of the airport, which meant about a 10-15 min taxi to get to the gate we were suppose to go to.

Thankfully we had a hotel reserved for the night that had a shuttle service. (We didn't get in until 1am.) The next day we got out of Madrid with no problems. And the ride back to Caceres was smooth (although I finished my book 10 min in, and my DS died, so I had nothing to do the last part.)

The lesson learned on this trip was that Timon doesn't like to ride the little animals that you put the coin in to ride at the mall, even with 2 girls asking him to every time we pass one. BUT he did right one of the spring loaded animals in the airport when I rode it with him (it was a 4 person one).

Pick Up in Madrid

The Adventures of Frustration

Today I took the DVDs I had checked out, back to the library. Question. How do you turn materials back in on a Sunday when the library is closed and there are no apparent return slots outside the building? Good thing I turned it in today, a Friday. Also, we went to the sports store. There are some brands I'm going to have to research because I have never heard of them, but they are still kind of expensive. Happens that right next door there was an Aldi's. Got some excellent canned peaches. Cookies were ok.

Ok now for the frustration. I have restarted my computer 10 or so times in the last day. I have uninstalled and reinstalled itunes now 7 times in that same day. Several calls to apple and a couple of emails and we will see if they keep the overall positive feeling I've had for their support in the past. "The registry settings used by the iTunes drivers for importing and burning CDs and DVDs are missing. This can happen as a result of installing other CD burning software. Please reinstall iTunes." This message gets more and more mind numbingly disheartening each time I reinstalled iTunes. I open it up and bam! Message still there. Of course my CD burner IS working. And I can import music WITH ITUNES. Yet message still there. Artichoke...

On a positive note I am liking these songs right now:

Back on the Chain Gang - The Pretenders
Dead Sound - The Raveonettes
The Ecstasy of Gold - Ennio Morricone
Hoppípolla - Sigur Ros
Moving - Macaco
Everlasting God - Chris Tomlin
Fugitive - David Gray

August 13 - Hitchcock's Birthday

Today is Hitchcock's Birthday. And that has nothing to do with this post...


Today Paul and I went out to play some basketball. First we went to the gym a block from our apartment. There are "paddle" courts. Like a combination of racquetball and tennis. Then a couple of basketball courts. All that is outside. We went into the pro-shop and looked around. Some shoe brands I'd never heard of. Then I asked the lady if she spoke English. Definitely no. I did ask her how much to restring my tennis racket, and best I can tell it is the cost of the strings (ex. 15 euros) and the restringing is free. Then we went out to the court to see if they were open. They were locked. So we walked several blocks down the street where there was a public court and shot some baskets. I was lights out the first 1/3. Then we played a revised version of a game called 42 (normally 2 on 2 but we did 1 on 1 and halved the score to 21 but as to not confuse you with the actual game 21...). I lost 21-19. Then the last part we did the talk while shooting thing, and I hit basically nothing except a few bankers.

So all in all a good early afternoon.

Cuadros de Caceres

Germany Revisited