Pondside Thoughts...

Cabinets and Appliances

Things are really moving along now. Henry installed the cabinets this week and the appliances arrived on Friday. It's starting to look like a kitchen again instead of an archaeological dig.

Henry is a magician when it comes to fitting together all the pieces, including the stove and microwave wall that I perversely insisted be placed on the diagonal just to make sure this wasn't TOO easy.

Now that the pretty shiny new appliances are sitting there it is particularly frustrating that they can't be used. The electrician and plumber will not be back until after the countertop is installed and that is still weeks away. Rats. All those pretty silvery machines waiting to do my bidding and I'm still microwaving salty Lean Cuisine on soggy, saggy paper plates, and slogging upstairs to the bathroom to wash the few non-disposable items I permit myself to use.  And that's another thing. The bathroom. My body is totally trained and timed to the precise number of steps required to reach the downstairs bathroom before peeing. No matter how much my brain knows that there is no bathroom downstairs these days, my body continues to believe that there is a toilet within 20 steps of my front door. So about halfway up the stairs I start wiggling, doing the pee dance, and saying the required pee chant ("ooh, ooh, ooh" for those over 5 and under 50) in order to keep my pants dry. Humiliating.

Stone One comes on Monday to make the granite templates. Onward and upward!

Back to the Kitchen... we have Flooring!

The floor has been installed! It is beautiful oak and it covers all those layers of old flooring fiascos. I couldn't be more happy!

The cabinets will be delivered today or tomorrow and Henry will begin to install them.

For myself, I am continuing on my quest to absent myself from this ungodly mess as much as possible. I am zipping off to California to hug and visit with the Lovely L, and there is some chance I will meet the Adorable P for coffee and to catch up on 42 years. Amazing.

On to Santander

From Bilbao I was driven to Santander, a beautiful city right on the ocean in the Bay of Biscay in the Spanish state of Cantabria. The region is astoundingly beautiful with its rocky cliffs and sandy beaches and lovely mixture of old and new architecture.

The food is incredibly good. Mostly seafood and a rich aged ham similar to prosciutto, and delicious wine. I've sent several members of the octopus family down my gullet this week - from sliced bits of the big guys lightly battered and fried for a moment into tender, sweet morsels, to tiny little ones individually stuffed with a light combination of onions and themselves, doused in a black squid ink sauce and served with a mound of rice adorned with stripes of black and red sauces.  

We had lupina (sea bass) on a couple of occasions, cooked very simply and perfectly, unadorned and delicious.  Also merloza (bream) similarly delicately cooked and served simply with potatoes and a ubiquitous asparagus that I am not crazy about. (I generally love asparagus, but this is cooked, served cold, and tastes like it is canned or preserved, tender to the brink of mushiness. It is a favorite here, but not my favorite.) The local ham on the other hand is fantastic - rich and intense, deep maroon red in color - very hearty. It is served cold, sliced very thin, arranged around a plate. You pick up a piece with your fingers and pop it in your mouth and swoon.  And the regional wines are fantastic as well.  I don't have the fancy words used to describe wine; suffice to say it was way good and tasty. Like really good. 

 

The hard part has been the virtual absence of English speakers. In my entire time here, walking miles every day and spending the days with large crowds during the conference, I heard not one American accent or a single conversation in English that I was not involved in. Most locals are not English speakers, quite different from traveling in Italy or France. I've had to use my very poor Spanish skills, unused for more decades than I care to admit, to communicate some of the time. Who knows what I've said - could have been anything - and judging from some of the looks my questions have elicited, it probably was.  However, my wonderful Spanish hosts were quite skilled in English and were gracious and very tolerant of my attempts to practice my limited Spanish, and when I was with them they provided me with every language accommodation possible. I drink a glass of the wonderful local wine to them in gratitude!

 

I've found people in this northern-most part of Spain to be very gracious and mannered, a little bit formal, and very, very beautiful. Most of those I met at this conference are from the Madrid area.  The women are beautifully dressed, quite trim, great hair, carefully made up, really very beautiful in an un-selfconscious way.  Women speak in deep voices and not a one speaks baby talk in that horrid American tradition of cutesy squeaky-voiced child-women. Men, too, are wonderful looking, graceful and gracious. They are very well dressed, they open doors, pull out chairs, and are attentive and gentlemanly in a completely endearing, lovely way. Utterly charming.  Everyone has been great company and I've found that even though I did not understand most of the conversation, it was easy and comfortable to sit and listen, occasionally piping up with some banal comment worthy of an infant (I like fish. The water is beautiful.)

Here is the Palacio de la Magdalena, where the conference was held. It used to be a summer palace for Spanish royalty but now serves as a university building - quite an extraordinary unversity building. It is a long hike up to the palace as it sits out on a promontory at the end of a penninsula. The grounds and beaches on the way to the palace are now used as park area and public beaches where large extended families come and stay the day, picnicing, playing, eating, and enjoying the beautiful coastal waters.

Espana

My trip to Spain was wonderful and difficult. Not the bad kind of difficult, but the outside my comfort zone and challenging and steep learning curve kind of difficult. This was due primarily to my struggle to understand and be understood as English was not widely spoken and even basic communication with cab drivers, hotel people, and waiters was difficult. 

But first the great part - the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. I took a day before the conference to visit this amazing art museum in Bilbao, about an hour from Santander, where the conference would take place.

The museum itself is a wonder. Designed by crazybrilliant architect, Frank Gehry, it is a masterpiece of form and texture. It is set in the city of Bilbao against a backdrop of rolling hills that are mirrored by the building's voluminous rounded forms. The inside is as fascinating as the outside, with enormous forms set at angles that make for galleries that have no verticals or straight lines and an airy, kinetic feel throughout. It is different from every angle and endlessly fascinating.

But even with all this shape, texture, movement and volume going on, the galleries are perfect places to exhibit art. There were two main exhibits - the sculpture of Juan Munoz and a large exhibit of Surreal objet d'art.

I love Munoz's work. It is amusing, poignant, disturbing, engaging, and I found it almost impossible to keep my hands off the many figures that comprise a single piece. The figures are generally arranged in groups or pairs, completely engaged in some conversation, or laughing or weeping together, concentrating together. Their social interaction is key to the impact of the work. There are insiders and outsiders and in at least one piece, a lone figure leaning against a wall, arms crossed, watching me, the visitor, with much amusement. Loved it.

The Surreal exhibit was equally delightful. They had some wonderful pieces - original ballet custumes of wool jersey in a jester pattern, lots of film footage, a phone with a lobster receiver, wonderful crazy fashion pieces and paintings, just a terrific collection of the nutty things that came out of the Surreal movement.  And also a lot of information on Peggy Guggenheim, who was just a WILD thing and an integral part of the community of artists and dreamers who were the Surrealists. 

But my favorite feature of the museum is the giant sculpture called Puppy, that graces the front of the museum property and keeps watch over the continuing construction in the surrounding streets. Puppy is about 4 stories tall and is entirely covered in fresh growing, blooming flowers, all over, every square inch. 

Bilbao locals find the museum endlessly amusing and call it the sardine tin, an apt description and one Gehry might enjoy. Of course, here in Massachusetts we know Gehry as the architect of the amazing Stata Center at MIT, an astounding building that is the source of endless heated debate.

I'll post about Santander and amazing food of northern Spain next... stay tuned.  If you'd like to see more photos of this trip there is a link on the home page of the blog, in the lower left corner. Enjoy.

Not Your Average Cooking Video

Love this video from PES. Take a lesson.

De door! De door!

The new door and windows have arrived and Henry popped them into place under the existing window header. It all came together easily (or so he says) and here are the results.  A door to the porch! What a wonderful concept. Wish I had thought of it YEARS ago. How wonderful that would have been for kids and taking food outside to the BBQ or picnic.

The plumber has finished his work and the electrician has got the basics in place - you can see the beginnings of new lighting in the photo.  Here is where the old house ghosts arose to haunt us. Turns out the kitchen sink had not been vented properly - actually not vented at all. So the plumber had to run a vent pipe up over the windows and into an available pipe in the bathroom wall. Ka-ching. And the electrician found wire connector boxes behind the ceiling - all hidden. Yikes!  And corrosion in the electrical panel in the basement began to cause mysterious power outages for days, finally repaired by replacing the main circuit breaker. I had long extension cords snaking all over the house to provide power to the necessities - refrigerator, bedroom light and clock radio, and of course the small bedroom air conditioner that saves my life during all this. And the microwave - my primary food prep appliance.  The small sink in the gutted bathroom (yuk) is my only source of water downstairs. So I scrub the sink area daily and have put paper over the nasty holes in the floor so I can at least rinse food and wash utensils. I'll be very happy when the proper sink returns.

Henry is on vacation this week so progress will slow, but he's got the wallboard up now and it's starting to look like a room.   

In the meantime, I'm off to Spain for a week. Mostly work, but one day in Bilbao to visit the Guggenheim and one more day of strolling around Santander at the end of the trip. Yay!  Then off to CA to see the lovely L the week after. Really yay!! 

A bad case of TES (temporary existential syndrome)

Today my heart is heavy and my head is brimming with thoughts of mortality, life turning on a dime, the illusion of security, the mean trick of good health, candles in the wind, like that. Our dear friend and colleague, the Illuminated V, passed away this Thursday evening after a brief and tragic illness.

V was an illuminated man. He was wise and learned and he seemed lit from within, just a glowing person with a deeply calm energy and sweetness. Everyone enjoyed him. Really liked him, and not in a Sally Field kind of way. We all profoundly respected and enjoyed him. 

V simply preferred to be happy, while never losing his earnest commitment to the task at hand or his willingness to work as hard or harder than anyone on the team when he could easily have taken the manager's more detached role. Everyone around him felt a bit calmer and happier as a result. This was a powerful man.

Although V was brilliant - blessed with a clear and remarkable mind - and often the smartest person in the room, he never, ever behaved as if he knew that. Quite the contrary. Into every conversation V brought a completely open mind and an endearing eagerness to hear the thoughts of others.

He must have been a wonderful husband and father, although I did not know him socially. His eyes would light up when he spoke of the son he adored and his precious daughter. His youth and good health were no defense against the series of events that took his life.  We are all diminished by his loss.