Our First Jamón

I feel like a proud papa.  We purchased our first jamon serrano a few days ago.  It arrived in the mail today.  Here are a couple of videos:





Other good news:  Lucy is no longer "broken."  She was successfully "fixed" today at the vet.  She's now free to have as much sex as she wants...so long as she uses a condom.  No worries about having a mess of Jack Brittany or a Pit Brittany puppies in this house.

Also, we found a loving home for the puppy.  Phew!

Barcelona

My friend, Frank, in Iowa City wrote to me the other day and mentioned that the fabled archives of Spanish travel were not immediately apparent upon looking at my blog.  They are there, but you have to dig deep.  Frank mentioned that he and his wife will be in Barcelona in June.  What a fantastic opportunity for me to sort through all of my pix of Barcelona!  We were there 2-3 days this past September.  Barcelona is awfully photogenic.  I've managed to cull a few photos.  I'm pleased to report that I now have only 115 photos remaining from which I have to pick and choose to post here.  Wish me luck.  At least I've got a couple of months to do it.

Until this year, Barcelona was the last remaining "must see" great site that I had yet to see in Spain.  The primary reason for this oversight is because Barcelona is in Cataluña.  The primary language there is Catalan, which, although similar to Spanish, is really an entirely different language.  You don't hear about it Catalan politics here in the US, but Cataluña would really like to be a separate country from the rest of Spain.  There is constant noise of secession.  There is also a long history of antagonism between Madrid (i.e. classic Spain) and Barcelona.  The two cities have the two best soccer teams in Spain, which hate each other, kind of like the Yankees and the Red Sox.  This past year, the Catalan people went so far as to ban bull fighting just to stick it to the people from Madrid.  I don't know if Cataluña will really ever secede from Spain, but they sure sounded pretty serious about it this past fall.  For me, my primary interest has always been more the Spain of flamenco and and jamón and Madrid.   For this reason, I had never made it Barcelona.  Happily, it is definitely worth the trip.  I had the best jamón of my life there.

The "Iowa City Ped Mall" of Barcelona is a street called "Las Ramblas."  Think of Las Ramblas being the Ped Mall many thousands of times over.  It's one of the finest people watching places on earth.  There are street performers and little shops everywhere.  There is a constant river of people going up and down the street 24 hours/day.  Another claim to fame is that it is the most notorious pickpocket spot in all of Europe.  The stats show that it is worse than Rome, worse than Paris, etc.  This doesn't mean you shouldn't visit.  Just have your wits about you.

Here' a picture of Lisa waving to the camera (you'll need to click on the picture to make her out in the sea of humanity).  There is also "human statue" street performer on the right side dressed up like a WWII soldier.  I have to admit that I've never quite understood the whole human statue phenomenon, but it is quite common in all the big cities in Spain.

We also stumbled into an anarchistic street demonstration one day.  They were demonstrating against the government with regards to the economic crisis.  One common theme was "let the rich people pay for their crisis."  In other words, the rich people caused the crisis and therefore should pay for the crisis themselves.  I guess this is not unlike the scorn that average person heaps on Wall Street over here.  One thing that is the same is that the average person unfortunately ends up paying for these things.

I've never quite understood anarchism as a viable political philosphy. How would you get roads built in an anarchist society?  For some reason, anarchism has been popular in Cataluña dating back to before the Spanish Civil War.

During the protest, teams of masked kids with spray paint would rush up to various business and quickly tag them before security could catch them.  It was kind of nuts.

__________________________________
This has nothing to do with anarchism:  We saw this interesting sign one day in a building in Barcelona  that was miles from the beach:

Resources:  Rick Steves' overview of Barcelona can be found on his website here.  I recommend his books and travel philosophy whole-heartedly.  In particular, his "no checked luggage" rule is pure genius.  The freedom of traveling light can't be beat.

Supper

Pork gorditas with onion, cilantro, tomato salsa, and cheese. And pork.

Found this in the yard today.

The only way this puppy could get in my yard is if someone dropped her over my fence. Arrrgh!

Here she is playing with Lisa:

Supper

For supper tonight we're having slow roasted pulled pork. Lisa has seen all these shows the Food Network where people spend 24 hours making their pork roasts. She decided that we need to try it. Yesterday afternoon, Lisa started brining it with salt and sugar. Later, she rubbed it with spices. She asked me to set the alarm for 2:00 a.m so she could start roasting it at low temperature. I apparently failed this this crucial task, because I woke up at 3:30. I immediately noticed the absence of the odor of roasting pork. I got up to investigate and quickly realized that Lisa had not been up at 2:00. Lisa caught me in the kitchen checking to see if she had started the pork while I was sleeping. She said I looked guilty. Happily, it wasn't too late. She got the roast going, and it was done by 11:00 a.m., which was still too early. I think my stove is a bit too hot, so the roast cooked too fast by about three hours. We'll have to do it again at lower temperatures, but this batch was quite tasty.

Breakfast.

Follow By Email

For those of you who read this who don't use Facebook, one of the big frustrations has been how to notify people if there has been an update to my blog.  Now, for those of you who are interested, you can sign up for e-mail notification. 

If you look over to the left under the About Me section, you'll see a "follow by e-mail" option.  Plunk your email address in there and hit submit.  Follow the directions on the subsequent screen.  After that, you'll receive an automated e-mail in which you will be instructed to click on a link to activate your subscription.  Once you click on that link, you'll get automatic updates everytime I post an update.  You can unsubscribe any time you like by following the directions on the automated updates that you receive.

Nothin' to it.

Today's food

Lunch today: Red chicken enchiladas at Estella's. Lisa had guacamole and green chile cheese fries.

For supper, we had Mexican-style hot dogs: grilled hot dogs wrapped with bacon, topped with lime mayo, ketchup, mustard, jalapeños, tomato, and onion. We had Ramen noodle cole slaw for our salad.

Lucy Goes Hunting

We got up at 6 a.m on Sunday, March 13th. It being the first day of daylight savings time, our bodies thought it was really 5 a.m. We got up so early because we were taking Lucy down to Albuquerque to visit her Facebook friend, a German Shorthair named Hunter. Hunter really does have her own FB page where you can see what hijinks she and her German Shorthair siblings have been up to (search Hunter Thegsp on Facebook). It's kind of like this blog, in a way, I guess.

Hunter's owner, Dave, took us out into public lands west of ABQ to give his dogs some training with some live Chukar Partridges. Dave buys the birds, let's them loose, and then uses the birds as a sort of live-action training aid for the dogs. It's not hunting in any pure sense, but it is good work for the dogs in a place where there are not that many wild birds to use for training.  It's extremely fun and interesting to watch the dogs do the thing that their genetic lineage compels them to do.  These animals were made to find birds.  It was our great luck and privilege to tag along.

The process is as follows:  Dave lets the dogs run around for a bit to burn off some steam.  After that, he locks up the dogs and gets a bird ready to let loose.  He puts the bird out and then starts working the dogs.  For the first bird, he did some training for one of his dogs, Luna, I think.  Luna is referred to as the "genetically engineered dog" on Hunter's FB page.  Luna is more of a show dog than a pure hunter compared to Dave's other two dogs.  For training (and to show me how to do it) Luna was on a long lead.  We worked our way up to the planted bird.  Luna points.  Dave shoots.  Luna retrieves the bird.  It was pretty simple.

For Lucy's first run, we did more or less the same thing as we did with Luna.  Lucy was on a long lead to help contain her exuberance when the time came to point.  At some point, we let her loose but still on the lead.  This was a mistake.  In the picture below, Lucy is still on the lead, but no longer restrained by me (click on the picture to see all the details).  She's just a few feet short of the bird.  She should've stopped and pointed.  Instead she just grabbed the bird.  So much for shooting the bird. 

On the bright side, Lucy brought the bird more or less back to me without too much struggle and relinquished it without much fuss. The bird was still alive, but not for much longer. Dave rapped it's head on his gun a few times and wrung its neck. All in all, this is a bit better than my old Brittany, Sandy, did many years ago when she retrieved her first bird. When Sandy got her first pheasant, she ran around with it for an hour with it in her mouth still alive, flapping in her mouth while evading my every effort to grab her.

In this picture, all three of Dave's dogs are closing in on a bird.  Lucy is on a firm lead to try to learn something.

Two of Dave's dogs are pointing the bird.

Seconds after the bird is flushed, Dave shoots and his dogs go get it.

A bit later, Dave's dogs Pepper and Hunter work a ridge, holding their point of a partridge that is just out of sight.  Lucy had graduated to being off lead on this run, but she was running around a quarter mile away at this crucial moment.

Here's Lucy's last victim, moments before release.

On her last run, Lucy was allowed off leash again.  She and Pepper chased the bird down, but instead of holding her point, Lucy just ran up and grabbed it off the ground. The bird was not feisty enough to take flight.  I'm sure Lucy thought this was the whole point to begin with.  Just run up and grab it!  Now that's hunting!  Again, she gave me the bird with little fuss, which I find a bit hard to believe. 

If we ever get the chance to go again, I'm sure we'll have to keep Lucy on the lead a bit more to help her learn a bit better.  Happily, Dave saved a couple of wings for us to use at home to help her learn how to point and hold her point.  We'll keep her on a lead and dangle the wing behind a bush while we restrain her.

Big thanks to Dave, Hunter, Pepper, and Luna for letting us join them!

Supermoon!

I took this picture of the supermoon last night.  To an extent, it did live up to its hype.  I watch a lot of moonrises, and as unbiased as I can be, I would say that it did appear brighter and bigger than normal, although I probably wouldn't have noticed had I not been forewarned.  I took a bunch of pictures with a tripod, but I just don't have the right gear.  Here's the best of an underwhelming lot:

Off to the Rio Grande Wild and Scenic River near Questa, NM

Lisa's driving. The dogs are sleeping at the moment. I'm writing this. The goal today is to test out our capabilities of blogging on the go. Lucy just woke up and is helping drive. Here's a test picture:

Spook likes to help too.

We're heading up north of Taos to a section of the Rio Grande gorge that is designated as a "Wild and Scenic River" by the government. It's on BLM land , but I think it's jointly administered with the NPS. There are many rafting companies that run the river, especially during spring when the runoff is flowing. We'll be hiking a bit upstream of that area we'll be up near the confluence of the Rio Grande and Red Rivers. This region is also popular with trout fishermen is search of the endangered Rio Grande cutthroat. Unfortunately, there is a forest fire somewhere near Los Alamos that has made the sky hazy.

Here's downtown Taos.

Taos Mountain.

The Rio Grande Gorge.

Letting Lucy run.

The gorge.

Confluence of the Red River and Rio Grande.

Hay ride. Questa, NM.

The Guadalara Grill in Taos, NM. I just found out recently that the term "Tapatío" refers to something or someone from Guadaljara. Think about that next time you have some Tapatío salsa.

What did we learn today? 

1. The on-the-go blogging apps for the ipad don't work well at the moment.  They are very buggy, which makes the whole process clunkier and less fun.  I probably won't do much more of this except for the odd thing to facebook.
2. Most of the photos taken by the ipad didn't meet my standards, although there a few decent ones. 
3. Oddly enough, the video didn't come out half bad. 
4. All in all, it was an excellent day.

The Mexican Weighs In On Our Trip To Juarez

As promised, the Mexican at the OC Weekly has answered my question about the sanity of our recent trip in Juarez.  He didn't endorse our trip, but he didn't crucify us for our boneheadedness either.  You can read the full story here.

Is boneheadedness a word?

Sady, the Mexican had to edit my question.  The full question was as follows:

"Dear Mexican,


Yesterday, to the horror of friends and family, my wife and I walked across the bridge from El Paso into Mexico for a day of wandering the mercados of Juárez in search of Salsa de la Viuda and Bohemia Obscura. A quick internet search suggests that there were over 3000 murders in Juárez in 2010. Our friends said we were crazy. We are both very comfortable mixing with latinos in general. My wife is a "Spanish" person from northern New Mexico (call her a "Mexican" at your peril). Our view was that the drug lords are killing one another and are not much interested in a couple of day tourists in broad daylight in the tourist zone of Juárez. The fact that we saw only 3 other obvious gabacho tourists over the course of the day shows that US tourists are terrified of Juárez. Most of the tourist mercado was closed (we were the only shoppers there). Most of the usual border liquor stores were boarded up, and those that were open had scant inventory. The mercados favored by the locals, on the other hand, were buzzing. So, were we crazy to go? We had a great day even though we didn't find the beer or salsa."

In his reply, the Mexican implied that I could find what I need in El Paso, but I have never found either Bohema Obscura or Salsa de la Viuda there.  I've looked.

Sherry Tasting Dinner

For my birthday, Lisa took me out to La Boca in Santa Fe to partake in a sherry tasting dinner.  I've recently become a fan of sherry.  Here's what we ate:

For the first course, we had two tapas.  The first was a crab salad on bread with avocado and pickled onion salad.  The second tapa was a canneloni stuffed with crab.  The first course was paired with La Gitana Manzanilla sherry.  Manzanilla sherries are kind of like a dry white wine.  This was the best course of the meal.  Both tapas were really great, and the sherry was eye-opening.  Until recnetly, I've been drinking fino sherries, but I think my next bottle will be a manzanilla instead.  It paired perfectly with the seafood.  Here are some pix (as always, click on the pix to see full-sized):

The next course was fried manchego cheese with caperberries and quice paste.  This course was paired with either an oloroso or amontillado sherry.  I'm afraid that we've forgotten which was which, but it's not a huge loss, because neither of these two sherries impressed us that much.  Also, the fried cheese was a failure.  They took excellent Spanish cheese and transformed it into some state fair fried foods concoction.  Just give me the cheese, and don't ruin it, please.  The best thing on this plate was the caperberry, which we could get out of any old jar.  Here's a picture:

In between courses paired with sherry, we had a nice salad:

The last course was a combination sausages (chorizos and blood sausage) mixed with pimientos and guindillas (each a kind of pepper).  I'm a huge fan of chorizo in particular.  I also love pimientos and guindillas.  This dish itself was very tasty.  The pairing with the sherry, on the other hand, wasn't that exciting.  Again, the sherry was either oloroso or amontillado, i.e. whichever one we didn't have in the second course.  Picture:

MMCAP

I had to go to Minneapolis recently for a yearly pharmacy purchasing meeting (The Minnesota Multistate Contracting Alliance for Pharmacy).  The meeting is run by a lot of really nice Minnesotans, which makes the meeting reasonably palatable despite the extermely dry subject matter.  The other plus is that the Twin Cities have really become one of my favorite places to visit.  I've gone the MMCAP meeting annually for five years.  Plus, I often end up there once per year for a concert.  I've got friends and family all over the place  up there (cousins, Matt Wilson fanatics, friends from the University of Iowa, friends from MMCAP, etc.).  It's gotten so that each trip ends up being stuffed to the gills. 

I've gotten to know the area well enough.  One thing I like is that the area is pretty easy to get around.  It's not too big.  There is decent public transportation (for my needs, anyway).  There is great dining.  There is great music and culture.  It's mostly safe.  I like the multicultural quality.  To me, it really feels like they've found a way to make society work in way, for example, that Albuquerque or El Paso simply have not.  The only thing I really don't like about the Twin Cities is the Vikings.  I even enjoy the cold and snow, although to fair, I don't have to put up with it for 8 months/year like the locals do.

On this particular trip, I was able to meet up with my cousins Tracy, Herschel, and cousin-in-law Bill.  We had a fine meal at the Red Sea Bar and Restaurant where I had big pile of east African vegetarian fare piled up on a plate made of thin bread.  I don't know exactly what I ate, but it was tasty.  The next night, I met up with a pharmacist friend from college, Laurie, who I had not seen in 20+ years.  Our meeting came about through the magic of Facebook.  A year ago, I had a similar meeting with and old college buddy, Mike, also through the magic if Facebook.  All I can say is that people who were your friends from way back are still your friends many years later, even if you haven't had contact with each other for years.  In each case, it really felt like I had just been hanging out with them just the other day.  It was really cool.  Also, Laurie turned me on to Black Sheep Pizza in Minneapolis, which was superb.

Over the years, I have become an aficionado of a peculiar kind of hamburger from Minneapolis called the "Jucy Lucy" (sic).  There are two places that claim to have given birth to this concoction of two beef patties sealed around a center of American cheese.  One is Matt's Bar.  The other is 5-8 Club.  Most sources claim that Matt's in the original.  For this reason, I have always eaten at Matt's.  However, there seems to be extensive, heated debate over whose Lucy is the best (go ahead and google it, if you're curious).  For this reason, I went to the 5-8 Club this year in addition to my usual trip to Matt's.  I have to declare Matt's the winner.  Here are pictures of each:

This is the Juicy Lucy (sic) from the 5-8 Club.  My primary issue with the 5-8's Lucy is the way the cheese melts in the center.  Specifically, the cheese is kind of gloppy.  It stays separated from the meat.  Look carefully at this picture:

Now, for comparison's sake, take a look at the Lucy from Matt's.  What you see is that the cheese at Matt's has mixed with the grease of the burger to create a super-tasty fat/cheese amalgamation.  Yes, I know it is unhealthy.  Look here carefully:

The second night that I hooked up with Tracy, she took me to her local curling club, where I finally got to see this peculiar Olympic sport in person.  Tracy's been telling me about it for 100 years, or so.  It's looks like great fun.  It has the social qualities of being in a bowling league, which helps get you out of the house in the middle of the winter.  I hate to say more, for fear of getting the details wrong, but it looks like shuffleboard on ice to me.  It's pretty intense.

Here's another place that is rapidly becoming a required visit each time I end up in Minneapolis:  Kramarczuk's, a deli that specializes in handmade eastern European food.  It is super tasty.

The flight home from Denver to Albuquerque was on this crop duster.  We made it home safely.

We flew over Pike's Peak.

Porn Star!

On our recent trip to Juárez, we asked our niece, Devin, to watch the dogs for a few hours (or longer if we didn't come back).  Devin was excited, because Lucy is so cute and sweet, and Spook is such a peach.  Devin hadn't seen Lucy in a while.  She still had the image of a cute, cuddly puppy.  Lucy's still cute and cuddly, of course, but she's also a Demon From Hell. She's particularly sweet and lovable later in the evening, but earlier in the day, she can be quite a handful.  This is especially true if she's in a new environment.  Such was the situation when she visited Devin:  Midday in a new environment.  Nothing but trouble.  She was Demon Lucy From Hell.  Here is a typical picture of Demon Lucy From Hell similar to what Devin had to endure.

Poor Devin.  What she wanted was Sweet Lucy, an Angel From Heaven.  Here's a picture of Sweet Lucy in full-on porn star mode late in the evening:

When Lucy's famous forebear, Sandy, died many years ago, I kept her favorite toy, the Orange Carrot, as as a memento.  I recently let Lucy play with Sandy's favorite toy.  I soon realized that Lucy is surely a reincarnation of Sandy.  She played with Sandy's toy gently, without doing any damage--i.e. the same way Sandy played with it.  Floyder would've ripped that thing to shreds in a matter of minutes.  Lucy just likes to carry it around and mouth it.

This is what Devin was looking for.  Sweet, sleepy Lucy.

Sweet Lucy can sleep in any position.

Sweet Lucy is quite capable of mischief.  I'll give you one guess how those shoes got on that bed.

Here is further proof of Sandy's reincarnation into Lucy.  This picture shows the adult Sandy from many years ago.  You can see the heart-shaped spot on her head.  Just like Lucy.