The charger lasted about ninety seconds. Long enough to feel like progress, short enough to feel personally insulting. Plug in, wait, watch the little blue light blink with what I can only describe as false confidence, vacuum for two minutes, die. Repeat a few times until we admitted the machine was never going to get […]
A Small Bureaucratic Opera: Returning a Vacuum Cleaner at Hipercor Read More »
The washing machine did not come. We had spent the better part of a morning waiting on it. Our old one had died in the kitchen a few days earlier, flooding the floor mid-cycle, and our handyman had already pronounced it unfixable. Our landlord had moved fast to get a replacement ordered, even while managing
Spain’s Natural Rhythm: The Rests Built Into a Meal, a Day, a Week, and a Year Read More »
My family and I went to Los Santos de la Humosa on August 12, 2026, for the total solar eclipse that swept across northern Spain that day, the first to touch the Iberian Peninsula in over a century. That day became the subject of a separate post, “A Total Eclipse Came to Los Santos de
Los Santos de la Humosa: Smoke, Saints, and a Village That Kept Moving Read More »
Every shutter on the street was down by early afternoon, and there was nothing curated about it, no picturesque hush staged for whoever might be passing through. Doors locked, blinds drawn, not a café chair set out anywhere, the whole place gone still under a heat with real weight to it, bearing down until you
A Total Eclipse Came to Los Santos de la Humosa. The Town Kept Its Own Time. Read More »
The Aparcamiento Pico del Obispo looked exactly like I remembered it. Six months earlier, on a scouting trip in January, we had left the rental car in that same open-air lot before wandering into the casco histórico, the old town, to imagine a life we hadn’t built yet. Now that life was starting, and I
My First Week in Alcalá: Paperwork With Better Views Read More »
A Knight Without a Cause We all need purpose. The hard part is figuring out what that purpose actually is. Mine came, of all places, from a fictional character. Don Quixote, Cervantes’ aging knight who looks around at the world he lives in, decides it no longer fits him, and simply rides away to create
Why I Left the US After 30 Years and Moved to Alcalá de Henares, Spain Read More »
