Muchacho Polaco

We had a nice view of the eclipse a few nights back.

Good size king snake made an appearance yesterday in the car port. Hopefully she was on her way to eat a nest of baby rattlers.

Almost no one knows anything about May Day. Even so, yesterday was a big day. Not so much due to it being May Day. Matt and I were both ordained at Midtown into the office of ruling elder. We had a lot of friends join us in the celebration.

Hitting nearly 100 today…still the pool temp in the 70s and too cold. Maybe one more month.

My sister just sent me this photo from a few years back. Fun lunch time memory – though the food was bleh.

We had a work event at Top Golf last Friday. This is an annual event and quite fun.

We have three varieties of agave in our front island. All three varieties regularly propagate, so we get free ones to add to the collection. I transplanted seven this afternoon.

This is the Agave Americana. They get quite large. This one is about 5 ft tall and 7 ft wide. We had a lot of these in our house in Sonora.

I think this is Agave Weberi. They are really nice looking and have a lot of little ones that pop up regularly.

The best of the bunch are these Queen Victoria agave. We have four of them now. To buy them locally at this size runs $300 each. We seem to get 1-2 new ones per year.

It wasn’t easy getting these up because the soil is so rocky and difficult to dig in.

We had a nice meal for Easter brunch last Sunday and Charles and Julie’s house.

Madrid remains our favorite city in Spain. The buildings are so grandiose and seem to go on forever. The city is alive with thousands of people moving through every street and alley. It is holy week so it is even busier than usual. We had a really nice hotel right in the heart of the central historic district.

There is so much to see and Yun loves to shop (I am of the opposite persuasion), so she had a lot of fun doing that. I had a lot of fun drinking beer and enjoying the clamor.

The central square is enormous and quite the sight to behold.

We had lunch at a restaurant hundreds of years old. I had albondagas and it was glorious.

We spent hours at the Thyssen Museum (near the Prada museum). We saw paintings by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, and Dali (clearly was insane).

And then another bar of course – this one opened in 1908.

We had such a fun time on this trip. The journey and timezone difference was exhausting but certainly worth it. One thing we were able to take advantage of was our global entry passes. This allowed us to mostly skip through the TSA checkpoints and skip all of the lines at customs coming back. We got through in under 30 seconds versus the 1-2 hour lines for the others.

On our return we got stuck in Dallas for more hours than anticipated due to thunderstorms. Fortunately there was a Capital One lounge that we have access to that was really nice – free food and drinks (with great meals and an endless variety of snacks), along with showers, relaxation rooms, and a gym. This was a relaxing and enjoyable way to endure a long layover.

Granada was a fascinating city with much to see. I think we walked more here than anywhere else.

The main site was the Alambra, a castle up on a hill overlooking the city. We left our hotel at 7am to make the 1 hour hike (uphill and mostly in the dark!) to get to it. We arrived in time to watch the sunrise over the city.

The castle itself was pretty impressive. We spent hours touring through it.

Granada was not unlike Sevilla or Cordoba. We spent our days wandering through the city visiting various stores, eating very similar meals, and enjoying the wonderful weather. We found a place for paella one evening but weren’t too impressed with the food itself. The location was filled with interesting sights and sounds.

We spent hours one evening and a bar named after Kafka. They had great wine and it was a popular place.