wisconsin

held's is the place to go for old-fashioned butcher shop ambience and the hypnotic aromas of smoked meats and aged cheeses. it is the stop to make if you are traveling to or from middle-of-nowhere wisconsin north of milwaukee. if you are a vegetarian forget it.

egyptian thing

This is an Egyptian thing I saw at the Field Museum. I think this is what I would have done if I had lived back then, drawn royal cartoons. 

tiles

these are four of the more than 100,000 photos I took of tiles and repeating patterns in Spain. OK, maybe not 100,000, but that is how you might feel if you looked at all my pictures. They were irresistible. 

hay cerdos en españa

so it turns out that there ARE actual pigs in Spain, but I did not see a one of them, only their legs, deliciously air-cured and hanging in bars and cafés and restaurants and town squares (Trevélez) and grocery stores. I saw sheep and horses and goats and one eagle and many dogs. Where are the pigs? Then I saw this cabeza and I figured it belonged to one of the many deliciously air-cured legs. I have never prepared the head of a pig and I imagine it is incredibly gross, but seeing this in the Boqueria did not make me want to become a vegetarian as it did a few of my workmates. A pig head! You can also buy olives and cheeses and beautiful fruits and vegetables within yards of this cabeza, but the cabeza is much more fascinating.

jamón

This is how the world should be: you walk into a bar, order a cortado, a glass of beer, a croissant, tomato bread with air-cured ham and aged cheese. This is how the world should be. This is Spain.

crazy guy's house

If you just sit in the back yard and watch the squirrels climbing around the crazy guy's back porch, it can be very relaxing and amusing. The stock market and John McCain disappear. Those squirrels are living INSIDE his porch, but they don't go in through the open windows; they have found access through the rotting window frames. Their huge nest must be for show, because the back porch is surely a better house for them. 

this pepper

I am having trouble getting this to look right, so I am posting two (!) things the same day. First of all, I want to say that the pepper you see below this post is a real pepper grown by Michael in the back yard. It tasted as perfect as it looks.

So, just to tell you, I have worked more hours in the past three days than in the past three weeks and I must say it feels GOOD. Really good. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. 

And to comment on this disaster of a country I live in, I am not hopeful anymore about the economy or how the US looks to the rest of the world. I was hopeful last week, but now that the wizards in our government have decided to try to make up for all their mishandling of the economy by putting the country, that is, us, into debt for all eternity, I don't see any bright spots.

On a positive note, the weather has been really amazingly beautiful lately.