Yesterday we got about 4 inches of very dry and fluffy snow, which is super pretty and gives a soft finish to everything. We also found out that our street is plowed when it snows. The snow added a whole bunch of white color for the wind to work with, and the beach was covered with sand and snow abstract shapes. The designs bring to mind the Jack Frost character who makes all the winter ice and snow into works of art. No pictures of this but during the day we worked. Then it was sunset time, which we bundled…

John had a work trip to Cancun the first week of February and then is going on another to San Diego next week, so we packed our warmest clothes to spend this week in Michigan. We’d seen the wintery shoreline in January so thought we knew what to expect, but like all coasts it changes so much with different conditions in light, snow, and the frequent melting and refreezing of lake water into ice.

Readers may be looking for a post with warm scenes of Mexico, but we stayed in the Midwest for all of January this year. And you know what? It’s really cold! Jan 20 was a big day in the world – and in addition to items that made the news, I came down with a bad cold that hung around for about 2 weeks. Here I am undergoing a home humidifier treatment and maybe hiding from the world a bit. Staying inside gets old so fast, so by the weekend, we bundled up for a walk and discovered that Humboldt…

Some posts don’t naturally form around one theme but ‘ice’ is hands down an easy theme for this one! Last night we had tickets for the international puppet festival, and we saw ‘Anywhere’ – a performance with a marionette made of ice. The puppeteer lives in Iceland and as we observed last summer in Iceland, when ice is mentioned in Iceland you can be sure there’s water too. The puppet was constructed from quite a few parts so its movements were really natural and charming, and as the performance went on it melted quite a bit, making drips that caught…

We had so much fun in Madrid!

We are staying on a very busy retail street in the centro in Madrid, and was I ever delighted and surprised to see that an exhibition of work by sculptor Jaume Plensa was open, right here on our street! Plensa’s work includes the towers with faces and water in millennium park in Chicago, and a very large figure made of letters on the city wall at Antibes, France, as well as his distinctive long, narrow head portraits. The exhibition is at the Foundacion Telefonica, and there were also really excellent exhibits there by other artists, on the themes of telephones…

On Christmas Eve and Day we walked to Retiro park, which reminded us of Central Park in New York. For sunset we met up at temple David, a 2nd century BCE Egyptian temple that was a gift from Egypt to Spain. It’s reconstructed on a ridge with an amazing westward view. Excellent intel from Zoe and Miles’s friends, we wouldn’t have heard of this site otherwise! Walking back we saw more holiday lights. Then back to our apartment for a wonderful Christmas dinner with the group. So yummy and we didn’t even have room for dessert, half a king cake…

We took a bus from Granada to Madrid and have been enjoying the run up to Christmas here. Madrid is so vibrant and full of people, and the Christmas decorations and lights are super festive! Tonight, for Christmas Eve we made a collective dinner for the 4 of us plus Miles and Zoe’s friends Nick and Shep. It was such a lovely time, and we’re looking forward to seeing them on Christmas Day too, for another meal! We took a walk after dinner to the festive plaza. Feliz navidad!

Wrapping up an amazing 5 days in Granada, here are some highlights. 2. The Alhambra. We stayed in the same street that Miles and Zoe live on, right across from the Alhambra. So we saw the massive fortress above us throughout our stay, and we visited the extensive grounds one day. We agreed that the Palace Nazaries is the most amazing building we’ve ever been in. 3. Flamenco. Miles got us tickets to a flamenco performance in a cave, in the neighborhood where flamenco was born. The show was intimate and very powerful. 4. Pomegranates. Granada and pomegranate vine from…