Christmas Letters

2000 Letter
2001 Letter
2002 Letter
2003 Letter
2004 Letter
2005 Letter
2006 Letter
2007 Letter
2008 Letter
2009 Letter
2010 Letter
2011 Letter
2012 Letter
2013 Letter
2014 Letter
2015 Letter
2016 Letter
2017 Letter
2018 Letter
2019 Letter
2020 Letter
2021 Letter
2022 Letter

Merry Kings Day to All,

In celebration of Balthazar, Melchor, Casper, and Martin Luther, it's time to write a quick note to all.

First, get out your pencils and record our new address: Vidrio 12, 2D 41003 Sevilla Spain

We currently have a new telephone number, (954) 41 03 38, but the mystic cosmos that is our telephone company may soon return our old number, (954) 21 32 52.

The year 2000 was a year of transition for us, as we downshifted from 5th gear (New York) to 1st. Maybe Stability will now lay its firm hand on our shoulders and tell us to stay a while. That seems to be the case with my job at Xware, where I've broken my personal employment record of 2 2/3 years. Without the moral support of an office, the abstraction of what I do seems all the more surreal, yet at the same time I feel a kinship with the shoe repairman two doors down, hard at work under his single small light.

Xware helped get us to New York for their Christmas Party, after which we moved on to Pennsylvania for a few weeks. New Year's Eve found us in Berlanga, as it did the year before, waiting for the utilities to be connected before moving into our new apartment. This time we're back to a purchased property. We had the contractor rip out all the walls and start from scratch. Thanks to Pura, renovations are now complete. Boxes have been emptied, and today, the first pictures were hung.

Adrian met his Year 2000 resolution of walking (Dec. 20, just under the wire) and talking (yes, he's bilingual -- that is, two words: 'agua' and 'bread'). His 2001 resolutions remain to be seen, though they would appear to be more subversive. Our own resolutions are to create a couple more websites: we'd hate to miss out on the dot-com implosion.

We hope everyone's doing splendidly!

Love to all,

Pura, Adrian, and Tom

Merry Christmas & Three Kings Day to all!

An American friend of ours told us yesterday that she hates Christmas. I'd say she's in a good place to avoid it, then. Aside from El Corte Ingles putting a few thousand bulbs on their buildings, there's really not much that's visibly different here when walking down the street. The only other evidence of the impending holidays is the lines of people waiting to peer into the nativity scenes on display in various places. Today we stopped into the City Hall's 'Belen'. I got the sudden feeling that I was looking in on a back-room exhibit of a museum of natural history entitled 'Dawn of Civilization'. A few more years living in Sevilla and I'm sure I'll get to respecting and admiring tradition, but for now I keep thinking what a few New York artists could do for these Belens.

So I've been determined to give this Christmas a bit of American style to get me into the spirit. Pura and I discovered that the local florister does sell a few little evergreen trees. We then bought some ornaments and lights (colored and white -- we don't take sides). So as not to snub local tradition, I grabbed some of Adrian's plastic animals, fashioned a fine blue baby Jesus out of his playdough, and had a reasonable first-year nativity scene. It was short-lived though: Adrian grabbed his animals back, and then took interest in the playdough "tortuga". I admitted the resemblance to a turtle, but explained to him that what looked like a turtle shell was really a swaddling sheet covering Jesus' body. The tree, anyway, looks great! We even got a cold spell in Sevilla, straight from Siberia, we're told.

The big news of the year, as most of you know, will be the big news of next year. Pura's due to have a boy in early April. On her last visit, the doctor told her he's getting pretty big -- that may partly explain why Pura's not having the most enjoyable pregnancy. With the pregnancy, we decided to rent an apartment with an elevator, and rent ours out. (We're renting ours out short-term, meaning we can make gaps if anyone wants to take a Sevillan holiday -- just give us enough advance notice.) Next year, we're bound to move again: I think Pura's decided the place we own is too small for 4, and I've decided I'm hooked on owning the place we live in -- here, my mind swirls on capital improvements that I'll never make.

I haven't decided on a name for our boy yet -- not the one that's due, but the one that's out. I like 'Adrian', but Pura and everyone else call him 'Cristobal'. To avoid the problem, I end up calling him 'buggy boy' or 'Kaluo'. He, on the other hand, has a similar problem, calling me 'Papa, 'Daddy', or 'Tom' in equal proportions. His solution is to say more than one, as in 'Papa Tom'. That seems to be his solution to bilinguality too -- hence 'moonluna' and 'blueazul'. In any case, AdrianCristobal is our dreamchild. He soaks up love from all quarters, and passes it on back, knowing just how we like it. Pura often wishes he could stay small forever, which always sends my thoughts to 'The Tin Drum' -- another good reason not to have stairs.

A few layoffs in my company, but otherwise no change (except my new 'window seat'). Pura gets occasional employment from our website. The website is in 'maintenance mode'; it has stabilized to getting about 70 hits a day. We're now posting family pictures in www.spainexpat.com/about.htm.

Hmm. It's two weeks later now, so before Balthazar and his friends arrive, I'll send this off. Remember, have your 12 grapes and red underwear ready for New Year's Eve!

Tom

Merry Christmas to all!

I hope everyone's got sugar plums in their heads and champagne bottles in their fridge.

Last year Adrian got to be an angel for the school play. This year he's to be a tambourine. Tambourines are symbols of Christmas around here (kids traditionally bring their drums and tambourines to the neighbors' house, sing half a carol, then hit 'em up for pocket change). We put Paula -- Adrian's third parent -- in charge of making the costume. She's done a fine job, so now it's up to Adrian to say his line: "los juguetes." We're pretty nervous: we're told he absolutely refuses to say it during rehearsal.

2002 was a landmark year for the Strong LLorente family. In the spring we completed the family unit: Teo Rafael was born on the morning of March 26. The first few months of his life, he was more-or-less ignored. Two weeks before he was born, we bought a house in need of renovation. We spent all spring and summer moving between 3 places and fighting with the workers (a draining experience). Finally as we recovered and began to find time to raise our heads and look around, we discovered that we had an excellent baby on our hands. There's just nothing as huggable as an 8-month-old. He's just learned how to crawl, so it'll now be easier for him to go over and chew on Adrian's projects (as Adrian has discovered). I think we've decided that Teo looks like Dad and has Mom's character, while Adrian is the reverse. (Nice and simple -- dare they confound us and develop their own characters?)

Adrian's first Halloween was realized on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, where the stores stayed open and gave away candy. He began the night crying 'a casa, a casa', but then a 7-year-old fairy suddenly appeared, kissed him on the cheek, and transferred some candy from her bucket to his. He peered inside his bucket and his tears began to dry up. We walked along, and in a little while, he was ready to venture into one of the stores. By the end of the night he was swaggering with confidence -- at the last store, I even got him to say 'trick-or-treat' audibly before he hit 'em up for candy.

Just two weeks ago were the "final" touches on the house: the completion of Pura's office on the ground floor. Before we bought it, this space (commercial space as opposed to the living space upstairs) was rented to an 80-year-old woman whose principal merchandise was pillow stuffing. Twenty years ago (judging from the newspapers), she'd stopped cleaning the store. By the time we met her, there were only a few square feet left of walkable space. After we bought the house and I'd begun digging away to see what it was we'd bought, I was amazed at the demand there was in Sevilla for pillow stuffing. I was constantly approached with foam inquiries; I was all too happy to give away any and all hunks that hadn't yet begun the process of decomposition. I'd put it in a bag for them like a real merchant. Sometimes I'd take a break from cleaning to investigate the drawers of a monstrous dresser that occupies one wall. The drawers were filled with a vast supply of sewing machine parts (and I eventually uncovered 6 whole sewing machines). The fathers of the renter and the owner used to run a sewing-machine repair shop. Before that, it had been a 'colmao': bar and dry goods store.

Now it's a law office. The same day we carried Pura's computer down from the top floor to her new office, she got a call from a woman in Geneva: Pura had been chosen to represent an American company expanding into Spain. Her first business client! Our feeling is growing that she's going to be successful here (that is, once she can part with Teo and start taking him to the nursery). Sevilla has a hard shell to protect it from new ideas, but Pura's going to break through.

Meanwhile, the New York company I work for has been struggling, as with all high-tech companies. They were fortunate enough to have developed a product a few years ago that's now keeping them afloat. I was fortunate enough to be on that project, so I haven't been included in the layoffs. A few months ago when payday started getting random, Pura said it was time for me to start thinking about alternatives. 'Pillow stuffing merchant' instantly came to mind, but perhaps that's not to be, as the company seems now to have turned the corner.

The mayor went wild this year on Christmas lights. He's hung lights off every tree and building. Our street had apparently complained last year about not having Christmas lights. This year Regina street has a big 'Felicidades' and behind it, 3 sets of lights in the shape of a drum, one of them strung from a recently painted hook on our house. (Check out our house and boys at www.spainexpat.com/about.htm.)

Here's wishing splendid holidays to everyone and to a peaceful 2003.

Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Greetings All,

Time for my year-end email . . .

Mysterious forces caused me a few months ago to pick a couple of ancient books off my shelf and begin a careful re-reading of Bloom County. I hadn't read these books since college. I'd long ago judged them as classics, thus justifying space in my very small book collection (product of a person who has moved too many times). In the books, I happened upon a strip about "penguin middle age", where the subject finds the need to recover his lost youth. Mysterious forces thereby explained, I commiserated with Berke Breathed and his penguin.

It was recently reported to me that I was about to turn 40. I did the math, and found this to be accurate. Yesterday, this landmark event passed without too many aggrieved sighs. I admit that I didn't climb Mount Everest, create a classic comic strip, nor perform any other suitably grand accomplishment in those years. Had I done so, though, I'm sure I could still manage to judge my past equally harshly, and I'm sure I'd still be making as many grand plans for the future.

My personal news of the year is that I quit my job after five-and-a-half years. Hanging up the (relatively unspattered) apron of my 18-year programming career neatly coincides with my 40th year. (These days, I read that my career is about to be "outsourced" to India. Gracious of me to donate my career to the developing world, no?)

My birthday was spent chasing a guy all over a high-tech office complex until I finally cornered him in the hallway and gave him a two-minute presentation. As a soul who's been in a high-bandwidth closet for a few years, isolated from human contact (aside from my family and the breadstore man), I had to muster courage to talk to a human and what's more, a stranger. (In fact, he wasn't a stranger; he was a strangest. I was at a conference a few weeks before where he'd been on the "facing bench" making very peculiar faces.)

I didn't mention that after quitting, I moved down from the 3rd floor of our house into Pura's 1st floor law office to become employee #3 of Strong Avocados. My job description is not fully clear, though "get clients" is the gist of it. So far I've taken this to mean clean up the web site -- a gentle transition from programming, plus I avoid talking to strangers that way. (Wouldn't want to be a hypocrite: any rule that applies to the kids should apply to the parents too.) However, when Pura deems that a potential client smells of "machismo", she sometimes calls on my services in the field -- hence the birthday chase.

I haven't fully made the transition from selfish to selfless that I think is supposed to come with having a family: it looks like this letter won't give equal time to the four of us. Oh well . . .

The law firm got started for real in the spring of this year, as Pura left childbirth behind (leaving her, she says, with 10% of her former cerebral ability). The firm has now rebounded from a lousy fall. Still too soon to see where it's headed. Pura's convinced of the firm's future success, and it's great to see self-confidence flowing through her. I don't know if she's taking her skills at "handling people" to new heights, or if I'm just more aware now that I work across from her, but it's a pleasure to listen to her coaxing bureaucrats to action, putting an opposing lawyer in their place, or making her clients feel secure and cozy.

Last August's trip that Adrian and I took to Princeton did wonders to consolidate Adrian's English. He's truly bilingual now (and, I believe, he has already corrected Pura's English and my Spanish on at least one occasion). In September, he made the leap from nursery school to regular school. The main leap, I think, was sizewise: hundreds of kids now yelling at recess. When we drop him off in the morning, he carefully avoids the fray, picking his way to the sidelines, rather than finding someone to tackle. Adrian has to have things just-so, and if he's not well-rested and well-fed, he gets very upset when Teo makes things not-so.

Teo's at a great age. He has a sense of purpose in all that he does. He knows what he wants and he will get there, unless of course, an adult stops him -- an action not chosen lightly. One of my parental joys these days is to watch Teo climb on Adrian (or me) with his resolute expression. Teo's vocabulary is about 8 words now, including "cayo" ("it fell") when he drops something and "ball" (his only English word). He calls both Pura and me "mama". I've been letting it ride, figuring that was a compliment to me, but today, I made a repeated effort to clear this up -- "I'm dada, that's mama". But each time he gave me a broad grin, as if to say "good joke, mama".

Other cast members include Adan, a 21-year-old accountant and employee #2 in the law firm; and Miriam, our 4-8PM nanny.

Tomorrow we're off to Extremadura, for two weeks of Christmas vacation. I will try to refrain from discussing business with Pura. I've decided my 2004 resolution is to try to vote 17 times in the November elections -- breaking the law in the name of one's conscience is the Quaker way! (or is being Quakerly just another way to recover my lost youth?)

I wish everyone a happy and toasty holiday season.

'Til next year,
Tom

Greetings to All,

A friend once gave us advice after we had our first child. She said be careful not to talk only about the children for the next 20 years of marriage; talk about other things. Pura and I were doing pretty well with that advice until now. We talk most of the time we're awake about our latest child, "Strong Abogados". One day, Adrian, who loves to put on theatre productions, got upset because we left before his theatre began, and began crying "where are my clients?".

By September, our business became an obsession. We realized we had to create a life outside Strong Abogados. So on November we resorted to our usual solution to all problems: we moved, this time across town to our old apartment we'd been renting. Our house/office on Regina Street is now just an office (with more space). Since there was no house buying or selling involved, the move was real easy: only the essentials had to go; the junk in the attic could stay. A week before our move, Pura's sister Lina moved with her two sons back to Sevilla. Lina now works in our office. We're slowly working her architectural career into our business.

During our 8 years of our marriage, I'd begun to think it was our curse that I had a well-paying job and didn't want to work, while Pura didn't and wanted one. I had no idea the solution was so easy. I just had to quit, and then Pura would have one. In other words, the website has made the difference; we now have a bonafide business, albeit with many peaks and valleys along the way. The valleys come when we realize the peaks weren't as big as they seemed from a distance. Our latest peak came last week with a trip to London that Pura and I took to discuss collaboration with a tax planning company. Usually, when Pura takes me to a meeting, I don't say much; I just bask in Pura's shadow as she exudes confidence and knowledge -- though basking makes me a bit sleepy. This time, though, I almost felt comfortable in my business suit, and played the part Pura's been waiting for. The prez then treated us to an excellent Thai lunch that was almost worth missing the plane for.

Teo has a commanding presence, not easy to pull off for someone who comes up to your knees. Adrian is "the good one" according to his peers, as another might be called "the tall one". In the morning we walk across town and drop them off. In the afternoon, one of us picks them both up from school. Earlier this year, ferocious animals would usually chase us home (occasionally passing through "el mundo de los dinosaurios"). Since Halloween, though, Adrian's been running ahead of me, hiding in the doorways to scare me. Teo usually manages to reach the doorway before I do to help scare me.

As I sit before our Christmas tree, I wonder whether olden day folk really had Christmas trees with candles and glass balls hanging off them, or whether they didn't actually have children back then. Our little Charlie Brown tree took a beating today from the collective energies of four young boys, its plastic-but-beautiful balls bouncing all over the place.

We wish all of you a splendid 2005!

Love,
Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Merry Christmas!

Or in the words of our new adoptive language, Bon Nadal! That's about the extent of my Catalan, unless I add the two words that Adrian has learned in his Catalan classes at school: "vert" and "melic" ("green" "bellybutton"). I hope everyone has enjoyed their Christmas holidays. We're especially enjoying this bit of R&R after a year where we bit off more than we could chew. Most of our years could be classified as transition years, but this one more so. The transition began in February when Pura decided bring me along on one of her work trips to Barcelona. During this trip I found Barcelona inspiring -- the continuing modernisme mentality provided fresh air from Sevilla's love of tradition -- so I began prodding Pura to move there. It wasn't so much my charts & graphs highlighting the business potential of Barcelona that convinced Pura; it was more that she felt since she picked the country to live in, I get to pick the city. The event that tipped the scales was a notary in Barcelona offering us office space.

So, by March, I was on a two-week trip to Barcelona to find a place to buy. On May 3rd, I was back to Barcelona for the closing. A day later the movers arrived from Sevilla and loaded both home and office. A day after that, Pura and the kids arrived. The following Monday Adrian and Teo were in their new schools "Panda" and "Santa Claus" and we were at work at "Strong Abogados".
A quick summary of the salient facts:
Puchi (pronounced "pooch"): the seller of the apartment we bought.
Puig (pronounced "pooch"): the street where we live.
Putxet (pronounced "poo-chet"): the big park across the street.
Peach (pronounced "peach"): the color Puchi painted his apartment.

We thought our two employees in Sevilla had made the decision to move to Barcelona, but we were wrong. So June found us scrambling to hire new employees and get the work done (and renovate the kitchen). In July, the kids and I spent time in the USA. We got to see a lot of family and friends, especially during road trips to Detroit and Boston. Many fine reunions -- new family meeting old friends. Pura, meanwhile, kept the business afloat with one new employee. In September, we got two more employees. In October, the notary hired another notary and staff, meaning we had to leave. November was spent looking for a new office (not the whole of November -- we did in fact reserve an evening that month to discuss whether a testicle can spontaneously explode (we found Google quite illuminating on this issue, but ultimately inconclusive)), while December was spent moving and getting settled into our new, and as yet unheated, office. We are currently researching a happy equilibrium between number of space heaters vs. blown fuses.

Just as we thought we'd cleared the last hurdle of 2005, Adrian told us he wanted an icthyosaurus for Christmas. Pura worked on him, and managed to convince him that what he really wanted was the rest of the "Vaca Maca" series ("Vaca Maca in the bathroom" being our one book in Catalan, bought on a trip here 4 years ago. Adrian has decided he wants to go beyond green bellybutton). All fine until we discovered, after trips to 3 bookstores, that books about cows roaming rooms of a house do go out of print eventually. In the end we got him a dinosaur game, and he's happy. For Pura's mother, we bought a "caganette" for her ever-more elaborate nativity scenes. A caganette is a fine handcrafted clay figure who is squatting to take a dump, or in most cases, has squatted to take a dump. This litte Catalunian joke in the back of the creche has apparently reached epic proportions, with caganettes now accounting for a quarter of all creche figures in the Christmas stalls behind the Barcelona cathedral.
Salient conclusion: "Seeing the North Star brightly burning sets one's insides swiftly churning."
Anyway, we didn't find a caganette in the guise of Princess Leticia, so we settled on a thoughtful guy wearing a Catalan flag and smoking a pipe.

Adrian (6) and Teo (3) save Pura and me from talking about work all the time. After the summer, Teo joined Adrian at the Santa Claus school. The school is British, with a picture of the Queen in the entrance. At first, Adrian liked his new school "Santa Claus" better than the one in Sevilla: "they don't let me choose my dessert, but it does have a playground". Now though, he's not so thrilled. Angels, especially small ones who don't like to play ball at recreo, can get pushed around a bit. The truth is, we're not thrilled with the school either, so we'll be looking into semi-public schools for both Adrian and Teo this fall. Schools with state support are required to have the classes mainly taught in Catalan. We're hoping they're mentally prepared for a new language. Meanwhile, Adrian at home is now reading (voluntarily!), inventing games (and letting Teo win), pointing out what rhymes, avoiding cracks, and drawing holiday pictures (he's now begun Valentine's day pictures).

Teo began the year speaking only Spanish. It was a thrill to see him at my parents' house speaking his first words in English. He's now as bilingual as Adrian. Teo's spongy body is turning into muscle, but he remains a ticklish little ball. He frequently points out "I'm getting bigger!". Teo's generally a respectful little brother, but sometimes he pushes Adrian around a bit too. The tackles-from-behind are to be expected, but I've even seen him tease Adrian to the point of tears.

I wish you all splendid two thousand sixes! Pura and I resolve to start the year in slow motion: rejecting new clients and watching our kids get bigger.

Love,
Teo, Adrian Cristobal, Pura, and Tom

Our latest contact data is:
Ferran Puig 74, bj 1
08023 Barcelona
Home: 935 351561
Work: 932 155393

Greetings!

It's the 18th -- one week until Christmas. The tree's not going to make it. The nephews came over yesterday -- one rushed over and grabbed a handful of needles off the floor. This morning the other had the broom out sweeping the floor under the tree. Maybe we should cordon off the tree. Adrian's been pouring water into the soil like I told him to. Christmas trees in Barcelona come in a flowerpot. I've now decided the flowerpot's not there to help nourish the few remaining root capillaries, nor is it there to help me develop muscle tone as I hauled the tree up the 45 degree hill to our apartment. I think it's there because Spanish households aren't yet equipped with Christmas tree stands. Reminds me of the pumpkin I bought in the local supermarket this Halloween, which came with instructions:
1) cut hole in top.
2) scoop out goo.
3) cut scary face.
American cultural imperialism -- just makes me proud.

I was having trouble remembering a whole year back, so I asked Pura if she could give me a unifying theme for our 2006. She told me "planting seeds". Hmmm . . . sounds good. Perennials, I hope, instead of the annuals planted in years past. I guess if I had to choose a theme for 2006, it would be "obsessions". I think this has been a particularly obsessive year with us. (Theme-ing our life is good practice, since we're planning to write an Oscar-winning movie script based loosely on our lives (romantic comedy, PG13)). Let me try out both themes (mine first). Our overall obsession, as those of you who have spoken to us in 2006 know, is our business. Then, sprinkled in have been our ancillary obsessions:

- Pura searching the web for office furniture in January. (The internet is especially good for feeding obsessions.) She found several pearls of good taste on ebay, such as http://stores.ebay.es/Antike-Fundgrube:

- Adrian's obsession with dinosaurs in January. "No, no, that's not a triceratops, it's a styracosaurus!!!" "Sure, son, I'm sorry." (Adrian, in general, has a rather obsessive personality type -- wonder where he gets it from.)

- Me with our blog site www.explodingtesticle.com in February (note the foreshadowing in my 2005 Xmas letter).

- Pura and I with the departure of three employees during the year (and post-departure work obsessions trying to do their jobs).

- Adrian and Teo's pokemon craze, which went full swing in October. Teo really has no choice but to go with Adrian's flow (Teo learned a lot about dinosaurs too).

- TV obsessions, easier in fact without a TV. We tuned in and turned on to downloading stuff in August, allowing a person to watch a whole TV season in two weeks, or less if you're not sidetracked by work. We had a "Desparate Housewives" bout, then "Fawlty Towers", now "The Office". I also got excited in August when I discovered internet radio -- heaven for an expat. Today I cranked up the Persian station.

Pura's following her current obsession at the moment, reading "Management for Dummies", which we bought along with "Beating Stress for Dummies" during an notably obsessive shopping binge in Target. (It has become tradition to spend a day every year in the USA stocking up on basic provisions -- clothes, toys, books, Cheerios, and peanut butter cups -- as if we were going on a yearlong camping trip to Spain.)

Now let's try the "planting seeds" theme: I guess some of the seeds would be our new employees in the business. They're all new to Strong Abogados in 2006, and they're solid. We're better at picking employees now (even before reading "Management for Dummies"). One key hire was Pura's sister, Lina, in June, moving from Sevilla to Barcelona. Her life and ours tend to weave like DNI strands. There's a good reason why family businesses happen -- it's such a relief to have absolute confidence in an employee from the start. Among other tasks, Lina performs the vital role of mediating: as can be expected, when Pura and I have a business disagreement, they are not always cool affairs discussed across a long mahogany table. After hiring Lina, we hired four more employees. The new employees all worked to fend off approaching chaos. Until chaos was averted, I vowed in October to make the company lose money: No New Clients, and kick out the rotten apples among the existing clients. Last week, chaos was officially called off. The money-losing campaign was also a success, and so I decided to turn the GoogleAds marketing switch back on.

"Santa Claus" is a catchy name for a school and we liked the Tartan outfits, but otherwise we weren't convinced. We found a new school to take Adrian and Teo to for the fall. The school promptly announced it was closing down, so we found another school -- no Han, it's called "Escola Pia", not "The Easter Bunny" -- but had to pray there were openings for the boys (Catholic school, by the way). By this time, Lina had decided to come, so there were more prayers that her two boys Harito and Dario could get in also. In July we got the great news that the school had managed to squeeze 'em all in. We've been really happy with the school. Once, Adrian was even upset on hearing it was a weekend! Quite amazing considering that the classes are all in Catalan. The four boys have hardly complained. A bit more work on us parents, though, trying to decipher the memos from school: is Teo supposed to bring 3 pinenuts to class, or were 3 lice found on Teo's head?

In March, we had a fine visit from my parents. This time, they didn't have to help pack our belongings. In July, my sister Laura and her family flew in for five days before heading to France. I hope it'll be a yearly visit. Since we didn't go to the USA this summer, we got in a week during Thanksgiving. Pura had two business trips this year - I tagged along on both: one to Bilbao where we celebrated her 40th; the other to Ibiza last week.

Of the four new employees, I'm including Merci. She allows Lina, Pura, and me to put in our hours by picking the four kids up from school, cleaning the office and two homes, and yes, making the three of us lunch. Pura pushed the plan on Lina and me -- I knew I couldn't argue, though I know it's going to make us soft. Pura's thrilled with Merci and with the plan. Merci is going to meet the other employees at our office Christmas lunch this Friday.

I'm continually amazed at how well Adrian and Teo play together. Hardly any fights at all -- I can't understand it. They're also thrilled to have their cousins around again.

Jeez, now that I think of it, Pura's happy, Lina's happy, the four kids are happy. Maybe it's even time I stopped complaining.

Merry Christmas!
Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Merry Christmas to All!

Christmas 2007 will be just the four of us tucked away in our nest. We got a live tree this year, I've been learning to make Christmas cookies, and Pura is playing a station of Christmas standards on internet radio. Since moving to a new apartment in August, we've been getting things curiously cozy. This time we're not just carting all furniture from the old place plus a side table from the trash; only select items have made the cut, other pieces we've bought new (and not necessarily from ikea!). What's more, I've begun to barbecue. I believe we're finally discovering nesting habits. Phrases like "5-year plan" and "a stable environment for our kids" are being uttered.

The new place is a rental unit, a short walk to work or school (14 minutes with kids, 7 without). The daily routine is: 7:30 I get up and while the the coffee's brewing, I stretch and watch the sunrise (or the neighbors, whichever's more interesting). At 7:40, I wake up the rest of the family. At 8:20, I get nervous that we're running late. At 8:45 we're off, being sure to close the building door behind us so the older neighbors don't get distraught. By 9:10 we're at work checking our emails. Pura then checks if employees are arriving late, while I check the bank account to see who's paid. At 4:45 in the afternoon, I swivel my chair and ask Pura who's going to pick up the kids. She says she can. At 4:51 she's still in the office and I get nervous. At 4:53 she leaves, and I then work another two hours, and put a note in Outlook to remember tomorrow to swivel and say I'll pick up the kids rather than phrasing it as a question.

We still own the apartment on the hill. Now that we've moved out, we've fixed it up much better, so that we can rent it out. It was a good place. I'm going to miss the times with the kids in the big park next door: catching bubbles, having water fights, playing upball, polarball, and snakeball, sticking little snails on big snails on benches, collecting seeds, scrambling down steep hillsides looking for the ball. The Putxet years . . . But our new place has great sunrises, and two! terrazas, so we can make our own two little parks (complete with Christmas tree).

In August we celebrated the 50th Anniversary of my parents. Mom and Dad and Laura's family all converged on a little medieval town in Costa Brava. We rented a beautiful house with a swimming pool carved into the rock and plenty of nooks: a well in Mom and Dad's room, a bread oven in our room. In the midst of the meals and the beaches, we surprised Mom and Dad one evening with a play, a remarriage ceremony, and a fabulous Anniversary scrapbook that Laura had put together. During this memorable evening, we were treated to a retelling of the early romance of William and Nancy, with previously unreleased details!

Also in August, Pura and I got in a 6-day trip to Ireland, leaving the kids with Pura's parents. From Dublin, we crossed the country to Sligo, my interest in that town incited by old memories of a downscale bar in Boston named Sligo Pub.

In school, Adrian has found his arch-enemy: the cold and silent multiplication tables. Teo has discovered that he can read words - he now seems to be finding them everywhere. Adrian's confidence has been building steadily. Teo's confidence has never been an issue (it doesn't hurt that Pura's nickname for him is "Perfeccion Absoluta"). Early this year, Teo was chanting in the subway "I am the leader of the world". He told me that he wants to be Superman when he grows up. But ol' Superman sure wakes up in a fragile state. We always make sure to ask him before pouring milk in his "blat unflat" (Sugar Smacks). Adrian's heavy into inventing Pokemons. For his website, we told him he couldn't use the name "Pokemon", so he called it www.mysterymonsters.com. Pura thinks I'm creating a monster, that an 8-year-old shouldn't know about html. But I say he's the dotcom generation: handiness with a mouse and keyboard certainly rivals the importance of writing in script and the multiplication tables. Adrian's extracurricular activity is something called "Foc-nou" - like scouting without the knots, I think. As an American father, I suppose I should fill his schedule with basketball and piano, but since it takes him an hour to do his homework and an hour to eat, there's just no time. During these activities, I can see the pokemons floating in his head, calling his attention.

In April, Teo said "I've got an avion blau". Yep, the two boys are trilingual now. It should be a matter of weeks before they discover that they can make fun of Dad in their secret language. We just got their inscrutable report cards. Adrian helped translate them for us.

As all years, 2007 has been a transition year. I admit the business has been a bit of an effort these last two years in Barcelona - it had us dipping into our energy reserves. Four employees left in 2007, including Pura's sister, but a star employee joined us in April, so we now have a solid group. Our energy levels are on their way up again.

Before Pura and I get over the hill, we've got to linger at the top for a while. The views are great, and I brought sandwiches!

Love to you all!
Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Merry Christmas everybody!

2008 has been a good year: fruity and aromatic, with a hint of new horizons. It looked good from the start when Susana, a lawyer and friend of Pura's, decided to follow our suggestion and join Strong Abogados. We hired Susana as Boss, with the goal of de-Bossing ourselves. As we learn to let Susana take over the wheel, we're beginning to take short excursions away from the mothership. As for the mothership itself, it's full of mothers, following our hiring strategy. We -- rather, Susana -- hired a non-mother during this bank-rupted autumn -- a risk on both counts, but our little business is so far surviving the cold economic winds.

Pura and I have come to the conclusion that a dominant trait that we both share is our recurring need for something new: a new subject to study or a new friend, a new sight or a new taste. The problem is that the older you get, the harder it gets to find something to do that you haven't done before. Finding firsts for a 44-year old means either doing something expensive ("flying in a balloon") or doing something weird ("putting a bean up my nose"). So what's left for a 44-year-old? The vicarious enjoyment of our children's firsts. That's what parenting is all about! Maybe it's the evolutionary plan to make parenting fun this way (uh, God's plan. No wait, Bush is out of office...)

So here are some of the firsts we've racked up for Adrian and Teo in 2008:

- Their first time on a rollercoaster.

- Their first time playing minigolf.

- Their first time eating cabbage.

- Their first time playing Monopoly.

- Adrian's first-time discovery that when your plastic straw can retrieve no more, so you tilt your glass up high to get at that last bit of crushed ice left from a tasty lemon granizado, the slush can come unglued all at once and hurtle down the glass towards your awaiting, all-too-dry face.

Pura and I got our own firsts in (expensive, and occasionally weird): the vacations.

In January, we took the kids across the border to Andorra in search of their first contact with snow. We drove up, up into the hills, beyond the point where malls can grow. And there, we spotted a patch of old, crusty snow. I hit the brakes and we ran over to it. I fashioned something lumpy and called it a snowman. We knocked him down, then we all threw crusty snowchunks at each other. The kids were thrilled, and Dad was deeply satisfied with the re-creation of his Boston youth.

In April, we did a home exchange to Berlin. In the airport, we discovered that Teo's passport had expired. We were told there was an office in the airport that makes passports, but that that we didn't stand a chance of catching the flight. We dashed to the office, and Pura displayed her famous now-there's-a-bureacracy-now-there-isn't trick, charming the guy at the office to produce a new passport for Teo in about ten minutes (there was a family in line before us but she charmed them too). We caught the flight, though Pura says I shouldn't come to take her legal sleight-of-hand for granted. In freezy Berlin, Adrian and Teo for the first time ate fresh pretzels, apple soda, and falling snowflakes.

In May, we flew to Koln to attend the wedding of Hella Witt. An idyllic afternoon in the park -- thanks, Hella! [Adrian and Teo's first wedding.]

In August, we drove to France, staying at Toulouse and Amelie-les-Bains. [Their first time eating cheesecake and walking on a platform through a narrow gorge.]

The kids filled out their summer going to day camp [their first time shooting an arrow], then to the Extremadura grandparents with Pura, then to the Princeton grandparents with me. Our Princeton visit also included a splendid week in Mount Gretna. Laura and I did some more re-creation of youth: games after dinner, a zillion-piece jigsaw puzzle on the porch, and an old movie with popcorn. [Their first time toasting marshmallows, swimming in a lake, roller skating, and their first time seeing The Wizard of Oz.] [And a Don Knotts movie too, but I suppose that doesn't count as one of life's landmark events.]

I admit the highlights of a year tend to be trips, but there are others that shine out amidst the routine: Sunday morning pancakes with Billie Holiday, wrapping up the day with Pura in our cozy living room pychoanalyzing our employees, an afternoon with the kids out in the rain diverting rivulets down different channels. Sounds sappy? Of course, it's a Christmas letter!

At long last, I've also discovered exercise bliss. I take a public bike up the big hill overlooking Barcelona, then cruise back down home, where I slip the bike in its slot just before the two hour limit (more at http://www.explodingtesticle.com/bicing.php). Pura has also found her groove in the gym. She had a fabulous teacher for Pilates. The teacher got fired, so now Pura's enjoying the pool.

Adrian loves to laugh. The other day he asked me where last names come from. I told him. He then said what if your last name was "Chopsticks", and started laughing uncontrollably. He's an expert with 9-year-old humor, but he's also taken it upon himself to understand adult humor (that is to say, the humor of adults). After I've made a joke, mainly to amuse myself, Adrian now catches something in it, and says, "that's funny, right?" Recently, he took a break from books to go on a comic book groove. Pura started him off with "Mortadelo y Filemon", then I dusted off "Calvin & Hobbes" and "Bloom County" for him. As for novels, he'll only read them if they have "funny bits".

Teo's full of love these days. He'll call out from bed: "Tom!" "What, Teo?" "I love you too much!" Teo calls me Tom. I think "Tom" is easier than deciding between "Dad" or "Papa". Recently, Pura started correcting Teo, saying it sounded like I'm not their real father. The result of this effort is that Adrian now calls me Tom too. A funny boy.

Well, okay, Pura and I did have a first this year, neither expensive nor weird. We were sitting in our apartment terrace one August night, looking at a weird half moon right over the neighbor's roof. We remembered commenting on a beautiful full moon in Amelie-les-Bains two nights before. I said that can't be. Pura replied casually that it must be an eclipse. Over the next few minutes, we proceeded to witness a spectacular lunar eclipse as our shadow passed over the moon (and the Earth's shadow too). And so we poured ourselves another glass of champagne and made a toast.

With love, Teo, Adrian, Pura and Tom

Merry Christmas!

Best wishes to all -- I hope you've got your stockings hung with care. 2009 comes to a close -- the first decade of the millenium has certainly moved along.

I declare to Pura that I live in the future. I tell her about my visions. She responds that perhaps those are daydreams. Pura's visions are not so long-term. And Pura's visions bend to her will (almost like an employee might). Her future scenarios soon become the present.

So in January, Pura saw the vision of a Strong Abogados without the Strongs. Pura announced to me that we would leave work the entire summer, and see if the others could run it without us. I maybe spilled my coffee a bit and asked "all three months?". But the future bent: in June, Pura gave her office table away while I apologized to the staff for the abandonment, then off we skipped to the USA. Fine family and friend reunions in the North and home exchanges in the South. We found an enjoyable randomness to home exchanging. We wouldn't have chosen a house on a lake in Georgia but it was perfect! Jumping off a boat, picking figs, watching the hummingbirds. Another was an Alabama beach condo where the days could have slipped into years. Thanks to the Tuans, we also had a spatious timeshare in Disney for a switch to high-energy vacationing. The new routines got Pura and me over a few parental hurdles: after a solid month of lake and pool, the kids can now handle the deep end with only casual surveillance. Second, Teo is now reading; I earnestly thank Captain Underpants for that achievement. The one final parental hurdle now is to teach them how to ride a bike. Oh, and adolescence too.

We returned to Barcelona to find the business was right where we'd left it: the dishes were washed, and the sheets put away. We'd put in some hard years to get to this. What the heck, we deserved this summer.

It was an important step to pull away from the day-to-day work at the office. Pura's parents stayed with us most of the fall so that we could help take care of Pura's father with Alzheimer's, and more urgently, take care of Pura's mother, the caregiver. I was braced for a tough time, but it was curiously good. I'd rush around and get things done fast so that I could then take a nice long stroll with Rafael and maybe watch the airplanes go by. I got closer to both Lina and Rafael. With the kids, we'd draw straws to see who was going to play chess with Rafael, and we'd discuss whether it was okay to make up stuff once he asks a question for the third time. Pura's parents left a week ago, back to Berlanga.

And the rest of 2009 filled in to make a plump year.

- The school psychologist told us in spring that maybe Adrian could use some psychiatry to get him back into this world. In the end, we diagnosed the school psychologist as crazy, and tried instead a bio-energetic-shaman person. Her treatment worked! -- for one, he stopped chewing his clothes. Such a clear result that I tried her myself (and stopped chewing my nails). (If only she hadn't mentioned the year 2012...)

- The Tuans visited us for a great Spring Break spent in a suitably-old house in a little medieval town north of Barcelona.

- I finally found an exercise routine I can stick with: I bike up the high hill overlooking Barcelona. It's a good mix of punishment and reward. When I fly back down the hill, I become an 18-year-old again, belting out David Bowie songs as I bank into the turns. Then I fell off the bike in March. No harm done, but to be safe, I added a few Simon and Garfunkel songs to the mix.

- We gave up on piano practice for Adrian and let him succumb to the computer beast. Sometime in summer, he began making video creations, using MS-Paint and Windows Movie Maker. And Teo got inevitably pulled in to the gravity of the older brother: he has begun to create his own videos.

- We celebrated our 10th year without a car. It's a real luxury to not have a car. Unfortunately I'm like a reformed smoker: totally anti-car -- I try to ignore their existence. Rather stupid, I know. I just read about how Antoni Gaudi hated trolleys, and got killed trying to ignore their existence. Ah well, since we'll probably wind up with a car after one of the next moves, I'll get the self-righteousness in while I can (no clothes dryer either!).

- Teo learned to hit the elevator button with his nose.

- The year started and will end with a trip to Tenerife. The island happens to be both a tourist destination AND beautiful. As we found out last year, Santa visits the tropics too.

I read a book in 2009 that actually changed my opinion. I figured I was old enough that that couldn't happen, but Risk/Fear by Dan Gardner did it. Among other things, the book said that through the ages, people have always warned about upcoming catastrophes. Sure, the idea of apocalypse is appealing, that's human nature, but life is actually getting a lot better. A couple centuries ago, a disease might come along and take two or three of your children. Now cancer seems epidemic, but not because we're eating chemical-laden cheese doodles. It's because people are living a lot longer. So I'll still recycle and vote green, but I'll stop worrying about the future. Just try to caress it a bit.

El brevisimo cuento de la crisálida y la mariposa.

El misterio del nacimiento de la mariposa, no ha podido ser desvelado.

Cada sencillo paso es un estado poético: el tiempo que tarda la oruga en hacer la crisálida, como descansa dentro y se transforma, cuándo decide que ya está preparada para salir y lo mas emocionante la forma en que rompe esa crisálida, despliega las alas y vuela.

El último paso es el más estudiado. La fuerza empleada en la ruptura es immensa para el tamaño y la débiles hechuras del insecto. Sorprendente su inmediata capacidad de volar, de encontrar la luz, el rumbo y alimentarse.

Científicos, analizando el misterio, decidieron ayudar a salir a la mariposa, cortando su crisálida. Las que salieron sin dificultad, no podian volar, no veian la luz, no desplegaban las alas y en breves minutos morian por no encontrar el alimento.

Podria concluirse: es de la fuerza al romper el caparazón, de ese enorme alarde de longanimidad (grandeza y constancia de ánimo ante las adversidades) de dónde la mariposa aprende a volar, a comer y a ser libre...

Feliz año 2010, año longánimo en el que la adversidad nos otorgue fortaleza y agradecimiento por lo que tenemos, lo que de verdad importa: ser fuertes y generosos.

A Oscar, por El Principe Feliz:

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde
The Happy Prince in Spanish

To a splendid new decade for all, just as you picture it. To Carla, that you now receive the same good energies that you always give.

Love,

Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Our 2009 photos
Teo's Christmas video
Adrian's Christmas video

Greetings to all,

Yup, the end of 2010 is ever-so-nigh, so once again I'm passing on a recap of our family's events of the year in a group email, hoping it'll get past the spam filters.

First, I'd like to talk about the weather. I thought I knew weather, but in this tropical island we've chosen for our new home, it has a fresh new look. The sky has different tones of blue. In one direction, you might see all rain clouds, in the other all sun. Sometimes in one spot, it's both sunny and drizzling (or less than a drizzle -- you feel it and you see it falling downward, but you don't get wet). From the ear-popping 10-minute drive from the airport down to elevation zero, you often see a disconcerting line on the horizon that marks the border between the rainclouds and the sunny weather below. I remember discussing that strange line the first time that Pura and I saw it: "can't be the line between the ocean and sky, can it?" Since we live under the line, the weather is great all year. As the exception to prove this truth, they closed school one day due to imperfect weather. November 29th was windy with a bit of rain: a definite gloom in the sky. The school officials acted fast to protect the children.

In the previous two Christmas vacations, we headed for good weather. On our first visit, we were surprised to find that Tenerife could be so beautiful, in spite of being Spain's cheap tourist package destination. On our second visit, murmurs of moving here began. Now I admit that during our vacations, Pura and I enjoy playing the What If We Lived Here game. On this occasion our arguments swept us away. The kids? Here they can cross the street by themselves. And they'll get taught in Spanish (adeu, Catalan, how little I knew thee). The business? There's no VAT tax here, so in theory our clients should be flocking here (we'll convince 'em). Our office in Barcelona? Pura said let the employees run the office. That sounded appealingly delinquent to me. I saw the moss growing between my toes and knew it was time ... five years in Barcelona, the same time we'd spent in Sevilla. We brought it up with the kids: they said "Sure, let's go!" Huh? Aren't kids, as a rule, supposed to opt for the status quo? We told our employees: a disturbed silence. We told our Spanish friends: they said "An island? So you're going on exile?"

Once we arrived at a tentative decision around December 25th of 2009, I was sorta thinking "in a couple of years"; but for my wife, there's maybe two heartbeats between decision and action: "we'll move when school's out". As a result, the first half of 2010 was action-packed: a search for schools, an office move (20 blocks away), a home move, a wedding (Pura's sister), a divorce (from a business partner and friend), a couple of road trips (across Spain and over to Italy), a marathon run, and a ride in a wheat harvester (bad crop this year in Extremadura). We had great visits with friends: first Chris and Traci, then Mark and Alla got in a visit to Barcelona under the wire. We enjoyed Venice with Han and Dolly, and I toured Sicily with Kurt.

In July, we began our new life in Tenerife. The efforts of spring gave way to a relaxed, blissful summer. When a whim conceived meets reality, it either remains known as a whim or it becomes re-positioned as a Good Idea. We as a family were relieved and elated once we discovered we'd made the right decision. It didn't even bother us when the movers doubled the price (and took a tip for themselves out of Teo's piggy bank!). Good news capped our summer two days before the start of school: Teo finally got accepted to the same school as Adrian. More great visits in our new home: Laura, Eric and the cousins, followed by visits from all four grandparents. The rest of the year has been spent opening a new office and finding new employees. The Barcelona office, I should mention, is doing fine in our absence (except for the plants -- they're all dead).

A little history of our adopted home: Ever since Columbus' first journey, the Canary Islands was valued as a pit stop on the way to the Caribbean. That's the reason the Spanish took it over, and why the French and British tried a dozen times to take it over from the Spanish. In 1797, the locals in Santa Cruz repelled one last attack by the British. The populace was so thrilled with having blown off Admiral Nelson's arm that they gave a nickname to the cannon that did the job: "El Tigre". In gratitude for their defense, the King of Spain rewarded the town with a new name: Muy Leal, Noble, Invicta y Muy Benéfica Ciudad, Puerto y Plaza de Santa Cruz de Santiago de Tenerife. These days, the local papers announce to interested shopkeepers how many cruise ships will be making pit stops in town before heading to the Caribbean. Last weekend there were five.

The kids are happy. To start, they have a big, beautiful front yard with fountains and frogs, bamboo paths and cactus gardens. And best for Dad, city workers come and maintain it for us. The paths get plenty of use since both kids learned how to ride a bike this year. As for the new school, they have fit in admirably. Adrian just got assigned the main role in theatre class after another boy realized he'd bitten off more than he could chew and quit the role and the class. Teo has decided he's going to be Basketball Guy. With the willpower of his mother plus two new NBA wristbands, I think he'll go far. One day in spring, we furtively dug a hole in the park near our Barcelona home. Then we carried our Christmas tree over and planted it. For some reason, all trees in this park have a number painted on the trunk. So the kids and I painted "888" on our Christmas tree and wished it well. We now have a new tree -- a diminutive one, since we're vehicle-impaired, but plants grow quickly here in Tenerife.

Time to wrap this up and start the holidays. Thanks, friends, for touching our lives. Let's hope that we and the other 7 billion neurons around us can come up with some inspired thoughts to ease us past the next few speedbumps of our journey on this island in space.

Love, Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Our photos of the year (too many, I know)

Adrian's Christmas video

Greetings to all!

I hope you've got your gifts all wrapped. I'm a little behind schedule: today I finish assembling our homemade Christmas tree and tonight I wrap.

2011's chapter closed neatly. It ended the full life of my father-in-law Rafael. His death happened both slowly (alzheimer's) and quickly (heart failure). The slow part had been causing ripples of stress in the family. My mother-in-law Lina was really suffering from caregiving, but refusing to take time off. So on December 2, Rafael calmed the waters in one dramatic act.

On other fronts, it was a good year. It had the potential to be a great year, but a few tactical errors reduced its rating. Pura and I saw the year's potential in January when we discovered that we had successfully delegated all of our work to others in the company. So Pura and I reclined in our IKEA Poang chairs on the terrace and became visionaries -- us and Steve Jobs. One day we went deep and had our Vision: we'll rename the company to Strong Weber and then look for a Weber. We were struck by the the plan's audacity! This Vision led to decisions and to actions and to work. So much work that by December, I had to hire somebody new. I'm now in the process of delegating all the work to him. Business is a weird game.

The year began with us in Extremadura. At that time, Rafael was in bad shape but disobeyed the doctor's forecast and came fighting back. Lina succeeded in finding full-time help that lasted – a guy from town named José who knew Rafael from earlier days.

We had some fine vacations: enjoyed the dramatic sea views in Kalamata with the Tuans, toured London with my sister and family, Dad and I met up for a week in Havana, work sent Pura to Moscow, and I finally got the kids to Halloween in Princeton. A week later, the zombie and the yeti returned to Tenerife older, wiser, and with a suitcase full of butterfingers, milk duds, and other assorted fruits of their labor. Adrian's stash lasted until 3 weeks ago, Teo's stash survived until last week (and only because Mom ate Teo's prized pack of Skittles).

After 13 years without a car, we broke down, so to speak, and bought one in May. It pained me -- I can no longer be condescending to car owners. Car-owner condescension had been one of my secret pleasures in life (right up there with a late-night snack). So I got inside our almost-new Renault Dacia and hit the gas pedal: what power! It made me stronger, faster. Like the six million dollar man! Anyway, it gets Teo and me to his basketball games – I’m the six million dollar basketball dad.

Later in May, Pura convinced her mother to come to Tenerife. Pura found an apartment a block away from us for Lina, Rafael, and José (who was happy to move to Tenerife). We all settled into a new routine. Every Sunday, we took Lina for a drive to explore some part of the island. Every bit of the coastline here is different. The volcanic rock, ocean, and erosion combine in beautiful variety. I'm glad to have nature back again after 12 years living in cities.

As for the kids, we've begun to delegate to them too. Not too much though: Adrian is now in escuela secundaria, which apparently means they get to swamp him with homework. Adrian and Teo have been a great help for Lina. They’ve given her love and another purpose. Adrian finished his video master-work in June: Mrs. Destroyer and the Power of Invisibility. (She's a superhero, and Surfer Fred is her sidekick. They have personalities strangely matching that of Pura and me.) Teo got his Christmas story Rupert, the Red-Horned Rhino into the school magazine (and of course, Adrian did a video for it). Teo and Adrian have 3 sources for their English: me and the two TV series we let them download. (No TV for 11 years, though now with iTunes downloading, I can no longer be condescending to TV owners either.) Teo now has a fine collection of Sponge Bob and Fairly Odd Parents phrases, handy for any occasion ("Holy guacamole!", "Time to rock and roll!", "In your face", "Weep, weep, cry", "Curse you!", "I'm going to rule the world!").

We borrowed a dog named Moncho for a few weeks in the summer. Teo loved Moncho. Moncho loved me. Moncho also loved piddling on Pura's desk, but we missed him when it was time for him to go.

Back to the present: Lina will live with us until she’s recovered, then we'll see. The first day back in Tenerife after the funeral, she told us she feels like she’s seeing the park and the surrounding hills for the first time. On to the next chapter of life! (And on to Christmas Sunday -- I have a hunch that Teo is going to find Skittles in his Christmas stocking.)

Si en el 1-1-2012 se acaba el mundo, y el 31 es último dia de mi vida, hoy, me enseñó Juan, que seguiré plantando un árbol o al menos una macetita. Para un 2012 feliz recordaré: nada mas vano nada mas inútil que la tristeza. (mejor si no sabemos nada de Rajoy) En el 2012...nosotros estaremos en Fuerteventura, y como todos vosotros ¡supervivientes!

Merry Christmas!
Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Greetings to everyone!

In Tenerife, we're enjoying a Green Christmas. Last month it rained as much as it's rained in two years, and this desert island has suddenly come alive -- as green as I've every seen it. I guess seeds are always lurking in the cracks waiting to sprout when given a chance.

2012 was our year of healing. Pura started the year in poor health. However, her willpower is rock-hard as always: she's been doing everything in her power to beat the illness. The solutions tried:

- Doctors: We saw a lot of specialists. (In retrospect, what we needed was a good generalist.)

- Medicine: Cortizone -- a good drug. Like any good drug, though, it can't be taken for very long.

- Psychiatrists: The problems probably started with stress, so Pura thought a psychologist might help. She came back so excited after the discoveries of the second session that I tried the pyschiatrist too. I stayed on longer than Pura did, but eventually left (still wondering if I was just being self-indulgent or was really on the verge of total madness).

- Health club: The true savior. Right when Pura really needed it, the club opened in the fancy hotel across the street. It's mainly a spa tailor-made for Pura's recovery (and I tried it too). Limpid pools, bubbles, jet sprays, saunas, floatarium, even a shower with a scent.

- Diet: One homeopathic medicine guy made his pronouncements: Pura had a Candidas Yeast Problem and a Leaky Gut Syndrome. His cure was a high-protein, low-carb diet with powders and pills: lecithin, probiotics, pea protein. Pura stopped the diet after a few months, but it left its mark. We cook more now, we're more careful of what we eat. In the supermarket, I used to pick up the cheap food; now I go for the most expensive. Free-range eggs? They've gotta be healthier.

- Yoga: See "Health club". Two days a week.

- Yogurt: A problem for us. The only good yogurt maker in Tenerife (goat milk, no cows here) went out of business two months ago. Pura needs yogurt to mix with her pea protein and mask its weird flavor. A definite problem.

- Meditation: Ashrams were Seventies. In the Tens, we're downloading meditation podcasts.

The results? Pura has been making progress since July. I really think her body will find its equilibrium again. I'm amazed that Pura seems to have almost turned her condition in some way to her advantage.

In other news: the business . . . no, let's not talk about that. We tried to run away a couple years ago, but the business has caught up to us again, panting and slobbering at our doorstep. Lovable, but it keeps piddling on our shoes.

The kids . . .

Adrian and the millenium are now teenagers. No growth spurt yet, no rebellion. A touch of petulance, perhaps? Adrian finished his second Mrs. Destroyer comic strip in April, a smooth production where our hero battles the Angry Snowman, who's out to wreak havoc on unsuspecting citizens. In May, Adrian worked to get Mrs. Destroyer into Wikipedia. I was impressed by this effort, by his ease at trying something that an adult might consider out of reach. Adrian's steady diet of books has parental guidance: lately Frankenstein, The Hobbit, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (which was a revelation to me at age 13), a book by Eduardo Mendoza (one of Pura's favorite authors). He's now plunging through the Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, as his father and grandfather have done. Other links: his 2012 advent calendar, and Eurosmack and Afrosmack games.

Teo began an obsession with tennis rankings after discovering the ATP Tennis website. Just as our family -- during Adrian's obsession years ago -- learned all about iguanadons and icthyosauruses, the family is now well-versed in the Davydenkos and Dogopolovs of the professional circuit. We need to be on our toes just in case we're asked, for example, how many Czech players there are in the top 100. Of the sports Teo plays, it's basketball (Mr. Defense), biking (no hands), and padel (we sneak into Pura's gym and play on the rooftop courts).

Pura's mother spent the first 4 months of the year with us. She's just joined us again for the holidays. As our 2012 photos will attest, Chris and Traci, Haddie and Ely made it out to our island for the tail end of Santa Cruz's all-out Carnaval. Then Mom & Dad came out in April. Great to have visitors! I know we'll never get the "just thought I'd drop by" visitors. We then saw the Tuans in our spring break rendezvous -- this time in Paris. Memorable meals, thanks to Han's perfectly strategized restaurant selection.

For summer we hit the camps: basketball (Teo), art (Adrian), theatre (Adrian), water sports (both). In August, I took a trip north to meet up with Mark and Hella and their families: a great hike in Luxembourg, a rock concert in France, Usain Bolt on TV running 9.63 seconds in Germany . . . the last time Mark, Hella, and I were together was 21 years ago: sipping slivovitz for breakfast (Slovakian hospitality), and sneaking into the theatre in Budapest for the last few songs of the Velvet Underground's reunion concert.

Since the Tenerifans mistake me for being German, since Spain has put my mother's name "Gruner" on my ID card, and since Germany's gone green, I've now declared myself a convinced German. Adrian's been gracious enough to take surrogate German classes for me -- every Friday after school. And I've been happily mixing yogurt and muesli -- until recently the yogurt supply ran dry. That's a problem.

So stay healthy, everyone. No need to pop open another beer just because the world ended (though a tequila and fresh pulp orange juice is probably healthy enough . . .)

Enjoy your holidays!

Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

PS: News flash! Pura called the Benijo yogurt factory -- they are NOT closed. The goats are just feeding their babies. After March, the goat children are off milk and yogurt production is back on. Enjoy your milk, kids! Fresh and pure!

Greetings to all!

It's wintertime again in Tenerife. Locals enjoy winter by driving their family to the upper reaches of our volcano to meet the first snowfall. They throw snowballs at each other for a while, then drive back down to 70 fahrenheit.

I hope everyone's enjoying their own winter traditions. Sometimes I think back to my Nana Tess' Christmastime dessert: peanut-butter-inside-dates-rolled-in-confectioner's-sugar.

To top off 2013, we bought a house last week: a fat one. It has an elevator. Pura’s in charge of decorating the rest of the house; I’m going to decorate the elevator room as I see fit. I think I'll start with the standard sign on the wall: "100th floor: viewing deck. 99th floor: Top o' the World Restaurant & Bar." Our house was built by a man who enjoyed entertaining friends. It was truly his castle, with a room to drink brandy in, a tiki bar and barbecue pit by the pool, with a fountain on its roof that he could time to cascade into the pool when the pork chops were ready, plus two gnomes guarding the fountain. I was planning to bid farewell to the gnomes once I moved in, to heave them off the viewing deck and watch them hit the pavement in a tearful farewell. But I’ve come to realize that the builder had a clear vision, and the gnomes are part of that vision. I don’t want to be responsible for erasing this bit of cultural heritage. (Pura has said I can be in charge of decorating the gnome niche also.)

We just got the keys -- we move in tomorrow. The sons of the man with the vision apparently forgot to take their dog with them. We asked them when they were going to come and pick the dog up. They sounded noncommital. Pura gave the dog a bath and that was that -- bonding complete. She said he's going to be named Paco.

In November, Adrian finished the Complete Sherlock Holmes. iPad books over 100 years old are free. I wonder if the new internet generation will be especially well-read in Homer, Twain, Conan Doyle, and Lewis Carroll. Every Friday Adrian and I go to the library. We don't get books there. Adrian reads 30's Batman comics while I search for movies for our Friday night pizza. I usually stop working too late so we get to the library 10 minutes before closing, and my search becomes desperate. All movies are ordered alphabetically -- if I'm lucky the movie I want to see will be translated literally from English. Let’s see . . . "La Criatura de la Laguna Negra" . . . there it is, pizza time.

November also included a trip to China for me. A trip with a tie -- I was officially sent there by me to network. But I admit I spent a couple of days with tie off and backpack on, eating grilled corn in alleys, ducking in temples, searching for mysterious fruit, and taking buses to the end of the line.

In October, Rafael Nadal reclaimed #1 after winning everything in 2013. It turns out tennis players get to take a break in December, so Teo is now at a bit of a loss about what to do with his free time instead of pouring over tennis stats.

Pura's mother was with us for two months in the fall then rented her own apartment, in a spot well-positioned to intercept Adrian and Teo’s trajectory back from school in order to feed them a big lunch followed by a yogurt to fill any remaining space in their bellies. "Fuel for your engines" she has been known to say.

In September the business pooped again on our front stoop, which might take a while to clean up. But I shall not be ungrateful -- the business pays for our peanut butter and dates.

This summer, we spread carbon fast and wide, and I only feel faintly guilty. It was our Great Trip to the American West. We laid on 16,000 air miles then 6000 car miles. More hard data: 3 home exchanges (and one cancellation), 4 states, 5 nat'l parks (Yosemite, Muir Woods, Cedar Breaks, Canyonlands, and Arches), 7 Mormon temples (I got an idea now for my Carnaval costume), 3 Spanish missions, 1 sixteen-lane highway, 1 epiphany, and 1 small snake. I caught up with Tyler and Emily in SF (and again in Barcelona). From SF, we crossed the bridge and got to see my Uncle's surroundings. In Berkeley, we connected with Wes Isberg, who took each of us flying over the Oakland A's Stadium then back by car to his Oakland aerie with Varia, Sonia, and shoulder parrot. We also got to see Han's family (minus Han) in Berkeley, then again (with Han) in New Jersey. Then down to San Diego: Jim and Gigi Kuo gave us an excellent day in La Jolla -- memories of sea lions and swimmers intermingled, and their daughters pounding the fuzz off of tennis balls. From San Diego we drove inland to a valley south of Moab, Utah: orange rock canyons on one side, high mountains on the other. Mid-day hikes and evenings watching the sun set. Princeton was our launching pad to the Trip West -- time with Mom and Dad and Laura’s family, with Rachel headed to Scotland for college and Janna showing us her lifeguard duties (she maybe heard Teo’s first belly flop -- I forgot to warn him about those). Laura, as my elder, has edged me out by a few months on the house-and-dog combo -- we got to see both their new house and new dog this summer. Not sure whose dog is older. I’m sure both dogs have stories to tell.

In May, I Jackson Pollacked in our art room -- I was quite prolific. I'll clean the floor when we move out.

Nothing much happened to us before May. (The pre-gnome years are becoming just a blur . . .)

For the most part, Pura is out of the business (and her sister is now in). If the rest of us (and the house) will allow her free time, Pura is headed for something big. Her Plan B podcasts were just the start. After so many years of us working together on the business, it's time for more independence: she's keeping her projects out of my view.

Next year our vow is to detach from our computers. We may have to banish our computers to the uncomfortable corners of the new home. The four of us log too many hours -- work, projects, ATP tennis, scratch (MIT's programming platform for kids), choosing the best photos of 2013. My mother-in-law sometimes complains that we don’t have a TV. After she's done complaining, she likes to make an ironic comment about our heavy computer use.

"Scratch" has lately become Adrian's passion. Zero for the body, but plenty creative. The real danger, of course, is that it might lead to a career. He's learning to code, for godsake! The next thing you know, he'll be kicking around in places like Silicon Valley or John Hancock. More than a proud father could bear. I may have to offer up alternatives, like drugs or Heineken. Adrian (who's taken an interest in these Christmas letters) would like me to add that he's also doing theatre.

I know we're lucky. I guess to be grateful is to appreciate life and appreciate others, to be curious and not be guilty (and really not guilty about a fat house, and only so slightly guilty about my mother-in-law in a separate apartment.) So often the brain works like the TV news -- focusing on the 1% that’s not working (the sore ankle, the son that doesn’t pick up after himself) rather than giving thanks even for 5 minutes a day for the miracle of water from a faucet, for a heart that’s beaten perfectly for 50 years, or for the immense support of family.

It's late -- time to get this letter in the mail. The family's all sleeping soundly. Good night, Nana Tess. Good night, Nana Marge.

Love to all, Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

PS: Late-breaking news: Paco just bit Pura, and lost his chance at joining our family.

PPS: Our new phone is 922 278 492. Our new address is: Horacio Nelson 26 38006 Santa Cruz de Tenerife

Greetings to everyone,

Merry, uh, well, Merry mid-winter. Merry Midwinter's Eve! Let the Goodwill Toward Men linger on until overtaken by Spring Cheer. We haven't yet taken down our tree. This year we went out to nature and sawed off a 3 meter length of a yucca tree/flower/shoot, threw it on the car roof and drove home very carefully (some day I'll put some rope in my trunk). We decorated the yucca and I thought it looked great Then someone said I can't do that. Hmm, I was thinking of it as picking a wildflower, but they're probably right. I tend to think of the mountains behind our city as mine, since I never see anyone else wandering around in them. And no goats in the mountains either, only goat poop, which I find odd.

Right, this letter is a bit late this year. I tried to write it a number of times, but it kept coming out cynical. But better cynical than never, so please accept this grinchy tale with my apologies . . .

17 years ago, I remember Pura and I were a typical couple in Manhattan. 9 years ago in Barcelona, we were out of the ordinary, but we soon found a group of people like us. Here in Santa Cruz, we are strange. More specifically, to the locals, called "guanches", Pura's a "godo" (meaning she's from the Spanish mainland -- "la peninsula"), whereas I'm a "guiri" (from beyond). Godo's an interesting term -- it means "visigoth", the implication being that the locals are not of Spanish blood, like some Californians who reject East Coast ancestry. There are a few guiri couples in Tenerife (outside of the fresh-off-the-cruise-ship tourists and the Swedish retirement communities) and a few godo couples, but a guirigodo couple is rare. Since we're different, we're pre-judged. Some ignore us and some are especially interested. Now with our big house, we're pre-judged again, even though the elevator's broken. Pura has pointed out to me that I disdain rich people as a whole too. (Now that she's made me aware of it, I admit I kinda like that prejudice -- I don't want to have to reassess it.) Had this been Manhattan, what we paid for the house would have gotten us a 1-bedroom. But our island is further out in the water than that island. Not many stock brokers. So the guanches pre-judge us and I pre-judge them. As an American I know it's incorrect, as a human I know it's unavoidable, and as an expat I like to ponder the cultural differences regarding all this stuff.

The kids are pre-judged too. To the other kids, they're classed as guiris, not godos. Just like Obama is called black, not white. "Guiri" must have more weight. I know I can be classified as a foreigner from about 20 feet away, but the kids? They're not as blonde as they used to be. As for the house, Adrian's best friend used to invite other friends in order to show off Adrian's house. With the house so close to school, it's become the gathering place for any and all group projects. Let's see if it becomes the hangout for youthful parties in years to come.

A boy in Adrian's class always used to ask Adrian "why are you so short?" Well, finally last year, Adrian was no longer the shortest in his grade. He managed to overtake Angela Andechaga. This year, Adrian shot beyond most of the girls and even a few boys, one of whom Adrian likes to ask "why are you so short?" For most of the year, Adrian and his active hormones had two voices, which he used to brilliant advantage in a theatre group performance this spring. The piece was called "Locos", written by the kids -- Adrian created a schizophrenic character. Finally in November, his lower voice started getting the upper hand. All these changes -- us parents get to witness an amazing transformation. In August, Adrian completed his fabulous fourth installment of Mrs. Destroyer's comic exploits: The Return of Peter Piper. Mrs. Destroyer has also made a brief appearance in Adrian's other world (or worlds): Scratch, MIT's starter programming site (you gave him a new key, Wes). Besides Adrian's many Scratch creations (including Epic Trolls), there's a lot of interaction too -- commenting on and "like"ing each other's game (Epic Trolls has 105 likes) and group projects -- Adrian has led some of his own. He told me "the other day someone wrote to me in Italian". "What'd you do?" "I wrote back". I tease the kids about typing on a computer with only 2 fingers instead of 10, and they tease me about typing on a cell phone with 1 finger instead of 2 thumbs. First millenium Dad, second millenium kids.

Teo's a jock. First we classified him as a math whiz, then he became, in our heads, a financial guru. In August, he joined a Tennis Academy and started beating people, even though he'd only played padel before. His life as a tennis pro flashed before my eyes. During these years of parenthood, I admit I've always felt pretty smug about never having to drive the kids anywhere, but finally the Soccer Mom era has begun. The courts lie almost directly above our house, so we zigzag up the hill. I used to hike the hills behind the courts while Teo was in class, but now that Teo has quit basketball to focus on his new sport, his hours are longer so I do the zigzag x 4.

Teo is a keen social observer like his Mom. For example, Pura has been mentioning a possible pet dog of late. When Pura was away in Barcelona last week, I went to the pet store with the kids to get a turtle. Teo asked "are we going to the store because Mom is away?" I'm honestly not sure if a pre-emptive turtle was part of a subconscious plan to avoid 6am dogwalking. In any case, we named the turtle Houdini. Houdini promptly escaped somewhere in the garden during my watch. The kids are deciding on my proper punishment.

Adrian and Teo are deep into the bear cub style of interaction. Now they look for each other when they are bored instead of looking for us. As my parents would say, they try to get a rise out of each other. Depending on the mood of the other, this either leads to a good noisy chase or to an eventual kick and a punch. Adrian has the oral advantage, while Teo has the physical advantage (even though Teo is -- for now -- the lightest in his grade).

We had a lot of work done to the house all year. Finding a suitable construction crew has always been difficult for us (thinking back to the drunk and ex-cop team in Sevilla...). We started with a big man named Manolo after the kitchen sprung a leak -- stereotype fulfilled, he was a plumber-with-a-crack. We lost confidence in him after our kitchen appliances began a general rebellion. Next we moved on to little Ventura, who worked hard, but just wouldn't finish the job. So our painters finished both their job and his. We were real happy with Fernando and his crew, so we hired the painters to do everything. Our man Fernando told us he has plenty of uncles to manage most tasks. We like Fernando a lot, but we just haven't been convinced about his uncles, so in the end all we did this year was the destruction work. Down came the gnome niche and all the many personal touches of the previous owner. After a good long breather, we'll re-construct in 2015.

Garden news: 40 oranges, 20 lemons, 1 grapefruit, 400 passion fruit harvested during 2014, plus 2 aloe vera smoothies which my kids refused to try. They see me taste strange berries when we hike and cover my food with hot sauce, so they don't fully trust me when I try to put things in their mouth. My goal is for the garden to be an impenetrable jungle: lots of giant leaves, hanging vines, mysterious undergrowth, and a turtle. The garden is a meter wide, so impenetrability could be a challenge.

Back to the judgment theme. Running a business, I guess it's only natural that we eventually find ourselves in a lawsuit. Lawsuits seem to have replaced goiters as the typical middle-aged condition. A client claimed that we didn't file a tax form, so we spent most of a year poring through employees' emails -- it turns out he never asked us to file it. It would have taken a week but this client's claim was for 2 million euros. It was a number that made all the procuradores' and peritos' heads turn. And made the insurance companies squirm. In July, Pura was able to squeeze proof from the tax office that the client actually filed the tax form himself(!), but it was too late to submit new evidence. The 2-day court trial finally came in September: one judge, one Danish millionaire (derogatory term), nine lawyers, and assorted others in the room. It felt like a volcano that had been building up. But there was no climax, no resounding "Guilty!" or "Not guilty!" at the end. We had to wait another month for that. When the judgment finally came ("Guilty!"), Pura and I were actually relieved, both thinking that the business was over and that the lawsuit was over (wishful thinking). The problem with lawsuits is that instead of a search for truth, winning becomes the goal. The truth gets covered in mud and the judge has a nasty cleaning job to do. In our case, the judge didn't use enough Ajax. As for me, I was blinded in total confidence that the justice system would do the right thing. A million thanks to Pura, for she is a realist and she was prepared -- our kids will still go to college. Conclusion: Pura and I would rather have a goiter. This thing started in 2012 and probably won't end until 2017. Meanwhile, we're taking vengeance therapy. Pura is studying how best to fight money laundering (especially involving Scandinavians and Gibraltar), while I'm writing a song about Jesper and the book he wrote, "Kick Ass" -- song's gonna go viral in Denmark!

We were too busy to move houses this year, so my parents graciously took over and moved in 2014. Back to our old neighborhood of Newtown! They moved to Pennswood, a Quaker retirement community where Mom was a boardmember 30 years ago. I got to visit them and join Laura's family twice this year, both before and after their move. I saw the old town too, and where Flum's Department Store and Ned's Cigar Store used to be. As a kid, I used to buy Marathon Bars in Ned's; nobody ever bought anything in Flum's.

It was great to take in a real Thanksgiving dinner with the family. This year I also got to see friends I hadn't seen in a long time: Chris and Laura in Tenerife, Hella and Christoph in Biarritz, Amit and Sadhana in Queens. Han and Dolly's daughter, Jia Ling, stayed with us in spring, including Carnaval and a visit from Han. Mom and Dad and Rachel came down in April, then I followed them back to Edinburgh where Rachel is going to school. A French couple we had met in Utah visited us and we arranged a week's interchange: their daughter for Teo. So in July, Teo stayed with them near Bordeaux, then the rest of us picked Teo up and hooked up with Mark in a nearby home exchange. See our 2014 photos (long or short version), including many photos of the Dune du Pilat, a giant sand dune stuck between ocean and forest. Great shots, Mark, and great job on your French, Teo!

We're passing on the business to Pura's sister. Pura's been laying the groundwork for new projects. She's going to be hugely successful, I know it. We're ignoring her illness. Her doctor says there's nothing to be done, so that being the case, she's stopped going to get platelet counts every month. Overall Pura definitely has more energy than she did two years ago. As long as she's moving in the right direction, that's what counts. She still covers far more ground than most. It's amazing how she finds her mentors over the web.

I have a few post-business plans too, but Pura's projects sound more like a career. Mine sound like goofing off. I sometimes hide this truth inside abstract terminology: we're undergoing gender role reversal, I say. (Besides Soccer Mom, I do in fact, do the cooking. By gum, it's my tuna melts that keep our family strong through this lawsuit storm!) But the man is the typical goof off in the couple, so the better terminology here is I'm going to take a sabbatical. I can't take the family on a backpacking trip though Africa just yet, so I'll take my backpack into the impenetrable jungle of our garden.

As for grinchy heart sizes: I love my wife, I love my family and friends, and -- during those times when I manage to slow down enough to hear the "Abu Dory" song -- I even love all of Whoville. It could be that on those occasions my heart expands 3 sizes (or at least back to original size).

A quote from my favorite book of the year, Flow: "When taking stock of one's life, the important thing is the experiences, not the accomplishments." Does that include having a goiter? Yeah, I guess so.

Have a great 2015!
Teo, Adrian, Pura, Tom, and Houdini (maybe)

Y feliz año nuevo a todos,

Looking over this email list, we've been lucky to have seen so many friends and family in the last couple of years. Gotta keep that up -- we have extra beds!

Tonight we were glued to internet TV, watching the Spanish election results. Besides the main Catalan party proclaiming independence from Spain, the "fed up" vote has suddenly burst apart a two-party system -- very exciting. The tiny Catalan party that we marched with 10 years ago to preach tolerance for the Spanish language went national and got 14% of the vote.

We got our tree up early this year. This time our Christmas tree is some kind of stick cactus that I dug out of the yard. He's humbler than the big dead branch of 2013 or the yucca of 2014 -- the ornaments seem to be a burden for him. Maybe the re-potting was traumatic, or maybe it was the adjustment to all that tinsels and lights. (A true gardener develops a rapport with their plants.)

Anyway, if Christmas is when a tree goes Glam, Carnaval is Glam-time for humans. I dressed up as Aladdin Sane for the last night. For the big nights of Carnaval, Mark, Alla, and Rebecca were here, and we dressed up in Monty Python costumes. No one recognized us, but I was proud of our well-crafted outfits. In the dawn after the big night, Mark and I ventured back out to view the wreckage and find those costumed souls who survived until daylight.

In summer, Teo headed for the Berlanga homestead with his cousins, Pura stayed in Tenerife, while Adrian and I headed for the USA. Dad joined us on a road trip to see New England friends. Chris and Traci invited us to Burton Island State Park, Adrian's first camping trip. He got the full experience: a rainy leaky night in a tent, smores, canoeing, big picnic spreads, a lakeside sunset, and a fire lantern that soared over and into the woods (the park store sold it, but I don't know if Smokey the Bear would approve). In all those woods, not one computer: no temptation to quench our digital thirst. Adrian got quenched a week later when he went to a "tech camp". He logged plenty of computer time, but he also saw (and threw) a football -- another first for Adrian.

Back to Europe and on to a two-week home exchange in Chioggia, Italy. I billed the vacation to the family as "Venice without the tourists". Teo decided to stay in Berlanga. My comment was later reviewed and deemed "optimistic" by those who went. Chioggia was more a small town with tourists from the surrounding towns. The Chioggians themselves bill it as "town of the oldest working clock tower". In 3 days, we did everything available: boat trips, bus trips, saw every museum, church, library, and historical signpost that the town had to offer. We even learned how to pronounce the town. Only the clock tower eluded us -- I think its opening hours must have been in code. The troops started to get unruly, but I said no problem: we have a car rental reservation in a few days. When that got botched up, I resorted to plenty of spritz drinks and gelato for the troops. Then I managed to get Kurt Husemoller to drive up from Rome and entertain us. Finally a new car reservation got us out and on to Bologna for 3 glorious days before returning home.

Adrian is into his 5th year of theatre. The spring show was Agatha Christie's "Mouse Trap". During the post-show bows, I don't know if Adrian saw his proud parents beaming and clapping wildly. His spare-time activity changed this year from "Scratch" to "Minecraft", along with a steady diet of books. He's also tutoring English to a 6-yr-old and a 9-yr-old. Last month we began our partnership in producing a board game. It turns out that not only is he an effortless and assertive graphic designer, but he's also a partner with great ideas. I'm seeing that Adrian has suddenly stepped beyond the realms I know. He surprises me with facts and knowledge that he's picked up. (Then he says "What, you didn't know?" Sometimes for a teenager to better see all those sparkling vistas, it helps to climb onto their parent's back.)

2015 is the year Teo passed me in sports, all 33 Kg of him. In January, I was giving him a 5-point handicap at ping pong, now he's giving me the 5 points. Our battles in the basement are hard-fought and emotional. Tennis, though, is his serious sport. By the time you read this, Santa will have brought him two new racquets. (Those on the "circuit" know that you always need to bring two racquets in case a string breaks.) In September, Teo informed us that he has rejected his parents' musical tastes. His cell phone contains Bruno Mars, not David Bowie.

Thanks to Pura's guidance, we completed the rental of the business to her sister, Lina. We finally let go emotionally, sink or swim (after a year with Lina, it's swimming). So we're in the divine phase of decompression and choosing new projects. Pura takes trips to Madrid, getting back to her roots and making connections. In spring, she gave speeches at shareholder meetings of 3 multinationals to push for more female board members. In the fall, she found partners on a new business relating to the prevention of money laundering and fiscal fraud.

As for me, I started a project called Arte Okupa to turn some well-positioned ruins into a museum. Sounds good on paper (facebook, that is), but in spite of an article in the local press and a 2-minute TV spot, it sure isn't the Guggenheim. It's been difficult finding people to stick up their artwork, so I've had to create my own art -- after a youtube lesson, I'm doing fluid painting. The attic's getting splattered.

My only beef with this island has been the lack of vegetables and a CSA, but it turns out this was really a lack of research. We now get our weekly basket of veggies, which translates to weekly soups (not sure what else to do with that hunk of pumpkin). Teo recently made the observation that meals get better when the fridge gets empty: pasta, corn fritters, fried rice. Overall, I've set the family on a bacon-vegetarian diet -- I think it strikes the right balance.

Our garden is now the jungle I'd envisioned. In January, we got our first banana bud. After 6 months of waiting, our bananas suddenly ripened while we were in Chioggia: 111 out of 126 bananas lost! But more banana trees are budding -- my banana bread pans are ready.

For most of October, our town dressed up as Athens for the Bourne 5 movie coming out in 2016. After years of dinosaur movies, Hollywood felt that Tenerife was ready for a new kind of role. The local papers reported on Matt Damon sightings and the mayor discussed the boon to the local economy.

Nicknames: Lessee, Teo calls Adrian "bro", Pura calls Adrian "crispu", Teo calls Pura "mamashu" and me "papo". Adrian calls me "big bob", Adrian calls Teo "brodzilla", "brobdignagian", and "merp". "Slimy goblin" is reserved for when Adrian is chasing down Teo for a misdemeanor.

Our photos of the year: short version or long version.

Have a great 2016! Lots of love from Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Dear Friends and Family,

Thanks for your Christmas cards. It's time for my lazyman version. I hope everyone enjoyed fabulous Christmases, and has their seat belt on for 2017.

I just reviewed last year’s resolutions that the 4 of us wrote. All were wildly optimistic: publishing a game, Samaschool in Gambia, reading 1000 pages, losing 1000 pounds . . . Reading them reminded me of a conversation I had with Adrian. I was giving Adrian the usual unsolicited advice: “to finish your collaboration project, you must give deadlines to the other people”. Adrian replied “it doesn’t matter if they finish, as long as they’re having fun doing it”. And so it went with our resolutions.

In February, Pura was in the hospital waiting to have her spleen removed. After seeing her platelet count drop slowly and steadily during 5 years, I had convinced Pura to have the operation. But in the hospital, it felt all wrong to her. She trusted her gut (while she still had it) and we left the hospital. One of the things I’ve learned from Pura is the value of intuition. And now in her December blood analysis, she got her first -- albeit small -- increase in platelets!

One day in March, Pura said to me “I want a dog. Here’s the address.” (my version of events). So we called the guy and drove over: the cute little dog ran right up to me and began humping my leg. We were told his name was Poopie. Appropriate name for a dog, I thought, until I realized “Poopie” was “Puppy” with a Spanish pronunciation. We took the dog off my leg and popped him into our car. At home, we voted to rename him Curro. (That was the electoral vote. “Doggiedenko” won the popular vote. Then I went off to do the paperwork for him, and wrote down my vote: "Leon Trotsky".)

5 days later, we lost him. Signs were posted, local vets were called. In the end, the poor thing had gotten run over and broke his pelvis. The vet said he’d have to get his tail removed: every time he’d be happy and wag his tail, it would hurt. (Sounded like he’d be headed for the psychiatrist’s couch.) Meanwhile we got plenty of calls from our posted signs. This being Spain, it seems the neighbors had been discussing the situation of our new dog, and whether or not we could handle dog ownership. The day we got Curro back from the vet, the former owner sent Pura a message asking how Poopie was “could she send him a photo?”. She sent him a face shot. Then he asked for a full body shot. Was he psychic? Could the news have traveled so far? Pura blocked the contact. As for the tail, Pura had trusted her gut. In a month, Curro was well again, happily wagging his tail without pain and humping the legs of all visitors.

2016 saw some accomplishments in our household, none of which were foreseen in our January resolutions.

• Pura gave a number of anti-money laundering talks this year, one before 300 police and politicians in Barcelona, plus a VAT talk in English before a big audience at Websummit in Lisbon.
• Teo learned how to juggle.
• Teo got chosen from his school for a national math competition, and got the top score in Tenerife. Round II was more impressive to me: Teo didn't make it, but the way he prepared for it showed a tremendous willpower that Teo has inside.
• Adrian’s teacher mentioned a Shakespeare video competition, so Adrian wrote a modern version of Macbeth, and got his class to perform and film it during one frenetic week.
• Adrian headed an unusual and popular Scratch collaboration: group development of a superhero story. Adrian then refined the story into a workable plot, and forged on to create a 9-minute animation: Nilluminati: Episode 1.
• Only 4 people came to my third Arte Okupa event. Two of them were police, who suggested that I shouldn’t schedule a fourth event.
• I had good fun tracking down street art on the island with Adrian, then posting it in a map, with new website, tenerifestreetart.org.
• Adrian and I made a prototype of our game and playtested it with authentic children in a park.

With Pura’s sister still in charge of the business in Barcelona, Pura and I started spinoffs in Madrid and Rome. We got our first clients for each this fall. Hopefully in 2017, we’ll have enough business to pay off all the airfare.

During the latest trip together, we declined the mother-in-law visit and left our no-longer-kids by themselves (which felt very right). Parenthood is changing . . . no more holding hands in the street, the bedtime visits give way as we sometimes fall asleep first. Only the dog leaves toys around the house. What remains is the odyssey of college.

Adrian quite understandably doesn’t have a clue about what to major in and what colleges to choose -- what well-rounded 17-year-old could? As parental figures, we pretend we know. But parents have only done this once ourselves. Pura likes her school, I like mine. I bought some clever books, but they didn’t really part the waters.

So we decided to apply modern physics to this sticky problem: we discovered that the more Adrian is questioned by adults about careers, the less focused he becomes. Corollary: the harder it is to pinpoint college choices, the more we’ve opened up to colleges around the globe. Amidst fevered calculations, someone -- Curro, I think -- had a moment of divine clarity and shouted the answer: Gap Year! We all congratulated ourselves, then chose some random colleges to whom we might peg this gap year on. If in fact the most crucial decisions in life are made in the gut, it’s usually after a certain amount of arbitrary filtering.

The college saga began in spring with a fat SAT book. Adrian dutifully did the practice tests, and in May we took a ferry trip to the next island, where, nestled in the hills like military bunkers, lay an American school. We took another SAT ferry trip in October, and then began the Commonapp Stage. The early decision school app was fittingly due on Halloween night. A week before deadline, the frenzy began: the scramble to finish the essay, parents pleading to let them proofread, a struggle to ascertain who would pass for “school counselor”. The school chose Adrian’s English teacher, José, as counselor. I warned José that the Commonapp was online and English-only. José said no problem. On Halloween day, we checked online -- no teacher recommendations had been posted. I called Jose: no problem, he’s in contact with the teachers. Two hours later, one teacher gave up on the Commonapp, and sent the rec to me by email. I said no! talk to Jose, I can’t look at it. (OK, I peeked, just to see what language it was in: Spanish.) No news from the other teacher. At 11:15pm, I got a call: rough day, but she wrote it. I checked the Commonapp: incomplete! I called Jose. No problem: he cleaned up her submission. A half hour before the midnight deadline, Adrian’s first app was in.

More apps are going in now (along with a goldmine of introspective essays), and then in spring, we take another wild ride figuring out the Spanish and European systems.

Link to our 2016 photos.

The book I savored this year was Viktor Frankl’s “Search for Meaning”. I wish all of you lives full of meaning in the coming year. It sometimes feels like humanity has taken its hands off the steering wheel, but as long as each of us knows where we’re going, perhaps we’re headed somewhere good in the end -- for all passengers.

Love and best wishes to all, Teo, Adrian, Pura, Tom, and Curro

Seasons greetings to all! I hope you've shared fine Xmases.

It is just the 4 of us this Christmas, a unit to be enjoyed to its fullest.

This letter is my chance to look over my journal and jog my memory of events past. Journal as "cheat sheet". I think 2017 will be remembered as the year where life split into alternate dimensions. That’s why things seemed a little strange -- when sugar plum fairies invaded the executive office, when a big brandied orange fruitcake fell out of the blue sky and landed on Paris. (Wait. Composure. It's a Christmas letter: love for humanity, no name-calling.)

For us, Adrian was the headliner this year. Before he headed off for college, Pura wrapped the three of us in ribbon, then Adrian ceremoniously cut the ribbon (and we had some champagne). The next day, off he went, leaving Pura and I in realization that the next phase of family life had begun: we were single-nesters. We entered the “Oh...right” awareness at random hours of the day, especially when passing a certain empty room, or when passing the cereal section of the supermarket. Should we call him? No, better to let him call us. Is Adrian doing laundry? Maybe we should call . . .

This year started with Adrian writing his college app essays. In April, we took a trip to Holland to visit the University of Amsterdam, and came back with a real fondness for stroopwaffels. June brought a big decision for Adrian: Amsterdam or ICADE in Madrid? As with the “which major” decision, the “which school” decision can only be made by touching the future. And here is where Adrian entered alternate dimensions (right after seeing Dr. Strange, the latest comic book movie). In the dimension we know and love, Adrian went to Madrid. But maybe once in a while Adrian will visit his Stroopwaffel Dimension.

At the same time, some alternate spaces may be folding back into one. At home Adrian Cristobal is called “Cristobal” in Spanish and “Adrian” in English. He says “Cristobal” is an old-fashioned name, so in leaving home, it looks like Adrian will shed the “Cristobal” self.

Along with studying for the finals in our basement with friends, going to after-school theatre and film classes, taking the “IELTS” and “EBAU” exams, and atttending high school graduation ceremonies, Adrian found time to finish plotting his Nilluminati film and the first quarter of animation for it. He decided to leave the project unfinished, and move on to something easier, he said: writing a play based on a new version of Frankenstein. The play got finished right before summer ended. Adrian and I spent many hours this year discussing what makes a perfect villain, reviewing films, and generally keeping me abreast of 21st century culture. (Will Teo continue these efforts?)

At one point during our drive through Holland, Teo shouted for me to stop the car. So I did, and we entered a family fun center. (Europe being known for its churches and family fun centers.) We bowled a few games, then played laser tag. That evening in the hotel, the seed was planted for Adrian and Teo’s new business, Laser Vader. Back at home, Teo ordered the equipment, Adrian created laservader.com, got business cards printed and started hanging around outside schools, waiting for the final bell to pass the cards out to the kids. When Pura and I told them that we would charge interest for the business loan, Teo mistook our lesson in financing for common thievery. They decided to empty their piggy banks instead. In the fall, Adrian’s first calls home from college were, in fact, for Teo: “New client: 7 people for 8pm on Saturday in the park.” At Adrian’s first visit home, he and Teo sat down right away to review the accounting. The biggest client this year was a Leroy Merlin party for employees, with people laser tagging up and down the store aisles. Last week's birthday party for 17 young children put them over the halfway marker to breaking even.

The summer kicked off in fine style: Mom and Dad’s 60th anniversary. Laura, Eric, Rachel, and Janna all came to Tenerife to celebrate (we had some champagne . . . and dancing!) Pura and Adrian stayed on at home for Adrian’s theatre performance, while the rest of us piled into a plane to Scotland: green meadows, castles and airbnb houses, haggus, all topped by Rachel’s graduation from St. Andrews (red wine, from a case bought when Rachel was born). Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Teo continues to work on his tennis game 5 days a week. His 85-pound body is like a rock. In spring, Pura and I took Teo to see the Madrid Tennis Open. It was a thrill to see Djoko, Murray, and Nadal all playing live. In late summer, Teo took a break from tennis to go to Berlanga with his grandmother and cousins. So many rumors flew about girlfriend sightings in Berlanga that we can be fairly sure Teo will never tell us anything about his love life until the day we get a wedding invitation. (In that case, we might as well keep pestering him.)

This year, Pura made new friends and learned a lot via daylong classes every month in a house a mile-high up the volcano. Many of the classes are “constellations”: resolving old family problems so they don’t recur in future generations. There are a lot of talented and caring people in Pura’s retreats. Maybe this year, we can convince them to meet at our house, and fill the house with that good energy.

I had a new art obsession this year. After sneaking a solar-powered “hairy heart” onto a public sculpture (which promptly blew off), I started decorating the house inside and out with solar string lights. As usual, the obsession led to another website, solargraffiti.com.

On November 1, after long negotiations, Pura’s sister returned the business that we were renting to her during the last 3 years. It was good to be away from the business -- you get a lot of perspective on something when you’re away from it -- but it was the right thing to get it back. The current team. As the Catalan independence movement blew up in October, Pura’s decision to open the Madrid office has been looking wise. We’ll see what 2018 brings, in this strange theatre of secession.

I remember years ago nestling with Pura and the little Adrian raisin in our murphy bed on 55th Street. While Adrian’s departure for school can leave me thinking wistfully “well, this family had a good run”, it ain't over yet. Back in Newtown, my parents, Laura, and I made our first family selfie. Do families expand then contract, or do they keep on expanding forever? Pura says when a person is born, that person chooses the family they get born into. I know I chose well. What do you say, Adrian? Good enough or do you want a refund? I know we may yell sometimes, but we have good Christmases.

Love to all and Happy New Year! Curro, Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

2017 photos

OK, Curro had achievements too. Last year he was scared to go into the 2x10 meter jungle. but this year, after a fit of rage sent him hurtling after a cat into the bushes, he has now conquered his fear.

Merry Christmas to all!

So good to set aside time to think about how each of you are doing, and to think back about how the year progressed.

Returning to Jan 2018 . . . We have our island house with comfy nooks for every occasion. We drink our morning coffee, open the door for the dog to go out to the yard, then amble to our designated office rooms for a while. The climate does its best to hover near 70 degrees. In the evening, I review the garden while Pura checks the latest on Netflix. A pleasant routine and before you know it, it’s 2050 and we’re dead. Mejor atacado que jubilado. Change is good. Our method of effecting change is always the same, though: we move. This time to Madrid, back where Pura and I began our romance in 1994 -- Cine Dore, the bar in Salamanca, and La Cripta Magica. Before so many moves...

This was a progressive suitcase move rather than haul-it-all style. A planned stay in Madrid is for two years so no furniture involved: just a selection of clothes, can opener, fondue forks (in the airplane hold, not carry-on, of course). Our decision was progressive too: we didn’t reach total certainty until Teo got admitted to the new school. We moved into a place that Pura had rented back in January for Adrian. But it was a bit cramped for the four of us, so we found a bigger (unfurnished) place 15 minutes away, still within the golden triangle of two schools and an office. It took 12 trips with 2 suitcases each to transport our clothes and fondue forks. Pura proclaimed there would be no IKEA this time, but the temptation was too great: the kids ordered IKEA desks and shelves. In a solemn ceremony, I passed Adrian and Teo the IKEA allen wrench, and said “May this be the key to your young adult lives.” They understood the gravity of their decisions: they saw both the sad face of IKEAman about to be crushed under his (improperly affixed) shelving, and the happy face of IKEAman as he is helped by his friend. They built their desks, and eventually got to studying (on their beds of course, hard to study at a desk piled high with stuff).

To keep 2018 straight for the records:

Jan: Pura rents Covarrubias Street apartment in Madrid.

Jan: Adrian moves out of his dorm room into Covarrubias.

Feb: Adrian decides to leave school.

Apr: We move the office (2 employees) from Goya St. to the living room of Covarrubias.

Jun: Adrian decides to go back to school.

Jul: We move the office from Covarrubias to Divino Pastor.

Aug: We move from Tenerife to Covarrubias.

Sep: We move the office from Divino Pastor to Goya and back again (not just for fun: the owner forgot to pay the electricity bill).

Oct: We move from Covarrubias to Rodriguez Street.

Nov: We have difficulties with all three landlords at Goya, Covarrubias, and Divino Pastor, as well as the doorman at Rodriguez Street. I’m at the point of unleashing my fondue forks, but Pura and I instead look to meditation to try to correct any karmic slip-ups we might have committed.

Dec: We give the doorman a generous Christmas tip. He understands that even though he can’t get a monthly tip from every tenant, a Christmas tip can still be a good thing, and so we wish each other a merry Christmas.

Adrian had some difficult adjustments in his first year of college. ICADE university was harder than high school, and the system of privately-run student housing did not make friendships easy. Adrian took a few months away from school, and soon returned to his easy-going, entertaining self. He decided to go back to the same university in fall. (He’d probably had enough of working at Strong Abogados in the interim.) In the fall, he joined the theatre group, created a video game, Unforgiven, and ran some 10K races with Dad. Back in May his LaserVader business crossed the threshold into profitability. After moving to Madrid, Teo could no longer run the events, so Adrian had to scout his friends in Tenerife to do that part. We always know when Adrian gets a call from a client: a certain transformation takes place. I admit I wasn’t convinced about Adrian doing a business major, but what do I know?

This fall was Teo’s turn adjusting to a heavier workload. Teo’s school was created as a Madrid politician’s experiment: a public school for kids with an 8+ GPA. It’s only for Junior and Senior year, so all Teo classmates were new too. Teo’s tennis hours have mostly given way to homework hours. I often peek in to his room and see him drawing polygons with a compass for a mysterious “technical drawing” class. We’re all trying to develop a social life in Madrid, but I think Teo is doing the best so far, in spite of his classmates all living far away.

At Pennswood, Dad took a nasty fall in the stairwell. It took a steel-edged stair to slow Dad down. Those who know Dad can well imagine him bolting down the stairs. The injury ended his 3-year streak as Pennswood Bocce champion. Dad also decided it was time to hang up his Strong Book Repair business after a good long run, including his spot on Al Jazeera. But he was game for a trip to Burt Lake in upstate Michigan, where Pura, Adrian, Teo, Mom, Dad, Laura, Eric, and me reunited with Aunt Barbara's family, while we reconnected Uncle Paul’s life from his photo albums and personal collections. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, we pieced together a life three generations earlier: that of Paul Leonhard Gruner, who arrived from Germany in 1835.

Living a few miles away in the Canaries from a continent unknown to me had been gnawing at me for years. I finally justified the trip to myself and bought a ticket to Gambia for January. My niece Janna had recently arrived at Barcelona for 6 months with Strong Abogados/Incwell, so she joined me. Janna and I found some remote schools to deliver pencils and stuff to, following the advice of a guy in Tenerife named Lorenzo. After the trip ended, I began plotting the second trip with Adrian. Lorenzo found a nursery school for me to sponsor, so in June, Adrian and I arrived in town, gave a loan for a tye-die co-op, met the school’s teacher Merry, helped to paint the school, and found an artist willing to draw relevant pictures on the school’s facade, like a bucket, a ring, a snake, and an ear. My Gambia involvement led of course to a new website, Bintang Beat.

Pura took her turn with a trip to Bali, the latest stop on a personal journey that her health has led her to follow. She is once again turning weakness to strength. Since the mind plays a big part in one’s health, Pura’s self-exploration with a Tenerife group has opened up new worlds for her. Someone from the Tenerife group invited her to the 4-day conference in Bali, then they spent a few days in Ubud. In parallel, Pura has managed to get Spain's universal health care to pay for a new medicine called Revolade that is working well so far.

As for Curro, our dog: I think the local Vet was giving out drugs on the sly, because when Curro arrived to Madrid after his first flight, he was totally wasted. Anyway, it was Adrian who took him on the plane flight so whatever transpired is between the two of them. Adrian has been great at giving Curro a social life in Madrid, taking him to the dog park every day to get chased and salivated on, just as Curro likes. The move has been an adjustment for him too -- he can’t just pee whenever he wants. He has to wait for us to get dressed and go outside on cold Madrid mornings. Poor dog. For Christmas, we’re going back to Tenerife. Free from efforts with suitcases and polygons, we’re all going to watch Netflix movies, go to bed late, get up late, maybe have coffee in a comfy nook.

Happy Holidays to everybody! May you find peace with your neighbors, doormen, and perhaps even your phone company.

Love,

Curro, Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Photos 2018

Our new address: C/ Rodriguez San Pedro 5, 3 centro 28015 Madrid

Merry Christmas to all!

We rushed back from Madrid to warm Tenerife for our Christmas vacation.

Last year, my Dad started thinking about one last trip to Cuba. I said let’s go, and got Mom and Laura to sign on. Just us 4: the 55th-year reunion of the Strong-Gruner family. Instead of Cuba, though, we went for the scaled-back version, Little Havana in Miami. I had visions of Dad getting into heated arguments with right-wing Cuban-Americans, but the trip was idyllic and incident-free. We explored all the art highlights of Miami, with Laura always picking perfect places to eat. With this family, no wonder I had a great childhood.

In September Pura and I made our pilgrimage to the pyramids, with 6 others. Wow. Seeing ancient Egypt put things in perspective. 12,000 years of civilization is just a blip in time, and Egypt covers most of it. When everything else is gone, the pyramids will still be there. We got on our boat, the "Moon Goddess" and floated off down the Nile to see the temples. We got assigned to an Egyptian guide, Osama. He made juicy topics dry, so we decided to take turns pretending to listen to his spiel. We noticed that most temples were protected by the Romans, vandalized by early Christians, and graffitied by 19th-century visitors. After the temple visit, Osama would guide the van to a sales pitch for perfumes or spices. Back at poolside on the Moon Goddess, I got into a heated argument with a right-wing Cuban-American woman. We tried to avoid the word “Trump”, but couldn’t help it. [Just kidding, Terry. It was actually a polite and respectful exchange of opinions.]

Teo is working to keep up in his "School of Excellence" in Madrid, especially with college app essays and SATs. He just finished his first research paper: the rise and fall of the Basque sport Jai Alai. Too bad American football is not on the school curriculum. Teo has learned far more than me about the sport. He even cares about the draft. So on Sunday evenings, we let the school books close, and Teo manages to find the Philadelphia Eagles game on the internet. We love Teo's school friends so it's ok if they're experimenting with Jagermeister and black rum. The school trip to Greece was incident-free, much to the principal’s joy. Summer was Adrian and Teo’s time to hang out with their “old” Tenerife friends. Going to Extremadura in August to see his third pandilla of friends is now part of the summer routine for Teo.

Adrian's doing well in his second year in ICADE business school. He signed up as subdelegado of his class, and continues teatro classes. At home, he's doing a total redo of his Frankenstein play. By chance, Teo had to read Frankenstein in school this year, so Teo went over the themes with the resident expert. Adrian's all prepared to do his third year abroad. We’ll see where Adrian and Teo end up next year. Be warned, sons: our bags are packed to follow you.

When we moved to our Madrid apartment, I took one room as temporary art quarters in order to cover the empty walls with a few pictures. Things became permanent, as the plastic-coated room filled with paint puddles. In my efforts to re-create water’s patterns in nature, I’ve gotten deep into fluid art. I must be getting better: Pura lets me hang my pictures in the office, and Adrian says my pictures are now worth the price of the frames. Before getting into bed at night, I wash off my blue feet. Link to my art photos (scroll way down past my drip art obsession of 2016).

Time to see what 2020 -- the 12,001st year of civilization -- has in store for us. And time to splatter some paint and see what we can create in 2020.

We wish you all the very best! Curro, Teo, Adrian, Pura, and Tom

Our 2019 photos

PS: Adrian can snap his fingers now.

Greetings to all,

The New Year is coming, finally. 2020 was certainly a year to learn something from. Among other lessons, a year to live in the present and stop making plans. A year of plane vouchers: I was planning to see a lot of the people on this mailing list. Perhaps next year I can visit, and you can tell me your lockdown stories. I’ll bet our version’s not so different:

A TV and a big, blotchy sofa. A plug-in foot-lifting blotchy sofa. Three of us on the foot-lifting side, one on the chaise-lounge side. Yeaaah, real cozy. Social distancing outside the front door. But we had no popcorn. Madrid had toilet paper, but the popcorn shelves were bare no matter which supermarket I went to. (And I went to all. As the day’s highlight, I’d grab my backpack and explore the deep recesses of every supermarket, even Supersol.) Different countries, different ways to stock the bunker.

We’d sit on our sofa bathed in a netflix glow -- Pura and Teo shelling sunflower seeds, Adrian eating black licorice, and I had my nails to bite. We binged on 5 seasons of Breaking Bad, then 6 seasons of Community, followed by the less inspiring Tiger King. Work and online classes continued for us without much commitment. Beyond the windows was a lot of blue light: police cars and ambulances. We heard tales from the Outside: the police raided a bar in Murcia that was serving patrons on the sly. A boy was fined for taking a bike to a bread store (his explanation was that the distant loaf was 30 cents cheaper). An old man was pretending to be coming back from a bread store. The police squeezed his baguette. Rock hard. The game was up, 300€ fine. On March 14, the first day of lockdown, I admit I went for a jog. But when I realized I’d just get fined instead of thrown righteously in jail, I conformed. I learned to run in place in the apartment. We did push-ups, we did limbo tests, we wrestled in bed (and broke it). We’d time ourselves doing 50 laps in the hall. We’d run up and down the 8 flights of stairs, until the doorman appeared suddenly on the 7th floor and said “you can’t do that”. A week later he discovered us on the roof of the building. “You can’t do that”. (In January, the doorman had told me to remove the severed arm hanging from our window since Halloween. Since Christmas, the arm was wrapped with festive lights.)

Besides going to the supermarkets, dogs constituted the other legal reason for humans to be outside. Dogsharing got popular in Madrid. We took turns giving Curro walks. Curro loved the lockdown. Pura was outside with Curro one day when a policeman questioned her if she was further than 100 meters from her house. The day before I’d taken him on a 3-hour tour of the city. Remaining a law-abiding citizen was definitely harder in 2020, especially when you have limited social contact and you’re trying to avoid the news programs. (Gee, what’s the death count today?) During my first post-lockdown jog, I was informed that 6-8pm was the time for the 65+ crowd; jogging was 8-10pm.

From the start of lockdown, everyone would get out on their balconies at 8pm and applaud the hospital workers. More so, it was the time to look out and see we’re all in this together, us Whos in Whoville. I think that sudden feeling of shared humanity is another breed of emotion, often sparked during those occasional times when we get to bond with strangers. At our window, I would always nod to the old woman in the apartment around the corner. After a week of 8pm’s, the apartment down the block started playing “I Will Survive”. 8:05pm eventually morphed into a showcase for the musicians of the neighborhood. The applause kept up for the whole 7 weeks. Vigorous hand-clapping was also good exercise. In late April, they started loosening the rules: one day they let the kids go outside. It was such a joy to see them, as if they’d been let out of the city dungeon after the evil candyman with the long nose got put on an aspirator.

When the lockdown ended, we took stock and discovered that Adrian and Teo’s studies were in shambles, and no, we were not in Italy where it was declared all students would pass. There would be no Snow Day Deluxe in Spain. Pura performed a late-term miracle and willed Teo into becoming a high school graduate, while Adrian studied for his make-up exams. And so the summer started with Teo headed in the fall to UC Santa Barbara, and Adrian headed to New Orleans for Junior year abroad at Tulane.

Over the course of the summer, the great covid sun continued to exert its gravitational warp on the straight line of plans. With all online classes, Teo deferred starting college at UCSB. So how to fill the time? I didn’t think an 18-year-old stood a chance in the 2020 job market in the Canary Islands, so I showed Teo how to harvest cochineal bugs from the prickly pear cactus. (Hernan Cortez got that trick for making red dye from the Aztecs.) But before I could send him into the hills with a spoon and a bucket, he landed a job at multinational Atos! In mid-September, he started his customer support job showing Budget Car Rental employees in the USA (perhaps in Santa Barbara?) how to restore their passwords. Teo works at home with 5 applications open on his screens. He sometimes gets the graveyard shift. We bring a meal up to him at 10pm, and listen proudly as Teo says in that confident customer support tone: “I’m going to need you to answer a few security questions. What’s your favorite sports team?... That’s correct. The Jets aren’t doing so well this year, are they?”

It was a shock to get an email two weeks ago from UCSB saying that they wouldn’t let him defer winter term, but I’m sure schools are hard up too. Teo just gave his two-week notice to Atos. He’s going to do his classes from Spain. Teo was late choosing classes, so many were filled up (in a virtual sort of way. I’m not clear on the reasoning there.) Graveyard shift again. His class on “Climate Change in Antarctica” is going to be at 3am. When Teo finally does make it to California, he won’t have jet lag.

Adrian’s answer to a job was to create a summer camp. He took over the dining room and taught kids how to do Scratch programming. Meanwhile, the Tulane plan for fall tottered and fell, so Adrian went back to ICADE in Madrid. But ICADE wasn’t working for him anymore. In October, Adrian left school and flew back to Tenerife. Years later we might ponder this bifurcation -- the alternate Adrian in his New Orleans dimension -- but for now, he’s recharging his batteries: playing D&D, teaching English, making movie shorts, plus aikido and cinema classes. Whoops, last week they closed the gyms in Tenerife -- no more aikido.

Listening to Pura describe her personal development classes during the last five years, I realized I need a reboot too, so along with a new meditation habit, I joined Pura on a yoga retreat in Gran Canaria and a retreat in Lanzarote called “Find your shadow”. In December, we moved out of the Madrid apartment. Pura posted ads: “Bed with one leg broken: free. Blotchy electric sofa: free”. We grabbed the last two storage units available in our neighborhood and stuffed them full -- mattresses, dishes, severed arm, fondue forks. Leftover furniture ended up in our office. We tried to camouflage it: our Breaking Bad TV became a conferencing screen in the meeting room. The paintings that I couldn’t dump on friends went to the office bathroom. With our last load ready to wheel to the office, our doorman appeared suddenly at our door in his pajamas, and we talked. All water over the bridge. He gave us sage advice about getting our deposit back from the owner.

In the midst of the move, Pura slipped and broke her foot. Two days later, we were in the airport headed back to Tenerife, vouchers all used up. The wheelchair guy wheeled Pura to the plane. Back here at home, she’s laid up. So Teo has joined her in the glow: 6 seasons of Brooklyn Nine-Nine with a big bowl of popcorn.

Best wishes to all on a fabulous 2021! Tonight really deserves a great celebration. This year was exhausting. I’m hoping to hug an unsuspecting stranger in 2021, or at least know that I can.

PS:

Photos of the year

Adrian’s first short. He prefers not to field questions about why there is singing.

Teo says spinning a basketball takes the same time to learn as juggling.

Latest painting experiments (scroll to the bottom). I’ve claimed a room in our Tenerife house to paint. On a side table lies a bowl of crushed bugs for my red tones.

Happy New Year’s to All,

I hope you all had excellent Christmases.

Teo was in from California to join us, so we had the full 4-person-1-dog unit for Christmas Day. I carried my tree concoction from Christmases past from the patio to the back room – now christened as our holiday room. In the afternoon, we all drove to the beach. The beach was empty and beautiful, so I think we’ll make that an annual tradition.

After a lot of false starts and memorable mistakes in the early months of the year, I felt like 2021 ended with healing and closure, ready for new beginnings.

Change of administration this year. I no longer read news of the USA in morbid fascination. And no news is so calming … no news, namaste, no news …

In July, Pura’s mother passed away with so much grace. I felt like she orchestrated the end: said her secret goodbyes to all. I felt honored that Pura and I were with her at the moment of her passing. She was 85 at the time.

We’d paid visits to her this spring when she was quite healthy. I drove her, Pura, and Teo to Cordoba one day (March 25). We were walking along the big Roman bridge in front of a statue of Saint Rafael when Pura heard from our lawyer that all charges against Strong Abogados had lifted. A few weeks earlier (March 8: Int'l Women's Day), one paper check from us to a Danish man was set to end this 8-year-old paper fight. On March 12, Pura was offered to go on stage to deliver the Premio Nacional de Jurisprudencia Alfonso X. Six months later, Hay Derecho, an anti-corruption organization, announced Pura as a finalist for their annual award. They paid for our hotel room at the event in Madrid for the five finalists, and recorded an interview with Pura. What did we learn from the 8-year experience? Not sure yet, but it’s over.

I cleared a big pile of documents related to those 8 years out of my office, and tried to cleanse the energy. This cosmic stuff. I can’t quite feel these energies yet, but I’m working on it. This year, one or more of us has done constellations, curso de milagros, voice therapy, magnet therapy, rebirthing, singing bowl concerts, pranic breathing, new moon ecstatic dancing, ashkan, ayahuasca, acupuncture, meditation, even yoga. All lead to the same crucial goal: cleaning house in the brain. Pura and I are definitely making advances and discoveries, as well as enjoying the journey. We got Adren to join us at a few events, but he has been more inspired by his cinema classes and D&D sessions.

Teo began his UC Santa Barbara era in Tenerife. All classes were online his freshman year. He deferred the fall 2020 trimester, then started with online classes in January. After leaving his job at Atos with its graveyard shift, he continued the graveyard shift for school classes. In summer, Teo bounced between his Madrid friends, Berlanga friends, and Tenerife friends. Actually, it was some kind of quantum 3-places-at-once performance. In August, we headed off to Madrid with a big suitcase bound for California. In Madrid, Teo found a few hours to visit friends before meeting us at the airport for the flight to JFK. After the two-year-covid-flight-gap, we got to visit Mom and Dad. We did a family reunion at Mount Gretna, PA, where Dad had spent his teenage summers. We were thrilled to have distant visitors. Aunt Barbara and cousins Susan and Nancy drove in from Michigan, while Mark, Alla, and Rebecca Webster drove in from Massachusetts. Along games of pounce, puzzles, and great talk, we visited the house where Dad’s mother grew up, the house where his Aunt Alice lived, and the town park and playground that Uncle George donated and built. The week slipped away. It was time to head for Santa Barbara: delta.com to lyft.com to homexchange.com to campus, our first time there. We headed straight to the pristine beach. Wow, that campus backdrop even beats Ardmore. I looked up Marcus Flathman, a friend from Haverford days (after he looked me up a year before – almost the same day Teo got accepted at UCSB – cosmic). On campus, Pura, Adren, and I accompanied Teo as he set up a bank account and bought a bike. We said teary goodbyes in his dorm room, stayed a few more days in town (just in case, you know), then flew back to our island. Soon, Teo was traveling to Chicago with exchange students, to LA for basketball games, and to the bay area for Thanksgiving.

More teary goodbyes today for Pura and me. Christmas break in Tenerife is over for Teo. We brought Teo and a big suitcase to the Tenerife airport, bound to LA via Copenhagen.

After we moved back to Tenerife from Madrid last year, we kept going to Madrid to get Pura’s expensive medicine from social security. This month we got the great news from her new hematologist in Tenerife that she can start receiving Revolade here.

In June, Pura and I joined friends Pili and Maria Eugenia for a vacation to Lanzarote and Isla Graciosa (population 200. The mysterious 8th island of the Canaries.) In November, Adren and I headed to Brussels. We got to see Rachel and her adopted town. Brussels and the Saint-Gilles neighborhood were a lot of fun (mixed with a bit of work). Back at home, Adren was helping out in our office. We needed to hire, so Adren was doing phone interviews to prospective employees. Soon after, Adren got a call from a prospective employer. The person wanted to check out Adren’s English. (In such situations, Adren admitted to me that he likes to throw in lesser-used phrases, like “by the wayside”, to countertest the other person’s English.) Adren passed the test: In a few weeks, he will start his job at Atos, the same place where Teo worked.

At the start of the year, we ripped up the kitchen and a few other rooms too. There were too many walls in the house, so walls came down, all plumbing got replaced with new pipes, and the kitchen was rebuilt from scratch. We ate in the patio for 5 months – that part was very nice. But we needed some time without dust and butt-cracks, so we found a getaway apartment in a British corner of the island with a golf course and crumpets. The kitchen is done now. The dust has settled. We’re still getting used to the changes in the house. Curro was scratching at a door one day, wanting to be with us. With walls gone, I showed him that he now had a route to us without opening the door. I will state (without judgment) that Curro did figure it out, but not immediately.

Guess that wraps it up. Got my 2022 resolutions written down. I’m avoid extra computer/phone time, so I miss out on social media, which means I‘m more out of touch than I could be. This weekend, I’ll do a full review of facebook and instagram, and check out what everybody has been up to this past year. Love to all. I wish you bright holidays and an illuminating 2022!

Happy New Year’s! Don’t forget the 12 grapes.

Curro, Teo, Adren, Pura, and Tom

Our 2021 photos

That butt-crack comment was disrespectful. Sorry, Vladi.

I will not be apologizing to Curro.

A googlesnort: People on the island of Kirimati (formerly called Christmas Island) will be the first to have a shot at celebrating the gregorian New Year. Pura, Adren, and I will be somewhere in the middle of the queue of people waiting to celebrate. In 1856, the USA decided to claim Kirimati and a few other atolls from Britain. Finally, Jimmy Carter ended the paper fight and recognized the country of Kiribati’s sovereignty over the island of Kirimati. Auld Lang Syne, people of Kirimati.

Dear friends,

Well, well, well. Christmas has already come and gone, the three Kings delivered their gifts and are making their way home after a brief stopover in Ibiza, so it’s time to celebrate the Chinese New Year! The Year of the Rabbit. Looks to be a white rabbit.

Over Christmas break, I think there was some seismic shifting underfoot in our family: leaving the rut and finding the groove. Teo came back from California transformed, I would say, after a season of late night bull sessions with his friends, in particular his flatmate Max. Max has taught Teo how to take concrete actions to becoming a better person. Teo has taught Max how to enjoy life. That about right, Teo? So in the spirit of self-betterment, Teo got an appointment over Christmas with a therapist friend of Pura named Ulyses: Teo finally came out after 3 hours. This session clarified Teo’s transformed relationship with Adren. A sibling relationship is a gift from heaven: why waste it?

We accompanied Teo to Barcelona, the first leg of his trip back to Santa Barbara. We bought Teo’s rock-climbing shoes and made a pilgrimage to the metamorphosized Sagrada Familia.

The other day I heard Adren downstairs shouting “Fuck you! Fuck you!...” I was concerned for a second. Oh, wait, that’s just Adren doing his homework.
Adren certainly found his groove in 2022. He began the year with his first job working for somebody else. With this job he met Helena, his first long-term relationship. After a few months at work, he made a decision to leave, and soon started school at the Escuela de Actores de Canarias (EAC), a short scooter ride from home. EAC takes 30 students per year. I love hearing about his classes: mime, fencing, voice, and even writing an essay or two. Adren has had to leave his mentor Candido from cinema classes, but Candido may well re-appear in a later scene. [You may have noted Adren’s name change. That’s how it is with actors.]

In summer we took Teo back to Berlanga for his regular attendance to the summer fiesta. We returned to the family house on Calle Iglesia, Pura’s mother’s clothes still on their hangers. Pura’s friend, Pili, was eager to re-introduce Pura to her childhood friends. A cover band blasted through the night, far from the “youth zone” where Teo and his friends were. I successfully shot some toothpicks and got rewarded with a “yo soy cazador” keychain. We managed to stay up for the 7am churros con chocolate before finding our way back to Calle Iglesia.

Adren joined us for the final trip of summer: a week in Stockholm. After Adren and Teo returned to school, Pura and I and our friend Edita took one final late summer trip to Scotland, Edita’s choice. We criss-crossed the River Ness, and discovered what we came for.

After 8 years at Pennswood Village in ol’ Newtown, PA, Mom and Dad moved out of their independent unit and into assisted care units. Laura worked her wonders turning the “units” into homes. With Covid declared over, I got in 4 visits in 2022, the last visit with Pura and Teo and also Lina and son Harold for Thanksgiving. Laura fit us all in at the dining room table, and proceeded to make a spectacular meal for 11 look effortless. Before heading back to Spain, we spent a few more days in NYC with residents Harold (Turtle Bay) and Janna (Williamsburg).

Pura is cured from her immune disorder, and her body is starting to figure that out. Last week, we went to a homeopathic doctor who told Pura to reduce the medicine down to zero and, if necessary, just lie to the social security doctor, which we did.

In the office, Pura leads the 20 employees with grace, conjuring new hires and making tough decisions without fear or hand-wringing. As always, she combines her laser focus and sensitivity to the task at hand. One employee named Cosmo recently resigned. He was rather annoying at work, always second-guessing Pura. One day he reportedly ate a bit of his son’s leftover brownie before heading off to work and, well, that’s another story. Our best hire of 2022 was Pura’s sister Lina (for the third time). Lina’s life has intertwined with ours since she lived with us for a time in Madrid back before Pura and I were married. Our 4 children were together for a time in Sevilla and Barcelona. And through all those years, we’ve used really lousy renovation firms. But lo, a miracle is afoot! Behold our sparkling new office in Tenerife, thanks to Lina and our first great renovators. Edita arrived to christen the new office and imbue it with good energies.

As for me, I just did a session with Ulyses. It went from 5pm to 4:30am. Ulysses spelled it out for me. Zombie or angel: what will it be? Back on December 27th, I killed the zombie in the ocean and some surfers saved the angel, but as we all know, a zombie never dies. Every day, every moment, I must decide what I want to be: zombie or angel. To paraphrase Ulyses, being in the movie (the angel) is better than watching the movie (the zombie), even if it’s a sad movie or a horror movie with zombies.
I’ve been signing up a lot this year for cacao ceremonies and yoga hoedowns, etc. Out of these events, I’m meeting amazing people, all freely giving their time to help me awaken the angel. For the Year of the Rabbit, I have a new exercise (thanks, Pura): when I pass strangers on the street, I will ask myself, where are they coming from? Where are they going? The angel knows. The zombie doesn’t even see their faces.

I hope in 2023 I can track down some friends in person, or perhaps you can find time to reach our cloud-hugged island. Teo’s empty bed awaits visitors.

Until then, muchos besos, abrazos, y churros con chocolate, Teo, Adren, Pura, Tom, and Dogless

Our 2022 photos