Fixing things

Last year I bought a very funky but lovely sounding guitar from a great old guy in Havana. Zoe pulled it out last Sunday to play the 5 and half year old blues. She strummed away for a while and then left it on the couch. I noticed that a pretty gnarly crack had developed on on the back. I immediately blamed the kid and had her go and clean the bathroom and wash the car... nah, she's always gentle with the instruments and besides we don't have a car.

I got on the internet, well I seem to always be on the internet... and googled "crack, accoustic guitar repair." I waded through all the sexual and drug related references and came cross this guitar maker who also teaches others how to make guitars. One of his students had written in to discuss fixing pretty much the same problem.

The guitar makers point was that the crack was probably caused by a change in humidity. Ditto... Havana humid to the point of needing a wet suit, Barcelona in the winter, dry as a bone.

So the guy says to first wet down the body of the guitar with a spray bottle and then stick it in a plastic garbage bag over night. Hmmm. OK I empty out a windex bottle and spritz my baby and then dug out out a garbage bag, put it inside and sealed off the neck with some masking tape. This apparently is supposed to re-humidify the instrument and will seal up the fissure that has been caused the wood drying out.

OK I wait until the next morning and remove the guitar from it's new damp environment. Viola! The wound healed!

Phase 2 was rubbing Elmer's glue to the now healed crack for " not less than 2 minutes using your finger tips." I cleaned up the excess glue with a wet paper towel as described and I now have a repaired guitar!

Much of my world is so abstract. The vagueness of what I do, the general lack of any kind of a schedule or a day to day rhythm... It felt good to do something physical and see the results of a small amount of labor. I 'll remember my success every time I play this old happily unfashionable guitar.

Sunday in Barcelona

Traditionally Sundays in Barcelona are for getting up early, fixing a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, hash browns, wheat toast, OJ and mugs of hot, hot coffee. Then it's off for an early bike ride and then on to a museum or two and finally a movie. IRONY! In general Spaniards stay up until 5 am 7 days a week. A typical Sunday consists of rolling out of the sack at 2 in the afternoon followed by hunk of dry bread and shot of espresso and depending on what you had the night before a shot of something else. Then it's off to lunch with some friends and then a movie and then a drink and then dinner and then a drink and then a club and then somehow it's 5 am again.

We came close to this today. Zoe woke me up at 8:30! I got her some juice and went back to bed. Everybody was officially up by 10:30. Good fer nuttin' lay-a-bout sinners were we.

A Sick Kid

Poor Zoe came back from school sick last night. The classic. The standard. The stomach flu. Yep lots of evacuation. We did the good parents thing and got her to bed. What felt good when I was kid when I was sick? My mom being with me. Soda crackers with margarine, Seven Up and Campbell's chicken noodle soup. An of course watching reruns of Perry Mason on TV.

Zoe's day was sort of similar but you can't find soda crackers or Seven Up here. Chicken Soup yes but no Perry Mason.

So you subsitute Catalan cooking shows and DVDs of Scooby Doo run off the laptop and you are almost there. But still those Perry Mason episodes were something; Della and Paul, Burger the DA and Perry sweating out a last minute on the stand confession from the dead guys nephew or business partner or wife. I'm sorry but bad Spanish Muppet clones cannot hold a candle to that.

Shadow of the Wind Time in BCN

It's definitely winter here. The trees are bare and it's damp and cold. Less people are on the streets. Barcelona is a very romantic city, a romantic city with a dark side. Black clouds gathering over the old amusement park on Tibidabo. Brooding modernista buildings with their organic shapes looking like grimacing mouths and bones. The old gothic part of town with it's labyrinth of dark and narrow streets. It's all in Carlos Ruiz Zafon's book, "The Shadow of the Wind." Get past the first chapter and you'll be hooked.

But for me considering my mood I think I need to re-read "The Great American Novel" by Philip Roth. One of the funniest books of all time. I kid you not. Hey! Anybody wanna make a movie of this! I know this director...

Dark Taxi Ride

I had to go way up on the hill to have an appointment with the Rhumatologist. It was scheduled for 6, well into the Spanish winter evening. My downstairs neighbor Alfredo came along as a translator. When it comes to money and health I need the information to be pretty concrete.

It was a weird dark ride. It was raining and the taxi driver was playing sitar music on the stereo and he had a plastic Jesus and a plastic Buddha stuck to the dash board. Alfredo kept visiting these extremely dark topics, topics that seemingly affect both of us. But it just wasn't the right time. We wound up through the Eixample and into Sarria. For much of the trip it was bumper to bumper traffic. Lots of time to hear just about how bad things could be. I couldn't get my leg comfortable. I appreciated the company and the help but I eventually asked him to please change the subject.

Finally we arrived at the office. We waited a for a while and I kept pretending to read Hola, sort of a Spanish "People" magazine but Alfredo kept getting back to bleakness. Eventually the Rhumatologist saw us. He just kept banging away in Spanish. OK, OK I know it's my fault I live in Spain, but he he wouldn't slow down and he wouldn't back up. It was 90% techno jargon that seemed to have a lot to do with my future.

On the way back Alfredo continued with his devil's advocacy. I occasionally closed my eyes and just wished I was in another place. A place where people spoke English, were nicely taciturn and didn't make everything an emotional upheaval out of cultural necessity. A place where my leg didn't hurt. I wanted a pine log on the fire, a dog on my lap and a slightly warm beer. OK put Zoe at my feet drawing pictures of raccoons and you have version of heaven.

Saturday morning at the biblioteca

Zoe and I go to the library either Friday night after school or on Saturday mornings. I like Saturday mornings because we can hang out for hours. She automatically goes to the kids section and I go grab a stack of magazines, the more trivial the better. Currently I seem to be attracted by mountain bike rags featuring 5,000 euro uberbicis made out of endangered bald eagle feathers and compressed hydrogen. Anyway I take my pile and join Zoo Zoo at one of the kiddy tables. Zoe has thing for this series called, "El Cuerpo Humano." She's always been interested in cartilage, why I dunno, but it just won't go away, but this Saturday she was fascinated by the immune system. Oh boy... Dads going to be a science project. For some reason white corpuscles are her favorites. I guess it's because they are cute, doughy and kind of cuddly.

She usually picks out a couple of books and a DVD or 2. Me I go for the DVDs and the CDs. I got Marc Ribot for the 4th time and "In the Name of the Father" or more accurately "En el Nombre Del Padre." OK I'm a real bookworm but let's face it the chances of me reading Catalan are slim to non-existent.

On the way home we stopped in a farmacia for some of the many things I am taking. The nice pharmacist was at the mercy of his brother's reorganization of the goods and couldn't at first find what I needed. I find that Catalans can get strangely fastidious over minutia but can live with a telephone cable hanging in front of their window for years. Maybe it's a subconcious reaction to the cable hanging in front the guy's brother's window that caused him to move all the boxes around. But he eventually found the right cubby hole.

The big news is what was on the counter. There was a display in happy kiddie colors from a major manufacturer of rubbers. The gadget, all wrapped up like it was a novelty candy like pop rocks or warheads, is a disposable vibrator kind of thingy. Apparently it's designed to be inserted where the sun don't shine and is guaranteed to last for 20 minutes. Jeez, twenty minutes! Comes with happy candy colored lube in a festive applicator. Imagine the research that went into this product. Can you imagine the focus group? Zoe was very interested. I told her it was a new kind of yo yo. She didn't buy it.

A short errand

I've been trying to get out more. My pal Lucy has me drinking homemade kefir. It's another cultured lactose thang sort of like yogurt. Anyway it has these chunky bits called grains that you are supposed to filter out and reuse to make more kefir. You need a medium fine strainer. So off I go to the tienda para everything you need including magnets and dog leashes. It's 2 blocks down the street so it will be a challenge. I shuffle along as all the fit and handsome people point and make comments about the poor guy struck down way too young by a vicious case of an overly aggressive immune system. I have now added a cane to my ensemble.

I make it to the shop and enter the closet like space. There is really a huge amount of stuff tucked inside. Pots, pans, knives, pasta machines, hedge clippers, toilet paper roll holders, decorative figurines and motor oil. Mr. Tienda is reading the newspaper. Mrs. Tienda greets me and ask me what I need. Wisely I had looked up the name for strainer in the dictionary before my departure. "Nesecito uno colado pequino y fino, por favor." "Si", she points to the wall behind her which has at least 50 different types of strainers. "Es para kefir, metalico es una problema, tiene plasticos?" Like she is going to know about kefir... Jamon si, kefir or kambucha forgetaboutit. Mr. Tienda looks up from his paper. "Abajo" there under a pile of swim fins are a few dusty lime green numbers. I acknowledge a successful search and say I'll take it. She wraps the strainer in beautifully printed paper and hands it to me. "Quando questa?" Back behind his paper Mr. Tienda says, "Uno euro" to his wife. Following protocol she tells me, "uno euro." I give a euro and take my new lime green strainer and hobble home slighter better for the experience.