hallo-gato

Halloween Alleycat.  I wasn’t going to ride, but caved to peer-pressure(!).  It was fun – we made a pentagon, as you can see on the map, or at this route-map (okay, so you can’t see the pentagram on the route map, but I was curious about the distance).  Here’s the material and the winners.  The clues are for a quiz that if you couldn’t answer you dropped a place, what’s the answer???? It’s super obvious, except that I always confuse him with Freddy Kreuger.

this past week

Since it’s been a while, a quick recap.

Last weekend I spent a lot of time at Hell in South, the bike fest put on by the fixed gear kids here.  It was a lot of fun – I rode in two alley cats on that crazy bike that I have. Also rode in a velodrome for the first time.  That shit is pretty crazy, but fun.  And, considering that the velodrome we went to is 400m a lap it’s very tiring.  Then, there was a metal show that was pretty good – lots of hair and head banging and other theatrics – generally the expected.  But! one the way home I got poured on.  Sunday there was some more bike stuff, some hill races which I did not participate in and then homework and general week preparation.  Nowhere is open in Madrid on Sunday (almost nowhere that is).  This means two things. (1) Places that are open tend to be owned by people who are not from Spain and there is a lot of the “Yes, they’re open, but they shoudln’t be” attitude about it. (I’m not sure why it really would matter so much but…) And (2) I can’t do my normal grocery-shop-on-Sunday-afternoon thing.  But, slowly, slowly I’m learning.

Then I spent all week doing this. Some sort of nasty put out for the whole week.  I only missed one day to school/work, but only today have a really felt better.  I did everything – drank lakes of water, slept during all of my free time, went to the pharmacy where the woman rather perfunctorily gave me some giant white allergy pills.  They helped with the drainage and headaches, but turned me into a total zombie. (I was looking for a picture of a good zombie or sleepwalker to put here, and a ran into these zombie walks that they have places! People really go all out, here’s someone flickr about it – but I guess if you really love zombies there only one way to really prove it?)

So the worst fall out from being ill has been that yesterday morning I was trying to go out and buy a few groceries and somehow managed to loose my wallet within two blocks of my house. Yeah, I have no idea.  I mean I understand that these things happen, but seriously, within 2 blocks has to be some kind of record.  So I made these little signs (soundtrack: Pinhead Gunpowder!) and put them up just in case one of the large population of elderly folks that live around here or some other kind person happened to have gotten it.  All the cards are cancelled, blah blah, but it was quite distressing – the only thing I have now to prove who I am at all is my passport, which I really don’t like to carry around – obviously sometimes I loose things.

Sigh.

The good news is that I made some great bread yesterday and then Shelby and I made awesome pizza. My roommate, Xavi, like it so much he kept saying ‘Sweet Jesus baby’ in an effort describe his feelings (for some reason that order feels correct to him instead of Sweet Baby Jesus, I blame the Irish guy, my other roommate, Bryan for all of this).  So that was great – terrific pizza, decent 2 euro wine, a little delicious chocolate bar for dessert – what more could you want?

Then we stepped out for a bit to this short film fest at La Boca del Lobo, which was actually kind of a bust. Thing is we saw 4 or five of the three hundred or so shorts that will be projected over ten days.  But it was hot and there were no chairs so we left.