Living in Two Worlds / Viviendo en Dos Mundos

That is what I wrote about for my last OLLI Spanish class of the fall season:

Estoy viviendo en dos mundos. Una parte está en EE.UU. , donde assisto a las últimas clases de OLLI, buscamos una casa para comprar, trabajo con mi empresa en Connecticut, y visito a mi familia alrededor en Cincinnati. Otra parte planea nuestro viaje a España el domingo que viene, arreglando citas con amigos americanos allí para el Día de Dar Gracias, reuniones con el club de lectores, juegos de petanca con los daneses, visitas a mis amigos y a mi profesora de español, y las tareas de preparar a vender la casa. Es dificil vivir en dos lugares cuando ambos son tan atractivos.

I am living in two worlds. One part of me is in the United States, where I am attending the final OLLI classes, we are looking for a house to buy, I work with my job in Connecticut, and visit my family around Cincinnati. The other part is planning our trip to Spain this coming Sunday, arranging appointments with American friends there for Thanksgiving, meetings with my book group, petanca games with the Danes, visits to friends and my Spanish teacher, and the tasks involved in getting the house ready to sell. It is difficult to live in two places when both are so attractive.

Now as I write this on Saturday, "this coming Sunday" is tomorrow and the balance has shifted to the other side. We have done our final purchases of gifts and supplies to take with us, I have done the final laundry--not that we are taking many clothes--we have kitty-proofed the house and talked with my sister who will become Guapa's best friend for the next four weeks, I have done a good job of using up those items in the freezer and refrigerator that I do not want to face again when I come back, I have finished reading the book for book club next week and arranged for its return to the library, and we have picked up the rental car that we will use to drive to the airport and drop there tomorrow morning. All that remains is packing the suitcases and making sure I have everything I need for the trip. It should be simple, since we have a full house over there and are taking little, and I have been collecting things and making notes for a couple weeks. But it's the part of the job that I always hate. So I had better get to it.

If time and mind permit in the next few weeks, I will be posting my thoughts at my original blog, Sundays in Spain.

Playing Pètanque in Ohio

Pètanque Court in Zanesfield, Ohio

I've been dealing all week with a nasty cold I picked up by being outside for two hours in the brisk air last Sunday in Zanesfield, Ohio. It's worth it, though, because after a break of more than four months, I was playing pètanque again. Readers of Sundays in Spain, my earlier blog, know that I used to spend a lot of time playing petanca, as it is known in Spanish, when living in the Alicante region in southeast Spain. It doesn't take a lot of resources to play this game: the court can be just a field or sandy area, the game is centered around one ping-pong sized ball, and each player needs three metal balls. No special equipment, though a sun visor helps.

We had looked high and low for other players of pètanque in the Cincinnati area, checking out parks and sports stores, and searching for notices in the newspaper and on the Internet. Finally we came across the Zanesfield Pètanque Club. So last Sunday we made a two-hour trip north from Cincinnati to Zanesfield, a small town that I had not heard of, even though, I discovered during the course of the drive, it is located only a half hour's drive from the town in which I grew up! The Zanesfield club is very active and enthusiastic about the sport, and has corralled support from many organizations in the community to set up the best-equipped pètanque courts I have ever seen.  The members were welcoming and we had a great time, even though I lost two games. And caught a cold.

That Time Again

Readers of my previous blog Sundays in Spain know about my obsession with the biannual changing of the clocks. I am not so much opposed to the changing of time once in the spring and again in the fall as I am frustrated by the inability of Europe and the United States to do it at the same time each year. They both do it at 2:00 AM on a Sunday morning; it's just that the particular Sunday they choose to do it is not the same Sunday.

This year Europe changed from what I know of as "summer time" to "winter time" a week before the U.S. changed from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. I got my first inkling about ten days ago, when I registered in advance for a webinar that was being hosted in London this past week. The registration website had a button that I could click to find out the timing of the webinar in my local time zone. I know that there are normally five hours' difference between the U.K. and U.S. Eastern time but that the U.K. does not change to summer time (I guess Greenwich Mean Time is Greenwich Mean Time, is GMT, is GMT forever.) The website showed four hours' difference between webinar origin time and my point of reception. Oh dear! I should check that, I said to myself, but there is time to do it closer to the webinar date. I wrote it down on my calendar for the earliest possible start time.

Then later I got emails from friends in Spain and Denmark commenting on the impending dark evenings because the clocks were changing, and I knew I should be changing my mental calculation of the normal six hours' difference between Europe and here to the odd five hours' difference. I tried to explain this week to a group of people (those in my Spanish class, as it happens) that I get a little unsettled every year when this happens because it upsets the normal symmetry of my life: it is so much easier to calculate the time difference when one slides the hour hand on a primitive non-digital clock face straight across from 9:00 to 3:00, for example, or 12:00 to 6:00, or 1:00 to 7:00 than it is to move at the oblique angle that represents five hours' difference. Not to mention the change to my very deeply internalized body clock that I think adjusted to U.S. Eastern time when I was born in Ohio and, in spite of many layered adjustments through the years, still reacts to Eastern time as "real time." I don't think I was very successful at conveying this illogical but very deep-seated feeling to the other students, except for one fellow student who I believe is from Germany, who told me after the class that she understood perfectly, and shared my frustration that both continents do not change at the same time.

Happily for me, North American clocks changed from Daylight Savings to Standard time early this morning--one of us was awake to watch the time jump from 1:59 to 1:00 on the iPad. For the first time in ten years--maybe twelve--I experienced the change from EDT to EST in person. My internal clock is once again based in the right zone, and in symmetry.

Cool Cat!

Scooter, the neutered cat. "Hip spectacles. No testicles."
Created by Northlich.

Our public television station, WCET, has GiveThemTen.org as a sponsor of the PBS Newshour. Ten is a project that is fighting the problem of over-population of cats--it claims that a cat is put to death in a "kill shelter" every twenty minutes! We watch the Newshour most evenings and are therefore quite familiar with hearing that "Cool cats are spayed and neutered cats" after we hear other important views of the world. The tagline is part of a stellar eye- and ear-catching PR campaign that I believe has gone nationwide on much media--and worldwide through the Internet--but which I was proud to discover was created here in Cincinnati at Northlich marketing and advertising firm.

We had been reminding our little Guapa that "cool cats are spayed" every time we heard this or saw a picture of Scooter, the neutered cat, in his cool sunglasses and black turtleneck during the past couple of weeks. That's because she was approaching her six month birthday and had a date to keep to be spayed herself. Not surprisingly, she failed to appreciate the warning or the benefit.

 Cool Cat Guapa. ©Johannes Bjorner 2014

But spayed she was this past Wednesday morning. Both she and we survived. After we picked her up Wednesday afternoon and returned her to the house, she slept most of the remainder of the day, waking only to sip a little water drained from a can of tuna and lap up a few morsels of crushed chunk albacore. Then she slept again, and we watched her constantly to make sure she didn't lick her wound. She probably got more sleep than we did that night. Thursday she was ready to eat again, and had recovered enough so that we had to watch that she didn't jump too high and split open her internal sutures.

She is still much quieter than before the operation, but we are astonished at how quickly she seems to have returned to comfort, and without the pain medicine we had prepared. She still occupies much of our attention, and we are continually surprised--and only a little apprehensive--at seeing where she will appear next. She's one cool cat.