The walk up there takes us under the motorway that connects us very conveniently to Santander to the west and Bilbao to the east. I liked how the arrow was pointing right at the Laredo skyline.

Springtime has brought us some adorable little calves. These calves seemed happier than mine after walking up the hill to get there.

The lush green mountainside.

Each of the thirty or so times I’ve walked up to Colindres de Arriba, I have been unable to avoid taking this photograph of the medieval church with the Pico Candiano behind it.

The coats of arms on the houses are those of the families that have owned the land for centuries.

We finally made it up to the church. Nora walked the whole way, but requested the stroller on the way back.

Just then, we heard some bells and saw a shepherd walking up the cobblestone path with about fifty sheep behind him.

Can you count them without dozing off?

The sheep were headed down to a relatively new park to graze. We went down after them and were impressed by the seemingly effortless control the shepherd, with his dog, had over controlling where their captives went.

I took advantage of this foreground subject to capture the view of this old haunted-looking mansion we can see from our house.

Sheeple and steeple.

The visibility was great, and we could clearly make out the hermitage on the Pico de las Nieves.

My walking companions.

A maternal kiss.

On the way home, we stopped at a park to see and saw for a bit. Then we went home and fried up some fresh anchovies for dinner.

We had a lovely day, and I hope you enjoyed these photos.

She also is full of stories that a more mature mind might not discuss, like today when we walked by a bar, she told me about one time when she and her aunt were stuck in the bar’s bathroom and they couldn’t open the door.

Three year olds should definitely be treated as social moles spying on their own families. We can no longer freely criticize people that we know from the privacy of our own homes because she’s capable of parroting anything to anybody.

I recorded the following interview with her today to capture the state of her language skills. She will often go off onto tangents about things she experienced months ago. Her language for temporally positioning events is still pretty rudimentary, with “yesterday” meaning any time in the past.

The video starts with the end of her sentence, “What are you gonna do?” when she saw me setting up the camera.

We will know if she got in to the school near our house at the end of next week. After we finished filming, I gave her the camera to “take me a picture”.

So why wouldn’t Christians vote in favor of policies that aid the poor?

A few years ago, I learned of a cognitive bias known as the Just World Hypothesis, and the more I learn about it, the more it explains the odd partnership of Christians and the rich. The Just World Hypothesis can be summarized with those common trite remarks:

• What goes around comes around.
• You reap what you sow.
• He got what was coming to him.

It’s the fallacy that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. It’s the ideal result of the Golden Rule that we all naively wish was always the case.

How does this hypothesis help to solve our conservatism conundrum? Well, logically it follows directly that, if you grant that there is an omnipotent deity that is looking out for our best interests, then everyone deserves exactly what they get. The poor are poor for a reason; the rich are rich for a reason; you deserve that membership to the country club, and that other guy deserves to have cancer. Pat Robertson gets press every so often for proclaiming that Haiti or Japan deserves its natural disaster for not obeying the Lord, and he gets written off by moderate Christians as a whacky radical, but to me, the Problem of Evil really is one of the strongest nails in the coffin of theism. If God is omnipotent and just, then we all deserve what we get.

Once you’ve bought into the Just World worldview, the conservative “don’t tax the rich” and “don’t help the poor” is an obvious corollary. Even if you’re poor. Another thing that has vexed me for years is how the poor could vote Republican, when it’s obviously not in their best economic interests. If you think that you deserve to be poor, for a reason not comprehendible by a mere mortal such as yourself, and the wealthy 1% deserve what they enjoy, then it makes perfect – yet twisted and fallacious – sense to vote for the party who will institute conservative policies.

I want to stress that the arrow of causation is not clearly defined here. I suspect that both the religious and political viewpoints stem from an underlying tendency to prefer the idea that the universe is ordered fairly. Personally, understanding this makes me feel better about people that vote conservative. They aren’t total jerks lacking any sense of empathy; they’re just reasoning sensibly from a different, albeit fallacious, starting premise.

The irony is that believing the the world is just only makes it less so.

It took us a while to find the church because Google tried to send us down several pedestrian cobblestone streets that were either too narrow to drive down or had stairs. The church was lovely, and the mass was a standard hour-long Spanish wedding. They had brought the priest with them from where they live in Murcia.

I could’ve taken a hundred photos of the church’s facade if I’d had my DSLR and it weren’t raining. It was gorgeous.

The best part of the wedding was getting to chat and drink with some of the friends I made in my four years in England. No one seems to have aged much in the six or seven years since I’ve seen them, which is good.

And then there’s this guy, Carlos, who looked very vaguely familiar, who we eventually figured out that we knew from one night out with friends back in August 2001, which happens to be the only such night I’ve blogged photos of.

Here we are with the bride and groom. I wish them all the best.

The practice putting green. The course was near the seaside tourist town of San Vicente la Barquera.

With my new handicap of 12, I was in the 13th of 22 threesomes on Saturday, so my tee time was 10:40. Even though the temperature was only about 15° C (59° F), the course was just so hilly that I was down to short sleeves after the first hole. All the golf I had played this year in the States was the lazy American kind where you sit on a cushioned seat and zoom right up to your ball, but this was Man vs. Wilderness Cantabrian golf, and I had to catch my breath before each shot.

The first hole was a steep climb.

Very soon into the round the rain began. This meant donning an impermeable outer layer. I had specifically made a trip into Santander earlier in the week to buy some rain pants for this exact occurrence. It never really poured, but a mild drizzle was maintained for the rest of the round. My woolen felt golfing cap absorbed several pounds of water and had to be rung out several times. I had four spare gloves in a ziplock bag in my golf bag (I learned in Ireland that my golf bag is not water proof when my HD video camera stopped working and needed a $300 repair). It wasn’t until the eighteenth hole that I had any problems with grip slippage. The only casualty of the rain was my scorecard. It was a disintegrating lump of pulp when we finished the round, but the scores of the guy I was keeping score for were barely legible, so we transferred them to dry card and turned it in.

Since there were eight local golf clubs competing against each other, it was possible to form the threesomes such that no one was playing with a member of their own team. My two playing partners on Saturday were an amicable pair. One guy thought he was a lot funnier than he really was. He’s the kind of guy who, when we finished the round and the secretary took our scores, told us that they would send everyone an SMS to tell us our tee time the following day, and said, “Okay, give me your mobile,” obviously asking for his phone number, he said, “But if I give you my mobile [phone] how can you send me a message?” She had to ask three more times to nail the syntax of “Please tell me the number assigned to your mobile phone,” such that he couldn’t escape into jokester-land. Exhausting.

He did, however, tell me a lovely story about how he was invited to the inaugural day of the course we were playing, which was designed by none other than Cantabria’s golfing son, Severiano Ballesteros. During his round, he saw Seve playing another hole and went up to talk to him. He said that Seve was kind enough to stop and chat for a few minutes and have his picture taken. He was a great man. May 7, a week from the date of this post, will be the first anniversary of his death.

We were playing at Santa Marina Golf Club, which was built near this 19th century chapel, which curiously has a tree growing from its bell tower. You can’t build anything in Spain without it being near some stone relic from another time.

I was very happy with my play on Saturday, especially my back nine that started with a string of eight bogeys. The eighteenth hole might be the hardest hole of golf I’ve ever played. It’s a par 5, but I never managed less than 8 strokes.

The rules of the tournament were that only the six best rounds (gross, no handicaps) from each team would be counted. The team from Laredo had a final score on Saturday of 519, an average of 86.5, which included my 93. The next closest team on the leader board had 520, but that was with only five players (an average of 104), so it didn’t count. The actual second place team was 36 strokes behind us with a 555.

Sunday was gorgeous and sunny…but very, very muddy. There was what the golf rulebook calls “standing water” on every square centimeter of the course. I made a slop-slop-slop sound as I walked up and down the steep inclines. If you didn’t visually identify the square meter where your ball landed in the fairway, it was a lost ball, because they plugged down into the mud such that just a tiny square centimeter of the ball was visible. Every single player on our team scored worse the second sunny day than on the first rainy day. That should give an indication of just how difficult an already nearly-impossible course was playing. One guy playing in a pair of wellies looked ridiculous on the first tee, but like a genius on the eighteenth green.

On Sunday I witnessed an event that would definitely win the storytelling competition my golfing group has every year in February. My threesome had finished a hole and was walking to the next tee when we saw a heavy set gentleman from the group in front of us returning to the tee with his driver. His ball had missed the fairway by a couple meters and had plugged into the ground and been declared lost. He teed up his ball and sent it slicing off into the woods. He shouted some Spanish curses about defecating on the mother of the ball he just hit and flung his driver with all his might. His intent was probably to fling it straight down the hole towards the fairway, but he held on to it a split second too long and it went careening over our heads and up to the very tip top of a tree, where it lodged itself securely. We tried shaking the tree vigorously, but the driver wasn’t going anywhere. This was a pretty serious situation, since a driver costs easily $300, which is probably 300€ (400 USD), if golf clubs are priced like other consumer goods. One guy from our group had the idea to use his golf ball retriever, a telescoping tube used to pull golf balls out of water hazards. He extended it out about 6 meters (20 feet), but it was still way too short. I suggested we could throw some rocks, but really I was imagining it either staying there forever or having to hire a cherry picker to fetch it. Just then, the other guy from my group, who was in his late forties or early fifties, jumped up into the tree, which didn’t look at all conducive to climbing, and promptly climbed about 25 feet into the air with the agility of a chimpanzee and grabbed the club. And somehow he made it back down without breaking his neck. Just then it made sense how he could only take the club back until it was perpendicular to the ground and whip it through the ball and hit it further than I can with a full swing. Amazing.

Every time I golf in Spain, I am amused by the fact that there is some law that requires them to put life preservers near the big water hazards. It’s a practice that strattles the line between reasonableness and silliness. I wonder how many golfers drown every year in water hazards in the US. If it’s more than 0.3, I’d be surprised.

The starter (the guy who stands on the first tee and controls who begins when) told us a story of one member of the club that plays golf in shorts, even in the near-freezing winter temperatures. When asked why, he replies, “When I wear pants, my wife gets so mad at me for how dirty I’ve gotten them, that I’d rather play in shorts.”

When I showed my wife this photo, she reenacted the shorts-wearer’s story, telling me that I had ruined those trousers. Surprisingly, however, they came out of the washing machine looking like new.

I shot a 93 the first day and a 95 the second. The tournament officials didn’t bother to properly add up the scores before declaring Laredo the winner. It wasn’t even close.

The best part of the course was the clubhouse, an old wooden structure that, as is common for golf courses everywhere, used to be the house that the owners of the land lived in. The greens were in a pretty bad state of disrepair. Apparently the club is running out of money because there’s a lack of members. And I can understand why. Who would want to pay money to be abused like that every time you play? The course is just too hard. They’ve tried to make it easier by getting rid of all out-of-bounds and replacing the white stakes with red stakes, marking forests as “lateral water hazards”, but it’s not good enough. Santa Marina Golf Club seems to be in a downward spiral where the course is so hard that they are running out of members and money, which in turn makes the course even harder as it falls into disrepair. It’s a shame, because the location is visually spectacular, with views from the sea to the snowy Picos de Europa with rolling hills and luxury chalets in between.

Laredo Club de Golf, the best golfers in Cantabria who don’t have a home course. That’s a bronze Ballesteros behind us.

What passenger really cares whether the wind is coming out of the north or south? Maybe once in a hundred thousand flights one of the first class snobs is planning on having his driver take him from the airport directly to the marina where he will be taking his ketch for a sail that afternoon, and, with this handy wind data he can start planning his tacking course. But most of the time, all the first class folks want to do when landing in Madrid is find car hire in Spain at the Hertz desk.

My hypothesis is that the pilots receive a transmission with all the weather data, and rather than consider its utility to their audience, they just read the whole thing out to us verbatim. The practice amuses me every time I fly.

And now you will be unable to ignore it, too.

In the mornings, when we are goofing around reading books or playing with toys, sometimes I’ll wonder aloud about what time it is. When Nora hears this, she goes to find my iPhone wherever it is (sometimes it’s in her hands at the time), and she knows how to exit the active application, lock the phone, and then press the home button to show the lock screen which displays the time. She then holds it out so I can read it, often with a “Here’s the time, Poppy!”

Nora has started following the plot of television shows for the first time. She now responds when Dora asks a question, for example. She likes Dora The Explorer a lot, but her absolute favorite program is a Canadian cartoon called Caillou, about a little boy and his family and the adventures they get into. I had never heard of Caillou before, but Nora already has a Caillou doll that speaks Basque very loudly.

We have applied for Nora to start school in September. For obvious reasons, we requested the school that is literally 20 meters from our front door as our first choice. They choose applicants based on a points system, which ranks criteria in more or less like this, in descending order of importance:

• Does a sibling already attend?
• How close does the child live to the school?
• How close is the parents’ workplace from the school?
• …other criteria involving disabilities and household income.

So we score very highly on the proximity criterion, but there are only twenty slots available for the three-year-old class, and we’ve heard rumors that there is a mass exodus of kids that are wanting to switch from another school to the one we want, so there might be competition. We will hear who got in in May. Our fingers are crossed…

The state of the offspring is strong!

For one, I was in a country in which everyone over the age of five spoke perfect English, but they chose to speak a different language to each other. You mean my mother tongue isn’t the inherently superior human language? It sounds stupid in retrospect, but I remember thinking that.

Look again at those two ideas. They are both inherently Liberal ideas.

Over the years, I have noticed that I am almost always in political agreement with other expatriates that I meet. We generally hold similar values on the left-right political spectrum, both in financial and social issues. I always attributed this to the unavoidable epiphany brought on by immersion in a foreign culture. It necessarily shakes any conservative patriotism you have to the core.

Just recently, in the past couple years, I’ve been reading about the psychology of decision making and politics, and I think I may be mistaken about why expats tend to be more liberal. The positive correlation between voluntary emigration and Liberal values is still very strong, but I think I may have the causation backwards. It’s not that living abroad makes you liberal; it’s that having a liberal mindset makes you want to live abroad. People on the left end of the political and moral spectrum are much more open to having new experiences and hearing new, possibly conflicting, points of view. Conservatives are much happier with what they know. It’s even right there in the meaning of the two words: Liberals are for change and rocking the boat, and Conservatives are for maintaining the status quo.

Here’s a TED Talk on the subject:

I just sent off an absentee ballot today for a state primary. Just as it’s in the Conservatives’ interest to make same-day voter registration difficult, which tends to disenfranchise poor and minority voters (who will always vote Liberal), it would also be in their interest to stymy the ballots from non-military expats, although I suspect there aren’t enough of us for them to care…yet.

By complete chance, April 17, 2012 was also Equal Pay Day, which sounds like a glorious day of liberal celebration, but is actually very sad indeed. Equal Pay Day is the day upon which a working woman has earned enough to fill the wage gap between her and her male colleagues for the previous year. Let me state that more concretely. The income American woman earned, on average, from January 1, 2011 to April 17, 2012 is equivalent to how much an American man in her same position made from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2011. From the Equal Pay Day website:

The next Equal Pay Day is Tuesday, April 17, 2012. This date symbolizes how far into 2012 women must work to earn what men earned in 2011.

Wow! I knew that women’s salaries were lower across the board, but I didn’t realize it was quite so much.

I love the coincidence that both these methods of representing a percentage of income by calendar dates fell on the same day. The fact that a man’s tax burden is equivalent to a woman’s inequality gender burden is quite striking. To my male readers, imagine working side by side with equals in your organization, but that you were the only one that had to pay taxes, and your coworkers kept all their gross salary. How would that make you feel?

There aren’t a lot of options on the What You Can Do page if you’re not an employer, other than raise awareness and complain to legislators. Perhaps all we can hope to do is instill a value of fairness and gender financial equality in our kids and hope some of them grow up to be CEOs.

If you’re going to talk to someone about this topic – and I hope you are – there’s one arithmetical error you should be aware of that is very easy to fall victim to. This coincidence of Equal Pay Day falling on Tax Freedom Day does not mean that the tax rate and the female salary deficit are the same percentage! If a man earns 4 apples a year, and a woman earns 3 apples, she is earning 75% of the man’s salary, or 25% less. But to make it to Equal Pay Day the next year, she needs to work 33% of the year (not 25%!), since the 1 apple she needs to make it to the male annual income is 33% of her annual 3 apples. If Equal Pay Day were to fall on Tax Freedom Day in this fruity hypothetical example, the average tax rate would be 33% and the female pay deficit would be 25%.

The real numbers are that, on average, American women make 77.5% (22.5% less) of an equivalent male salary, and the average American pays 29% of their income in taxes.

One thing I love about going plastic-only in the US is that it gets around that horrible sales tax that causes purchases to be higher than the price listed on the items in the store. I hate that! In Spain, the VAT (or IVA, in Spanish) is included on all the prices, so if you’ve got one item that’s 0.95€ and another that’s 2.25€, you can go ahead and count out your 3.20€ while you’re waiting in the checkout line and hand over the exact amount to the cashier. That sort of calculation is all but impossible in the States.

The second thing I love about using only a debit or credit card in the US is that it allows for more accurate tipping. Several times I’ve noticed items priced on bar and restaurant menus such that, if you don’t want to deal with coins (who does?), you’ve got to give a 30% tip. For instance, say your bar bill comes to $3.05. If you drop four $1 bills on the bar and walk out, you’ve left a 31% tip. But when you are given the blank space to write in any value you choose, and you won’t have to deal with change in return, exact percentages are more accessible.

The third thing I love about using plastic rather than cash is that you automatically get a record of your purchases. Sometimes, in Spain, I’ll take a couple hundred euros out of the ATM and then, after what seems like a few short days, I’m out of cash again and I have to rack my brains to remember where it all went. Sure, it’s possible to keep a diary of each transaction, but it’s such a bother that I would never do it. Knowing where you’ve done business before can help the next time you have to search for car hire USA or other repeating transactions.

I’ve lived so long abroad now that when I go back to the States, the green money looks funny and fake to me, not like the colorful Euro notes and coins that are valuable enough to take the time to bend over and pick up off the ground. The US coins are so worthless I’d rather just not have a quarter than lug one around in my pocket all day.

I dare say that one could live quite comfortably in the US with a wallet only big enough to hold a drivers license and a single credit card. That’s something I miss in Spain.