Saturday, November 3, 2012

The past few days have been rather uneventful.  I have been working on my card magic and making a list of the various effects that do with a normal deck.  Susan has been busy with exercise, shopping, visiting with friends and reading.  Thursday she caught up with Zahava and went to the movies.  They Saw Ruby Sparks, which they enjoyed.  The film just opened here, although I did notice that it is available on iTunes.

We have been eating at home, for the most part.  Thursday we did make it to La Fórcola for lunch.  We had a twofold purpose.  We wanted to have lunch there, and that was our primary reason.  However, we also wanted to deliver the two suitcases that we were giving to Marta.  Our belongings are arriving in the near future and we are trying to make as much room as possible before they get here.

Susan and I shared a salad to start our meal and Susan chose the pasta special for her entrée – ravioli stuffed with goat cheese and fig marmalade, topped with a brown butter sauce and topped with red pepper corns.  The taste was amazing.  I chose the calzone, which was enormous.  I ended up taking half of it home and it morphed into last night’s supper.  We passed on dessert, but we did have coffee.

Here in Valencia November is the month of the gota fría.  It is the rainiest month of the year and the rain is a cold rain.  When a cold front dips to the south it picks up the warm water from the Mediterranean and converts it into a cold rain.  It is similar to the lake effect snowstorms that are generated by Lake Erie.  It is supposed to start raining tomorrow and the forecast is for it to rain off and on all week.  We shall see how accurate the weather forecast is.  The most reliable forecast seems to be looking out your window to see what’s happening.

The papers here are focusing on the US elections.  It is abundantly clear that Obama is a favorite with Europeans for a variety of reasons, one of which is the fact that he is a known quantity.  Mitt is a mystery and the newspapers have not failed to notice that he has positioned himself all over the map.  Given the fact that the polls see the race as extremely close, we shall just have to wait and see how this political drama turns out.