Posted on by Jo Gent

Very Close to There

Are we there yet?, as in, Are my husband and I in Spain yet? Not yet, but very close.

The new news is that we have an apartment!

After rejecting several on their merits or lack thereof, being turned down by one landlord for being foreign, and missing a few great finds in this fast-moving market, we suddenly found ourselves with two applications accepted and a short time to decide whether to put a deposit on one of those or continue looking.

Eliminating the Continue Looking option was easy. We need to get out of here before flu season!

Both of these apartments are close to Ave Diagonal in the very northwest portion of Eixample, where it marks the boundary to Sarria and Gracia. The smaller one is a gem, with a huge master suite that includes a windowed gallery overlooking a leafy pedestrian way, and its building has a concierge. Sigh. A cozy retreat for us, but not much room for anyone else. 

The second apartment is 30 square meters larger, still with a large master area, but not ensuite. It has two other bedrooms, and all the bedrooms and the two baths are grouped together at one end of the apartment. The kitchen is opposite the front door, and the living spaces are at the other end. The living/dining area is spacious and has a balcony, though its not wide enough to dine on. The building was built in 1900 and the apartment has been renovated. The views are not as appealing as in the smaller apartment, but there is a lot of light. 

We chose that one, for the extra space and also because it has both A/C and heat. Many apartments in Barcelona seem to be lacking one or the other of those. 

I would link you to the listing, but the realtors took it down today! I guess they accepted the deposit we sent this weekend. I also have videos our agents posted on Whatsapp,  but I have not figured out out to share them.

In any case, we are here in charming Glen Burnie, MD, with water views in every direction, until Oct. 25th, when we will leave for Barcelona. We will be in  a hotel for about ten days while we register ourselves, find a bank, sign our lease, and arrange furniture rental, then occupy our new place starting Nov. 5. 

Furniture rental is a fun new addition to our to-do list. Our container MYK Demeter, rechristened by us as Slow Boat, won’t arrive until Dec. 14, so we need furniture between Nov. 5 and then. Moreover, our overpromising/underdelivering mover says clearing customs could take a week. We suspect it may be unwise to expect delivery during the festive season, since Barcelonians go big to celebrate Christian holy days, and we are having our kids out between Navidad and Año Nuevo.

We’re thinking we will allow a year to unpack when it does get here, because we have a lot of preferable activities planned. The joys of retirement know no bounds. 

 

Posted on by Jo Gent · 2 Comments

Bon Voyage to New England

As many of you know, we received our visas yesterday and are cleared to move to Spain. Late this afternoon we found that our furniture is scheduled to sail on October 7, which means it could arrive five weeks after that. We are finally starting to feel that the next chapter of our lives is close to beginning.

So here we are in New England, where I spend 35 years of my adult life and my husband spent 32 of his, staying in Brookline, where our kids grew up. What a great time we are having!

Day 1: Feasting at the home of former neighbors which included their new neighbors, the young Quaker couple to whom we sold our Brookline house, one of the best decisions we ever made.

Day 2: Drinking some of the freshest beer we’ve ever at that the successful taproom of one of our friends who gave up high tech to follow his dream and persevered. After that we went dancing, contras at the Concord Scout House, where we met in early 1988, while we both sought warmth by the stove.

Day 3: Hearing the BSO led by Andris Nelsons perform Mahler 4 and Debussey’s Nocturnes in Symphony Hall twelve days before the 125th anniversary of its opening. We treated our lovely hosts, then the four of us went to an amazing dinner at the newest location of Row 34 in Kenmore Square. In-between we viewed the latest art installation in Boston Common, a 20′ x 40′ (H x L) sculpture tribute to MLK and his wife called Embrace.

Today is Day 3.

Tomorrow, Day 4: Walking in the vicinity of Forest Hills with a good friend who is a former work colleague, then catching up at “home” (current edition) with our hosts’ son, who was our younger son’s close friend since they were both in Kindergarten.

Day 5: Meeting the aforementioned brewmeister and his wife at another brewpub, The Notch in Brighton, then visiting a couple who are both former work colleagues at their Seaport neighborhood home, followed by dinner at the nearby trending restaurant Yankee Lobster.

Day 6: Visiting yet another close friend/Brookline neighbor at home, then driving to Lee, MA to have lunch with friends we bonded with in Santa Cruz who now live in western MA. Then on to NJ and beyond–more on that next week…maybe.

We are honestly having trouble finding anything wrong with our lives right now other than wearing the same clothes repeatedly (most of our clothes are on the ship) and having a key ring with no keys on it. Not having an apartment in Barcelona yet is a bit of a nit, but we’ve got some gals working on it, plus one application in play.

We even dodged a bullet? The picture below, of our former California condo, was taken on the morning of Oct. 2; the cleaners left the driveway in their car the afternoon of Sept. 30, while we were flying to Boston. Happily for the new owner, this is an HOA problem.

Posted on by Jo Gent

I Do Have Regrets

July 1, 2025 was not a good day.

Some things about me are improving as I age. I easily maintain my weight, I sleep great most nights, I rarely feel cold, and my daily life is relaxed and easy, because I’m retired so I do mostly what I want. On the other hand, I am physically less able than I prefer, have a few aches, am slower to accomplish tasks, and can’t remember and/or forget a lot of small things.

One thing has always been true of me and still is: When stressed, I my brain freezes.

The most horrifying example of this in my life happened in Exeter, New Hampshire on a family trip. We stopped at a park on one of the smaller numbered roads, perhaps route 27, and for some reason we lost track of our three-year-old and he showed up in the middle of the street. People started shouting and I looked up to see something impossible, namely, a small boy in the road facing a car stopped directly in front of him. His head hardly cleared the grill; I don’t even know how the driver saw him. I froze. My brain simply did not accept that this could be happening.

My husband raced past me into the street and snatched him up. Similar things have happened to me several times. If I’m nervous about a deadline, or trying to get something done in a hurry, I’ll forget the most basic things, for example my own zip code. Or I won’t be able to log into my computer, something I do multiple times a day, because I forgot my password. Stress sets my brain function to Off.

Interestingly, this wasn’t a problem in the workplace. Maybe because high tech work requires one to show no fear? I don’t know, but I faced many stressful situations at work with relative equanimity usually, and wrath occasionally, but never with brain dysfunction. But that was then.

The second most horrifying incident happened this morning. After months of tens of daily tries to schedule a visa interview online, I got through. Instead of Please try again, the screen said Choose your appointment time. I was stunned, but quickly clicked on the next step, which revealed that there was literally one appointment left in August. My husband had been up a lot of the night trying, and we knew for sure August appointments weren’t opened yesterday, so this meant that they were going very quickly.

I thought I nabbed that appointment but there were more steps, and soon I got to one that didn’t work. The computer wanted me to download a picture, yet it simply would not accept the one I had. I started to edit. I was using my phone rather than my computer, and I quickly realized I didn’t know how to fix it. I woke my husband and explained the issue and we both started working on it, but to no avail. There was a timer running and we didn’t manage to get through the registration process before it expired.

in retrospect, I realized I probably could’ve just skipped that step, or maybe entered a picture of something else then edited it later. I’m not sure. But basically I lost all my reasoning ability and freaked out and focused on this particular step without thinking it through. My husband was helping very much, but he had just woken up and he took my word for it that what I needed was this picture, which was a perfectly logical thing for him to think. I was the one whom logic deserted.

The bottom line is we had an appointment for a brief shining moment but now we don’t have one, and it will be another month before the September appointments are open. Things are getting worse at the San Francisco consulate. When the June appointments opened, they filled in four days. When the July appointments opened, they filled in one day. When the August appointments opened, today, they filled in two hours, which I know because I called to see if anyone could help me. The opening dates vary and are never announced; you just have to keep trying.

This is a big deal for us because an August appointment was our last chance of keeping our original schedule. Now we either can’t go to Spain at all, or we have to sell our house and move somewhere else before we move to Spain. We will probably do the latter because every single day another significant right is abrogated in our country. But this was a big, big blow. I wept. My husband cancelled his appointments and slept. We are both battling some despair and realizing we have to make a new plan but not feeling like doing it.

I used to say these are “first world problems,” but I don’t believe I live in the first world at the moment. I want to. That’s why this is so fraught, and fraught makes my brain freeze more likely.

Posted on by Jo Gent

No Drama Living

My husband and I had a consultation with a financial planner based in Italy today. Financial planning is very different in Europe, and he explained some of the changes we would need to make were we to move to Spain, which is our intention, although execution of our carefully constructed timeline is tenuous, mostly because the Spanish consulate in San Francisco is extremely busy right now.

One of the biggest differences is a dearth of places to leave money where it could earn interest. For variety of reasons, European banks don’t want to stash money, and not only do they not pay interest for the privilege of doing so, they often charge. Out of curiosity, I asked, What do Europeans do with their retirement funds?

The planner told me they mostly don’t have retirement funds, that salaries are lower there, so most people don’t set aside savings. That sounded terrible to me, until he explained it.

Europeans, he said, don’t view retirement as a time to stop working and start doing whatever they like to do. They spend their entire lives doing whatever they like to do; no one works 14-hour days, or stresses themself out to make a killing, or has to work multiple jobs to survive. They tend to live in the same house until it’s paid off, raise their families, and form communities, and nothing much changes when they retire.

Remember, he said, there’s no cable news in Spain recycling the headlines of the day into more headlines, endlessly. People aren’t barraged by frantic assertions that they need to act quickly to avert the next disaster. Speculation and fanaticism do exist in the realms of sport, celebrities, and the royal family, but not in a way that derails the routines of daily life.

Elections, he said, come and go without most people spending a lot of time on them, because there is not a lot to worry about. No political entity is going to take away health care, or close schools, or use legislation to “reverse” the discoveries of science. That’s why when a pandemic comes, or there’s a nationwide power outage, the people are mostly calm and compliant.

No Drama Living.

Now I’m really looking forward to moving. I try for No Drama Living every day, and as a retired person willing to ignore the news and able to live as I like on my retirement funds, I succeed most days. But the drama is lurking just around the corner, popping out in a guy you meet at a party whose daughter was arrested at a protest, or a member of your dance troupe who lectures on the “failings” of the “other side” during a team dinner.

Since I am an American, I also feel some obligation to keep up with the current dismantling of our society, mostly by skimming NYT and The Guardian daily, occasionally by contacting a representative or supporting an organization. I also delete quite a few inflammatory emails, despite spending considerable time unsubscribing.

My husband and I are moving, but our friends and family are not, so I’m sure I will always want to keep an eye on what is going on here. But I can easily picture it becoming more of a background hum then a headache-inducing stress. Should I try to be the person who makes the difference? I may have aged out of that behavior.

Or maybe that’s only a thing in the movies. Civil, stable, locally-oriented living is optimal for humanity. Without supervillains, no superheroes are required.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

La Merce

We are fortunate to be visiting turning the primary festival of the city of Barcelona, which honors our Lady of Mercy, also known as the Virgin Mary. The tradition started in 1687 when the Lady saved the city from a plague of locusts. She shares the role of patron saint of the city with Saint Eulalia, whose crypt I saw in the Cathedral of Barcelona. The rays of light in the picture did not appear to the naked eye, leading to some banter about holy presence. It happened several times that day. Later it turned out I just needed to clean my camera lens.

This year the festival ran from September 20 through the 24th, so we were here for the entire time and saw a lot of it. It contains some features that are unique to me such as castellers and correfocs, as well as some I have seen elsewhere, including gigantes and fireworks.

In order to enjoy such a festival one must either be wealthy enough to command a private viewing platform, or a person who embraces crowds; we are both the latter. While not anxious to be crushed or fumbled, we find most festive crowds quite well behaved, and being in the midst of one a source of shared joy.

After an excessively celebratory tapas meal at a lively restaurant Saturday night, we encountered the correfoc, or fire run, on Passeig de Gracia while walking home. The components include elaborate, car-sized renditions of devils and monsters as well as people costumed similarly, both spraying lit fireworks into the air to a rhythm provided by ranks of drummers and dancers. Continuous fireworks-spewing structures are also erected over the street at intervals. It’s loud and action-packed and slightly dangerous–those who venture near usually wear (slightly) protective clothing, whereas others watch from farther back. The noise and heat and light and general atmosphere of dissolution are easily experienced at a safe distance, but are very difficult to photograph, though some Youtubers have managed. There’s a Reuters video that appears to be shot at that very location on that very night, but I’m not allowed to link to it.

Castellers are teams of people, not completely dissimilar to Morris teams, who create human turrets by standing on each other shoulders. These rise quickly and are not considered complete until a child, by appearance I’d say someone around 10, climbs to the very top and gives a thumbs up, after which the tower is disassembled. We did manage to get a video of this, but mostly what you see is the crowd, as we didn’t get there at the very beginning. Looking toward the opening at the far side of the square you’ll see one group in green and white on the right forming a shorter tower, and another in red and white at the left. The crowd cheers when the kids reach the top, with the video maker’s (my husband’s) voice prominent. I also have a drawing, below.

Gigantes are very large puppets manipulated by people inside, which we used to see every Easter in Boston, and we also saw them when we were in San Antonio for the solar eclipse earlier this year. The ones in Barcelona may be the largest. We missed both the main display–we tried for it but couldn’t find it!–and the parade, so I have no evidence.

Fireworks are fireworks, for the most part. They were a big part of my growing-up family so I’m sure I’ve rambled on about them here before. The differences in Barcelona were the site on Montjuic, including a nice castlely sort of building in the background; a dearth of concessionaires, excepting a couple of guys with beers and bottled water in a backpack roaming around; and a pop music soundtrack devoid of martial or jingoistic themes, at least as far as we could tell.

My husband found that last difference made the whole experience more enjoyable, or perhaps I should say, less fraught. For him. I love martial music, though I enjoyed the dancebeat vibe as well.

Posted on by Jo Gent · 1 Comment

Locomelon

Another day, another review. Yesterday I was innocently reading the latest New Yorker, which contains an article about Cocomelon, a new-to-me animated series for young children. I mentioned to my husband that I was very confused by it. Always a man of action when YouTube in involved, he promptly launched an episode onto our TV.

Watching it affected me as I imagine hallucinogenic mushrooms might. I was transfixed, unable to move, even to sit down, as I watched large-eyed denizens of the Uncanny Valley participate in actions that can be described with real words–grocery shopping, playing with toys, playing with toys in a grocery, using groceries as if they were toys–but were not really those things.

Happily the one we watched was only about five minutes long, so I was released shortly, feeling dazed at first but quickly regaining brain function, which I used to promptly turn the feed off. There are 30- and 60-minute versions as well, from which I fear I might not have recovered.

Maybe the problem was the music, which my body was insisting should be ominous but was horribly not-ominous in a cruel way. The parents and children were oddly proportioned and simultaneously acrobatic and clumsy. There were no spoken words, only English subtitles, which did the opposite of explaining.

Perhaps a warning could be appended: Activities are not representative of those in real life.

This warning would be as useless as the subtitles, since the targeted audience is mostly pre-literates, primarily toddlers and infants. I’m old enough to indulge my inner curmudgeon, and I find myself nostalgic for the days when moms conversed with their children, even very young children, instead of both being engaged by devices.

As with the industrial food system, many people have no choice but to partake. The article’s views of the behind-the-scenes production revealed a pernicious research technique: A tot is given two screens, one showing Cocomelon and one showing a parent doing typical things around the house, and whenever the tot switched attention to the real life screen, observers analyzed the Cocomelon video to figure out how to punch it up to avoid the distraction.

Before release, the videos are scrutinized against a list of corporate no-nos, including Coco-children shown as sleepy or sleeping, which might inspire a viewer to leave the video for a nap or bedtime, and Coco-children riding on a parent’s shoulders, which would reveal how unnaturally enormous their heads are.

At some point this was the brainstorm of an individual, but that person has long ago cashed out. Cocomelon is now in the hands of its second or third profit-focused owner and has expanded correspondingly. It is now the third most subscribed channel on YouTube In The World, after MrBeast (even I’ve heard of MrBeast, so you must have) and T-Series, a Bollywood channel in Hindi shown in India.

The company has fired quite a few people lately, and may be planning a wholesale switch to AI for content-generation. That should kill it?–or else the bot-indoctrinated children will come after the rest of us when they grow up.