domingo, 29 de enero de 2012

Good morning everybody! Do you feel like a hippie party? 

 Last week it was my friends Pilar and Marcos´ 50th birthday and they decided to celebrate it in a peculiar way last night. So they rented a rural house very near from Motril and invited their friends to a fancy dress party. It was very amusing and also sentimental since they were remembering old times through a slide show of photos (you know,  military service, Holy  Comunion,  wedding, siblings,... ) Marcos´ brother spoke about the events that took place when they were born (Vietnam war, first Beatles´ song: Love Me Do, the birth of Spiderman, people that were born in the same year than them: Bon Jovi, Demi Moore,...) and when  everybody was nearly crying, music began to sound: tallyho!!! Jimmy Hendrix, Deep Purple, Nino Bravo, Santana, Janis Jopplin,...) It was great really fun!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY PILAR AND MARCOS!


My friends Patty and Mer and me.


Pili, the hippy hostess.


Marcos, the hippy host and Manolo Hendrix.


Elvis was there too.


miércoles, 25 de enero de 2012

CHARLES DARWIN

Why did I choose Darwin?

First of all, because when I was a girl the book "On the Origen of  Species" were always going round my home though I never read it. I guess it was from one of my four sisters and now that each of us live in different houses I wonder where the book will be, if exists.

Secondly, since I have never read the book, my conscience told me that, at least, I should research  about the author, so I did.

Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire on the 12th of February of 1809 (by the way, I was living very near there for six months). Since he was a child he was interested in nature and after studying at Cambridge University he was invited to sail on the HMS Beagle on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. He spent most of that time on land investigating geology and making natural history collections.

He established that  all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory in his 1859 book On the Origen of Species.

The Church of England's response was mixed. There were some liberal clergymen that interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design and other people like the Bishop of Oxford, that argued against Darwin's explanation and human descent from apes.

He thought of religion as a tribal survival strategy, but still believed that God was the ultimate lawgiver. In 1879 he wrote that "I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. -I think that generally ...an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind".

Charles Darwin got married with his cousin Emma Wedgwood, they had ten children two of whom died in infancy. It made that his faith in Christianity faded. He suffered years of illness. He had stomach problems, headaches and heart symptoms. He died at the age of 73.


Cartoonist parodied animal ancestry in an old tradition of showing humans with animal traits, and in Britain these droll images served to popularise Darwing´s theory in an unthreatening way.

Note: The shopping centre in Shrewsbury is called "Darwin shopping center".









sábado, 14 de enero de 2012

Lessons of life


After reading ´Mandela´s Way´ I always think of Mandela as an intelligent man, calm, patient, humble, a man who transmits tranquility, who can see the goodness in every person and doesn´t judge without knowing.

I have learnt a lot of things through this book and I have enjoyed it a lot since is practical and applicable to your own life, it really gives you lessons of life.

What I take from the book, in terms of my own life,  is that patience is a gift. Haste and urgency usually lead up to mistakes and regrets. We must be able, or at least we must learn,  to control ourselves and think twice before taking important decisions.

Another important lesson is that love moves the world. The best way of overcoming problems is to be in love (with a person of with a cause). I think love helped and made Mandela strong enough to bear his long imprisonment.

And among other lessons (because this book is good all the way through) I also take the idea that each of us must have our own garden, our own space, a place exclusively for us as individual persons whether a physical place or  listening to music, practising sport, maybe the time spent learning a language (I think this is my garden now).

lunes, 2 de enero de 2012

HAPPY NEW YEAR to all my friends from the C1!!! I haven´t done anything special this Xmas but resting body and mind and enjoying my family. Nevertheless, I have been involved in a few things that don´t require a big effort:

- on the 26th I went to Los Tablones, a small village attached to Motril, to see a living Nativity scene that local people perform only twice every year by Xmas time. They began to do it two years ago and every passing year it is becoming more popular since it is carried out with a lot of atmosphere and accuracy. I´m not religious at all but it deserves to be visited and I recommend you to go next year.

- I have watched the second season of ´Downton Abbey´, in English of course, since it hasn´t shown yet in Spain. Do you know the serie? I also recommend it to you.

- At last I could dust my guitar and play a few chords.

But now it is time to think about coming back to reality, begin to work hardly and enjoy C1.

Here are some photos from the Nativity scene and from my daily routine.










Amor Leigh´s 4th birthday (my daughter) on the 16th of December.

De tapas on Xmas!

My son, Agustín, with his guitar.





By the way, do you remember this painting? It has been rewarded with a honorable mention and I´m happy for that, I need very little to be happy. Consuelo has posted it in her blog too, with my words about it, and I want to thank her for taking into account my opinion about this picture.