The first three are of Nacho's new (as in two year old) shop taken during my first few days in Madrid.

The shop is strategically located near the Jardin Botanico, El Prado, El Retiro, my mother in law's house and -- most importantly -- two stories below his apartment so he can commute by elevator. He does not even have to set foot on the street because he has an entrance from the house side. The angle of the pics is funny because work is beginning on an underground garage for residents of the area. As a result there is a large pile of stuff related to construction roughly in front of the shop and there is no easy way to take a frontal picture that does not feature this pile prominently. In this shop he does only made to order clothes. The ready to wear stuff is still at the older shop, the one you visited.

I did not take pictures on the interior because every time I stopped by I was walking my mother in law's new bulldog puppy named "Balon"

He was very unpredictable as to bowel movements and I did not want Balon to leave a souvenir in the very elegant shop.

After a few days in Madrid I went to La Toja with my father for a few days. We shared a few days there with my sister Jacinta and her daughter Maria.

The first is a picture of my father and suster in one of the nicer beaches nearby called La Lanzada. The second is a picture of the island (more like a sand bar with a few rocks) where my father wanted to take you when you were there and where we could not go because of the fog (clearly you have to go back when there is no fog) and the third was taken from the top of a hill in the peninsula of O Grove and it shows the istmus between the land and the peninsula. The water on the right of the picture is the open ocean (the beach is La Lanzada) while the water on the left is the very shallow bottom of the Ria de Arosa -- there isn't any water there at low tide. My father's house is about one mile to the left of the water edge on the left.

After returning to Madrid the family gathered to celebrate my father's 80th birthday at his house in the suburbs. This are all the attendees in various combinations.

The first one with everybody, the second with myfather and Maca with me and my siblings and the third one my father with my nephews and nieces. The last picture from the event is one of my brother Nacho and my sister Carmen that I like.

The only missing people of the blood brood were Camila and Nico. Two in-laws were also missing: Barbara and Lola (the widow of my late brother Jose Luis). Given that the event had not been planned (my father expected to be in La Toja from June 15 until mid September), the attendance was spectacularly good.

I then joined Barbara in Almeria. The house was looking great. Here are a few views of the front of the house:

One of them was taken in the morning light on a rare summer day with some clouds in the sky. The other three were taken in the evening sun on a more typical day with a perfectly clear and deep blue sky.

Here are a few pictures from the opposite end of the house, which is the corner of two streets, one of them -- the one running by the front of the house -- perhaps ten feet wide.

The "snowy" appearance is an artifact of the very poor processing of the roll done by the 1-hr service... time to go digital. The gaping rectangular hole in the white facade in the last picture is the entrance. It will be closed by a perforated steel gate that sounds promising but was not ready yet. As a result it had become the shelter of preference for a stray dog and we had a lot of ticks in residence. Here is Barbara engaging the ticks in the entrance in hand to hand combat:

(More on the stray dogs later.)

Then there is the patio

and the veranda in front of the upstairs bedroom+bathroom

and the roof in the back of the upstairs bedroom+bathroom.

and a cute detail of one of the spouts that send the water down from the roof... somewhat Gaudiesque and made locally. You can see the spouts in the pictures of the veranda and the roof.

The inagural crew for the house included Luisa (the woman who was the cook at my in laws for 25+ years, now retired). A couple of days later we were joined by Juan and Paloma, friends from the time they lived in Palo Alto in the late eighties. Here is the entire crew having breakfast at the main square of Fernan Perez, about thirty yards from the house.

Notice that the bar (the only one in the village) says "Centro 3 Edad" whch means something like "club for the elderly", an officialy sponsored institution...:-) Note also that this is the real central square of the village and not the one in the pictures from last year; I was fooled by the presence of the church in the other square, but it is now clear that the bar cum old folks center is far more important than the church.

The next two photos are of Paloma and Juan.

Juan looks disgusted because (i) his boss had just called him on the cell phone 48 hrs after he started his vacation, (ii) he (may have) just swallowed a fly and (iii) he had (certainly) spent the previous 48 hours drilling holes in masonery to install light fixtures. This picture is not a reflection of his usual attitude or appearance.

The last two photos are among the few I took of the interior of the house -- I had a brain fade on this account and I took a double dosage of exterior pictures and almost no interior ones.

One shows Paloma and Luisa (both superb cooks) discussing and reconstructing sketchy recipes Luisa extracted from Helga (a woman who cooks for Barbara's brother I-igo's). The other one shows the view to the west (front patio) in the morning.

Our stay at the house was more work than fun, but we still managed to hit the beach a couple of times. Here, as evidence, is Barbara at the beach in the Bahia de los Genoveses.

The mound in the background is "El Morron de los Genoveses" from where I took the panoramic picture of this particular beach that I sent last year. This picture was taken at 9pm or thereabouts... The light and the water were gorgeous. The beach was dirty: in spite of the economic progress, Spaniards still insist on leaving garbage behind wherever they go in numbers.

Here are two are pictures of the local fauna. One is a 6 inch praying mantis that paid a visit to the house. I wanted to introduce it to the ticks, but i could not figure out an elegant way to do the introduction.

The other is a day old puppy that a stray dog had in our yard taking advantage of the lack of a gate in the yard entry. I discovered it half an hour before we were due to leave and we had an interesting time discussing with the neighbors how to deal with it. (It was relocated but not anihilated... at least not by me.) There is plenty of other local fauna, but I did not take pictures of the ticks, flies, cockroaches and cicadas (these last two creatures over one inch long) so as not to decrease too much the chances that you will visit one day...:-)

We then returned to Madrid so I could catch my plane on a Monday. We returned Saturday so as to have time for one more visit to Ikea (Barbara was returning to Almeria after my departure with the purchases) so we had time for a few errands on Sunday and during those errands I took this picture.

I believe that this is the shop where you had a shirt made to your specs once upon a time -- like before you had kids... :-) Barbara and I walked by it and I decided to take the picture just for you. The bizarreness on the edges is the doing of the botched processing mentioned earlier.

These final pictures were part of my summer as well, but only in a peripheral way. My sister in law Maria baptized her daughter (and namesake) in Ibiza. Neither Barbara nor I attended, but here are a few pictures anyway.

The first is the baptized, the second group consists of Maria's three children (Lucrecia, Mauricio and Maria) with the godparents (my brother in law Jaime and a friend of the mother named Maria Victoria), and the last one is of Lucrecia, the eldest daughter of my sister in law.