days of damp and mushrooms

mushroom

The village is celebrating its jornadas micológicas this weekend, which means that the local restaurants are offering all sorts of weird and wonderful fungal specialities. I don’t expect to be indulging, having had a bad reaction a couple of years ago.

Instead, I have been out observing the hongos on the lawn. Although the weather is beginning to be autumnal and the fog was so thick this morning that I thought we’d lost the orchard, we had more mushrooms last weekend, I think. Certainly more variety.
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big kids

Nine years old and 81.5 kilos in weight. That’s nearly 13 stone for those of us who still think in “old money”, and it’s the weight reached by a child con obesidad mórbida in the north of Spain.

It seems the authorities have been aware of problems since 2004 and the parents haven’t been obeying the legal conditions that had been laid down. So, recently, a judge ordered the child to be ingresado en un centro de menores where diet and exercise routines would, presumably, be strictly adhered to.
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tall tales

Esperanza Aguirre, the presidenta of the comunidad de Madrid who described herself as “el verso suelto dentro del poema” has come up with another quotable phrase: “Yo no hablo cuando llevo zapatos planos.” – “I won’t make a statement when I’m wearing flat shoes.”

Most women are familiar with the concept of getting dressed and putting our make-up on before making an important phone call, and I guess this is much the same thing. The problem is the psychological reasoning behind it.
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prevention is better than cure?

This caught my eye en route to the village this morning:

Sociedad de Prevención de Fraternidad
What about igualdad & libertad?

It was on the side of a lorry parked down by the river. Muprespa are some kind of mutua de accidentes, but I don’t think the slogan reads quite the way they want it to.

a number of questions

Or, perhaps, a question of numbers.

A headline in today’s El Mundo says that 4,158 million euros has been lost in the last ten years due to political corruption. Except, it being Spanish, it doesn’t say it quite like that:

Headline: la corrupción política ha sustraído al menos 4.158 millones en 10 años

The Spanish use “million” in the plural after a number, giving phrases like seis millones rather than “six million”. They also use a full stop as the thousands separator and a comma where we use a decimal point.
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