Skipping Town

So May seemed to last much longer than just 31 days, and it seems crazy that we were in Barcelona just a month ago, from April 28-May 3. We'd planned the trip in a kind of covid-break fever, along with our trip to Mexico--with numbers low (back at the beginning of the year) and all of us vaxxed, it seemed like this was our chance to finally do some traveling. Andrew's fifteen-year MBA reunion was planned for May, and our discussion about how he should definitely go quickly expanded into--Hey, let's ALL go! So we pulled the kids out of school for a few days and went. Our first time back since we left in 2007. It was very very strange and exceptionally wonderful to be back. Lots has changed. It seemed much more crowded and touristy than we remembered, and there were new procedures for timed tickets to Gaudi sites and things like that. But we reconnected quickly. We rented an apartment in the Barri Gotic, a narrow four-story apartment with one room on each floor, and after dro...

On Saturday, Andrew and I headed to Napa for a day of paella-making with Beth and Nate and the babies. We had gotten a paella pan and ingredients for a wedding gift, but hadn’t yet put them to use; paella is definitely something you have to make for more than two people. It was unseasonably warm on Saturday, in the high-70s (by “unseasonably” I mean “unseasonably for the Northeast”), but nonetheless Napa was beautiful, with the vines changing to gold and red, set against a bright-blue sky. After some debate, Andrew and I decided to adapt a recipe from Penelope Casas’s The Foods & Wines of Spain for our paella. Friday night, we’d watched a video of the NYT’s Mark Bittman cooking a simple tomato paella, and it looked easy enough—it seemed like the kind of dish that, like a soup, you could pretty much just toss anything into. After a trip to the Napa Whole Foods for provisions, we were ready to begin. In theory and in practice, cooking paella is not that difficult—cook some things in...