Lamberto:
Lamberto started High School this year – hard to
believe how time flies. He is enjoying 9th grade and to his
amazement he already excelled in some crucial subjects such as
skateboarding, soccer, paintballing……
This summer he spent two weeks at the Real Madrid
soccer intern Camp and returned here with the necessary proficiencies to
make his High School JV team. He is getting tough and building character
while patiently awaiting his growth spurt (like dad).
In skateboarding he has mastered some pretty
amazing moves (click here for video). We hope we can get him to
readdress this enthusiasm into math, science and geometry.
Blanca:
Blanca, living at home, has been a huge help this
year.
Except for cooking, cleaning, buying groceries,
doing the laundry, drying, ironing, gardening, feeding and cleaning after HER cat, picking up Lamberto from
School, cleaning the pool or her room, she takes care of everything else
around the house.
She will be completing her associates degree this
year and moving to a 4 year college to complete a major in business.
Strangely enough, our parachutie-wearing,
reggae-loving little revolutionary, has come over to the Conservative
side. We all grow up sometime !
The Borges - Franco:
Click here for pictures of the Borgeses Xmas of Ice and Snow !!
Barbara and the grandchildren (Gustavihno
and Gabriella) spent the summer in Spain with all of us. It was
wonderful.
Gustavinho is now in (kindergarten) and he
is attending a British school in Brazil, where Barbara also teaches. He
is so cute on the phone because he is developing what is called the
King’s British accent…it goes like this
house = hice
tower = tar
really = rairly
milk = miulk
This Halloween he dressed up as “Harry Potter” – spoken
with the King’s accent, of course.
Gabriella is just as wild and daring as her
mother. This summer, at (8-9) months old, she was walking with great
control and finesse, and in the pool she was already doing the butterfly
kick and dunking her head under the water with reckless abandon.
One of Barbara’s highlights of the year was
“meeting” with the Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Maria Aznar, while he
was visiting a museum opening in Sao Paulo. The story is truly sensation
and this short rendition does not give it justice. Upon arriving at the
museum that day, the audience was told that, for safety reasons, they
would have to wait outside the building so that the Prime Minister could
enter first.
Barbara’s excitement had been mounting all
day and upon seeing the great man approach the museum from his car, she
screamed out in all her usual passion “Viva España!” To this, Mr. Aznar
looked directly at her and gave a look half of appreciation and half of
fear, while the secret service was taking defensive positions. Barbara
was not embarrassed or deterred by this spontaneous outburst, she was
only more motivated to achieve closer contact with the Prime Minister.
Once inside the museum she learned that after the
inauguration ceremony there would be a private reception for the Prime
Minister with only 30 or so select guests. At the moment of cordoning
off the small reception area, Barbara ditched Gustavo and propelled
herself into the room by prying open the security doors. As son as this
objective was achieved, she stalked the Prime Minister around the room
waiting for her opportunity to meet him and give him her pre-arranged
and practiced introduction. Finally she was confronted with the perfect
chance as Mr. Aznar was suddenly walking toward her. She stuck out her
hand to shake his and as they shook hands, and a glimmer of recognition
from the “Viva España” incident came over his face, Barbara froze,
completely unable to speak. After a few seconds, Mr. Aznar said hello
and Barbara stammered out part of her introduction. She said she was too
shaken-up to continue with everything she had planned to say. We all
know she was very emotional because, when she called us hours later to
tell the story, she was still under the spell of the emotional overload.
Recently “tia Mercedes” (dad’s sister) met with Mr.
Aznar, and they had a good laugh about the episode, obviously the Prime
Minister could remember the events VERY distinctively.
Gustavo is doing great and we still give
thanks every holiday season that Barbara found such a kind and
responsible angel to tame her out and take such good care of her.
Gustavo is winding down on his swimming career, but not before one last
Olympic performance, his fourth. Athens will be such a wonderful place
to end his illustrious Olympic success.
The Walsh - Franco:
Claudia had a very busy year planning and
starring in her California wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony at the
Stanford University Memorial Church, followed by a one-of-a-kind wild
party, that can only be achieved by the joining of Spanish and Irish
people. Getting the whole family together, including the Brazilians, was
such a treat.
By bringing Marte into the Franco family,
Claudia has added yet another 6’7” + giant into the mix. The Franco
lineage shall be growing much taller thanks to Marte and Gustavo’s DNA
soup.
Claudia will be finishing up her legal
studies this year and taking the Bar exam this coming summer. Watch out
Mark Geragos! After the Bar exam, Marte, the Walsh family, and Claudia
will finally visit Spain for a true meeting of the families. Then they
all plan to go to Athens to watch Gustavo and Marte’s sister, Kerri,
compete in the Olympic Games.
Mom:
As some of you know, Mom teaches “English as Second
Language” to (4th) graders. Her students really enjoy her
class and feel a certain attachment to her that other students might not
experience with their teachers. However, imagine out surprise this year
when she received a Christmas card from one of her students that began:
“To the One that I Married.”
Mom finally had a vacation this summer and
was back in Spain for a few months. Of course, hanging out with Blanca
is not always a vacation. While Mom and Blanca were shopping in
Barcelona one afternoon, Blanca tossed the car keys to Mom and they fell
into a sewer. The problem did not seem quite so severe until they
learned that there was no spare to this type of electronic key to the
car. They ended up having to call the City utilities company which
showed up with a unit of Firemen from the Kingdom of Catalonia . They
had to dive in and upturn a large section of the street in order to
recover the keys, and they did so. This is one of the advantages of a
country with close to 3 million public employees (if you’re only a
tourist and do not have to pay taxes, we mean).
Dad:
He is running and practicing soccer with Lamberto
as usual but….. last (February) he had an unplanned layover in the
Chicago area that turned from routine to pneumonia-inducing. The flight
that he was arriving on was late and the connecting flight was missed,
so the airline put him in a hotel for the night.
The problem was that Dad was coming from 75
degree (24C) weather in sunny Jacksonville, Florida, and the weather in
Chicago that evening got down to 12 degrees (-10C). To make matters
worse, he was dressed in his typical Florida attire (shorts and short
sleeves) the airline lost his luggage and at 1am all was closed .
He was told to wait out on the airport curb for the
hotel shuttle to arrive “in just a few minutes.” However, a few minutes
turned into too many minutes, and half an hour later Dad was still
waiting with teeth and limbs wildly chattering.
When the shuttle finally arrived (40) minutes after
first stepping into the polar weather, Dad was delirious and did not
know if it was the hotel shuttle, an ambulance to rush him to the nut
house (hopefully wrapped in a balmy straight jacket), or the grim
reaper.
This episode was followed by hours in the hotel
room trying to get the body convulsions and teeth chattering to stop.
Heat pouring out on him and blankets upon blankets piled on his frozen
body did not do the trick – at which point he was convinced these would
be his last moments of consciousness before succumbing to the feverish,
pneumonic slumber that followed. Luckily Dad only had a severe cold for
a week or so, and he can now look back on the experience and ….cry
again.
