Tile of Spain asked me "Wanna go to Spain?"

And I responded with a resounding ¡Claro que sí!

Play this video and then read this post as the video plays.





Spain has to have the liveliest national anthem of any I've ever heard. That's the Marcha Reale if you're taking notes.

I've been asked to go on Tile of Spain's Reign in Spain Tour in 2011. I'm one of the journalists who'll be accompanying the lucky winners of Tile of Spain's Reign in Spain Contest. I wrote about the Reign in Spain Contest around two weeks ago and if you're a US-based architect or designer who hasn't entered yet, please do! You can find all the information you'll need and an entry application by following this link.

Madrid's shining Quatro Torres, via Flickr

On February 4th, 2011, I'm getting on a plane bound for Madrid.





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From Madrid, my traveling companions and I will board the Ave, Spain's high-speed train system.

The Ave will take us to Zaragoza.

via

Zaragoza is the fifth largest city in Spain. Caesar Augustus established it some time around 25 BC. It remained a population center and rose to power as the largest Moorish city in Northern Spain in the centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. It remained a Moorish city until the early 1100s. I am salivating at the chance to get up close and personal with Spain's surviving Moorish  architecture and from what I can tell, Zaragoza will deliver more of it than I can imagine.

From Zaragoza, we're heading to Teruel. Teruel is the smallest of Spain's Provincial capitals. It traces its beginning to the latter days of Moorish rule in Spain in the 12th Century. It's a Unesco World heritage site for its many examples of Mudéjar architecture.

Mudéjar was a style of Moorish-lite architecture and arose at around the same time that Gothic architecture was coming to be in France and Germany. Mudéjar was an important transitional style and its contributions to the great cathedrals of northern Europe has been largely overlooked.

Teruel promises to be an architectural wonderland. In addition to the great examples of Mudéjar, there are a variety of buildings in Gothic, Baroque and early 20th Century styles. Any time I can look out over a thousand years of development in one sight line I'm a happy man indeed.

From Teruel we're off to Valencia, Spain's third-largest city. Valencia also started out as a Roman outpost and they called it Valentia then. Then being in 137 BC. It's since been occupied by the Visigoths, the Moors and finally the Catalan and Aragonese. Every one of those cultures has left fingerprints all over the city and I can't wait to see as many of them as time allows.

For all of Valencia's history, it doesn't seem the least bit shy about embracing not just today but tomorrow as well. The City of Science and Arts shown here is a pretty loud announcement of the Valencian peoples' belief in their future.

While we're in Valencia we'll attend the actual reason for this trip, a trade show known the world over as Cevisama. Cevisama is a world showcase devoted the best and brightest in the worlds of tile, bath fixtures, kitchen fixtures and natural stone. Spanish industries are on the march and it's going to be a real thrill to see these products on their home turf.

All of this is being made possible by Tile of Spain, an umbrella brand for ASCER, the Spanish tile Manufacturer's Association. I'm honored and grateful to have been selected for this once in a lifetime opportunity to experience the culture, food, architecture and industry of Spain. ¡Viva la España!

A Blog Off post: Thanksgiving's coming, what's it to you?

The following is a Blog Off post. A Blog off is a biweekly event where bloggers of all stripes write about the same topic. You can learn more on the Let's Blog Off site. As the day progresses, a table will appear at the end of this post and it will list all of the participants as well as link to their posts.

Oh man, it's Thanksgiving next week. How on earth did that happen already. This year has shot by with a speed that's making my head spin but now that Thanksgiving's around the corner, I suppose that means things'll be winding down on 2010.

What a year it's been. Everybody was telling me at this time last year that 2010 was going to be my break out year and in more ways than I can count it has been. When I look back on the last 11 months and think about the people I've met and the places I've been and when I add that the last two years' worth of people and experiences and wow. My life's unrecognizable from how it looked three years ago. That's fantastic of course and I am deeply, deeply grateful for how things look today.

But I was deeply, deeply grateful three years ago when everything I'm up to these days wasn't even on my radar.

Around 15 years ago, someone very wise told me that I should "choose what's so." It made no sense to me at the time, I was somebody to whom life happened.

Back then I was unhappy and ungrateful. I was waiting for the next big thing that never seemed to arrive and I couldn't figure out why I was so miserable. I thought that the key to happiness was to do the stuff that would help me get the things that would bring me the happiness I was looking for. A lot of people lead their lives that way, I can see that now.

It took me years to see that the do+have=be happy equation was a recipe for continued misery but eventually I did see it. Once I started to really think about that wise man's suggestion that I choose what's so I figured out that I had it all backwards. The answer wasn't do+have=be happy and that the answer I was looking for wasn't even an equation. The key was to be happy first. Once I was a happy, grateful man I'd do the things that happy, grateful people do. Once I was doing the sorts of things that happy, well-adjusted people do I'd find myself surrounded with the trappings of a fulfilled life.

It worked and it works. When I start out happy everything falls into place from there and it's absolutely unrelated to the circumstances I find myself in. If my default mode is grateful then everything's a gift. Since life is a series of stories I tell myself why not tell an empowering story?

Thanksgiving always gets me present to this stuff and I think it's absolutely fantastic that in the US we have a specific day set aside to be grateful. Five other countries around the world also have a day set aside called Thanksgiving but a day to be grateful goes a lot deeper than that. Human cultures have had harvest festivals for as long as there have been human cultures and something tells me that I'm not the first person to trip over the idea that being grateful is a good thing.

Maybe someday I'll find an excuse to prattle on some more about how to be grateful to nothing in particular.

So happy Thanksgiving folks. The assignment was to write about what it is to me and everything I just wrote is it. What's Thanksgiving to you?

Watch this space, I have another big announcement to make tomorrow

Or should I say, Miran este espacio, tengo noticias importantes para anunciar mañana.

Keep a hand on the soap

Meet my new soap dish.

Well, it's not mine yet but I know for a fact that Santa reads my blog.

It's a beautiful object and it's just creepy enough to be interesting. It's made by Galassia in the tiny town of Corchiano, Italy.

But I have a history with these sorts of things.

Meet my toothbrush holder.

I use an electric toothbrush so now it's my dental tool holder, but you get the point.

I bought that at an artist's garage sale almost 15 years ago and I know nothing about it other than it cost $5. I think it's cool. The cracks on it are from when I dropped it ten years ago. They give it character but I'd trade in all that character for a new foot in a heartbeat.

I think my foot's lonely and it needs a hand to hold the soap.

Autumn re-runs; Break a CFL? Don't panic.

This post ran originally on 23 April 2009. Few things irritate me more than panic spawned by ignorance and scientific illiteracy. A shocking amount of pseudo-scientific nonsense gets run as gospel by the Huffington Post, almost as much as the nonsense spewed out by Fox News. Ignorance and panic peddling know no politics.


Math and science are how human beings come to understand the world. For some reason that perspective's considered to be suspect by a lot of people. I will never understand that suspicion. The world's a dangerous place and removing all danger is impossible. Furthermore, everything is a potential toxin, everything. So much so that the term toxin is meaningless. Toxicity is dose. Period. Sure, drinking a cup of mercury will kill you, but so will drinking a gallon of water in a half an hour. Should we ban water because it's a toxin? Individual CFLs aren't a problem. A landfill full of them is. So use them, be sensible and recycle them once they're burned out.


The key to all of this is to understand what level of exposure to something is unlikely to cause harm. That's not information you're going to get from the Huffington Post, Fox News or anybody else who has an interest in you being scared. Science is your friend.


Lisa Sharkey had a piece in yesterday's Huffington Post where she described her panic over a broken compact fluorescent light bulb in her home. She then listed a series of clean up procedures that could only have been written by a personal injury attorney. Sheesh. Calm down already!

All fluorescent light bulbs contain elemental mercury. That includes the long, skinny ones in offices and schools. Elemental mercury is a naturally-occurring heavy metal that's also a neurotoxin in high enough doses. Elemental mercury is a liquid at room temperature and it evaporates into a gas easily. That gas glows when electricity passes through it. Hence its use in light bulbs. Mercury has a long list of practical uses and is found in everything from Mercurochrome to mascara. High concentrations of elemental mercury are more damaging as a gas than as a solid, so there are some sensible precautions you'll want to take should you break one of these bulbs.

But let's get a little perspective first and do some math.

Let's say you break a CFL containing five milligrams of mercury in your child’s bedroom. Further, let's say that bedroom has a volume of 25 cubic meters (that's a medium-sized bedroom). For the sake of illustration, let's assume that the entire five milligrams of mercury in the bulb vaporizes immediately. This would result in an airborn concentration of 0.2 milligrams per cubic meter. This concentration will decrease with time, as air in the room leaves and is replaced by air from outside or from a different room. So even if you do nothing, the concentrations of mercury in the room will likely approach zero after about an hour or so.

Under these relatively conservative assumptions, this level and duration of mercury exposure is not dangerous, since it's lower than the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standard of 0.05 milligrams per cubic meter of metallic mercury vapor averaged over eight hours. 

To equate the level of exposure in our broken bulb scenario with OSHA's eight-hour standard Imagine the immediate level of mercury in the room immediately after the bulb broke to be 0.2 milligrams of mercury per cubic meter. If we assume the air in the room changes every hour, then the eight-hour average concentration would be .025 milligrams per cubic meter.

See? No need to panic. While I wouldn't call it harmless exactly, it's not something you need to call a Hazmat team over.

So, in the event that you break a CFL, open a window to speed up the dispersal of the mercury vapor. If it makes you feel better, leave the room for a half an hour. Then come back and clean up the broken glass.