Spanish views from a small town

It turns out my aversion to housework will help me in the long run. A study run over twenty years by the University of Bergen in Norway shows that inhaling regular cleaning products, like degreasing sprays, window cleaners, and other substances, can reduce lung capacity to the same extent as smoking twenty cigarettes a day.  Though, thanks to my father's smoking habit in my infancy, I already have asthma, now I am vindicated in not having a spic and span house. I never did like the smell of most cleaning products, however brightly and attractively they did smell. My refusal to use bleach now has a good reason behind it. Despite the Spanish love of bleach to disinfect and leave everything bone white, my gut was telling me it was not a good idea.  So you can smell the last meal we cooked when you walk into my house? At least it smells more natural than canned roses or plastic pine needles. It also damages the lungs less. And there are more germs and bacteria around. Which is...

I'm too young to have ever taken a home ec class in high school. By the time I entered those halls of learning, it had become a relic of the past. I was always under the impression that it had been a way to get good girls ready for their role in society as wife, mother, and homemaker. And that the then-few girls that decided to continue their education were considered failures as proper women. I'm simplifying, but when home ec was common in high schools women were still being held back in the job world. Well, the conservative party that is ruling at this moment in Spain, has decided that it's a good idea to reintroduce the idea of homemaking as a career. At the end of this last August, a law was approved amplifying what can be studied in vocational schools. One of those new courses of study is Actividades domésticas y limpieza de edificios (Domestic activities and cleaning in buildings). Its objective is to prepare a student to be able to keep a household and know how to ...