And by 'Sweet', I Mean 'Totally Awesome'

We received a package in the mail today from one of our TOTALLY AWESOME friends, which included a P.G. Wodehouse book. This stroke was particularly well-played, since the book (Jeeves and the Tie That Binds) follows directly upon the one I read earlier this Fall. I already read the first two chapters, and it was already hilarious. So...

THANKS!

Consider this Your Christmas Card

Allison asked me to post some of these since I have more regular access both to the internet and to wasting time. So here are some pictures of our Christmas decorating festivities.

I removed the fake tree from the real box, and that was all I did for a while (I mean, come on--someone had to document the event). Allison, on the other hand, got to work putting the tree together:

Then came time for trimming and tinsel (this is around the time I almost blew myself up with the lights). Here's Allison again:

Then came time to place our 1 Euro red-cheeked plastic angel atop the tree, and this was a job I could handle:

And so from us to all of you and all of yours, we wish you a most Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The Depths of Self-Loathing

The cause:


Those of you who know me well know I have an aversion to carrying around of these little mobile KIT-LYLAS boxes. But, alas, I've become one of 'those people', walking around, looking at the little screen, playing with all the buttons, going, 'Oooh, Allison, look at this!'

But we figured we should have a phone, especially for when visitors arrive and the like.

So here it is again, the little match-box-sized communication case:

Very important things

Thing one, work. I am writing right now from the desk of my new job. I'm in week three and having a great time. I'm one of several English editors hired to assist in the Italian to English (I step in once the translation is complete) translation of a 5 volume work on Hydrocarbons produced by the Istituto Della Enciclopedia Italiana. If you know anything about my resume you will find this as funny as I do. Human services to hydrocarbons--natural progression I think not. Side note: the office is 3 blocks from the Pantheon, and one block from the best candy shop in Roma.

Thing two, ponytails. Eric is sporting one now. I think I will wait on posting a picture so that you can all make a mental image first.

Mosaic/Mus(a)ic

Last night Allison and I went on a little mosaic tour before winding up at a concert. We started at SS. Cosma e Damiano, with a 6th century apse mosaic that was very influential on later mosaics. The church is in a converted Roman hall on the Forum, the first Christian church in the monumental heart of the city. From there, we went to S. Pudenziana, which contains the oldest public monumental display of Christian visual art in Rome--an apse mosaic from the late 4th/early 5th century. From there, we went to the church of Pudenziana's sister, S. Prassede, a 9th century church commissioned by Pope Paschal I with lots of mosaics on the arches in front of the apse, the apse, and the Zeno chapel, the only chapel in Rome entirely covered in mosaics. Here are two pictures from that chapel. The first is over the entrance, and the second is Peter (the white-haired one) and Paul (the dark-haired one) flanking an empty throne. The throne is the throne of light--i.e. Christ--and it was constructed so that light shining through an opposite window would fall directly onto the throne.




The concert was very enjoyable. The music was for organ (the church is currently trying to raise money for organ restoration), and on around half of the pieces he used the organ to accompany a mezzosoprano with a beatiful voice. On the bill were pieces by Pachelbel, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Saint-Saens, and Verdi, among others.

I haven't put up any pictures of the Christmas tree yet because I'm (AHEM!) waiting for someone ELSE to do it--oh yeah, and also because I haven't loaded the pictures onto the computer yet. Perhaps soon...

Update: Heated Goodness and Uncloggery

So I called our landlord last night. Well, actually I called twice. The first time I called (using the cell phone number) I talked to his wife, or, rather, I said a couple sentences of broken Italian (after telling her about the sink, I think I just kept repeating, 'We blew a fuse! We blew a fuse!'), and then she send a bunch of stuff in really fast Italian. I gathered that I was supposed to call their home number sometime after 8.

So, after Allison's fantastic artichoke lasagna, I called back. That was a little better, since he speaks some English. He said he'd come today at 9:30.

So he did. It took him approximately 2 or 2 and one-half minutes to fix the stuff that Dum-Dum Eric spent a few hours on. For the fuse, he just pushed one switch really hard. I had pushed this switch, but not really hard, because, well, I was afraid to. For the sink, his technique was this: he covered one hole on the back of the basin with a plastic grocery bag and then assaulted the drain with a plunger. Voila! No clog. But he did recommend one more treatment of Mr. Muscolo.

So anyway. The heat is back on, my socks are probably close to being dry, and Allison might stop wearing my coat around the apartment now.

Happy as clams.

Christmas!

I figure that I'd better leave some of these Christmas pictures for Allison to post, but Vancenation put up a few pics that reminded me that i at least needed to get a couple up....Ok, scratch that. I'm only putting one up, because the rest aren't on the computer yet. So here is holiday fun in visual form:

Next to the poinsetta you can see a type of cake called 'pandoro', which means 'golden bread'. It was on sale at Sidis (our neighborhood grocery store) AND came with a big packet of confectioner's sugar. Sweet, on at least two levels.

And now for the section called 'In Other News'. You can see a couple of posts below that we've been having some exploits with our sink. I thought I'd almost gotten it fixed, but I misjudged its teeth-clenching determination to stay clogged. Now trouble has been added to trouble: while toying with some Christmas lights the other night, I attempted to plug them into an extension cord we found in a drawer in the house. This cord was obviously defective, as I realized when I nearly electrocuted myself and blew the fuse in the apartment. No electrocution occurred, but darkness ensued. When sufficient lighting was recovered (via opening the circuit box and flipping switches indiscriminately until the lights came back on), we realized that a couple of outlets didn't work, including the one into which the washing machine was plugged in the selfsame bathroom as the clogged sink (thankfully we were able to plug it in somewhere else). Then, last night, after removing the laundry to place it on the registers to dry, we realized that they were cold. So when I almost set myself on fire, apparently it did something to the heater as well. This heater, not surprisingly, is in the same bathroom as the clogged sink and one of the non-functioning outlets.

All this is to say that a call must be placed to the lord of the manor, who, I hope, will do some things with tools--you know: hammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, that sort of thing--and will restore our bathroom to its former grandeur, and our apartment to its former warmness.

The Uffizi

Continuing on with some of the Florence pics, here is a shot of one end of the Uffizi, looking through an arch that goes out toward the river (the Arno). On the Sunday (I think) when this was taken, there were a lot of artists making things and whatnot in this area, and we picked up a nice little ink drawing of the Florentine skyline.

Caspita che fame!

While working on an Italian lesson today, I came across the following in the vocab section, and I think it's appropriate to the name of this blog: Caspita che fame! The book translates this as, 'Gee, what an appetite!'