Forward Motion

Fruitfull

If you've ever wondered what a blooming pomegranate tree looks like,

 
wonder no more.

Not every flower turns into a fruit, thank goodness.  Some of the flowers fall off the tree, but you can tell the ones that will bear fruit.

 

Right there in the middle is the beginning of a pomegranate.  Last year we had almost 30 pomegranates from this tree.  I've counted at least that many teeny fruits on the tree so far and new ones are still forming.  Sometime around October we'll find ourselves spending hours doing this again:

 

Pomegranates are delicious, but a great deal of messy work.

10 miles. 2 Villas. Thomas Jefferson.

Today was walking day, so there was no lingering over my morning Diet Coke. I slathered on my 70 SPF sunscreen, did up my ponytail, and left the house by 8:30 to drive waaaay up the hill to my friend Vicki's house.  Vicki is my walking/hiking friend and I'm going to miss her so very much when she moves to Germany next month.  Not just for the walking thing, but it's true that there's no one that can make three hours of slogging up and down hills so much fun. 

We've been knocking out 10 and 12 miles walks over the last few months.  Since her house is 2 miles up a big old hill, we start there and have walked all over that freaking hill.  (If you want to see maps and statistics of our adventures, I log them on RunKeeper.  I think I've made the activities public, so hopefully anyone can see them.)  Last time we went, it was a 12.75 mile walk that was more of a "holy crap, where the hell is your road and how do we get back to it" kind of stumble about.  Luckily we didn't need to call for a rescue and some very nice Italian man didn't mind us walking up his driveway asking for water.  In fact he called after us, "Have a nice walking!" in hesitant English, which I thought was adorable.

Anyway, Vicki had a plan today.  She's been here two years and now she's moving away and she still hasn't been to the Rotunda.  The Rotunda, or Villa Capra, was designed by the famous Italian architect Palladio.  Look familiar?

(These aren't my photos in this post.  I didn't take my camera, so thank you, random Google image result photographer.)

Thomas Jefferson visited there and went back to America like a copycat and built Monticello, that building on the back of the old nickels.  I used to drive past the Rotunda every day on my way to work when I was here the first time, but I had never been in it either.  It's privately owned, charges a hefty 10 Euro per person, and is only open one day a week, nine months of the year. 

A few months ago, we'd walked the two miles down Vicki's hill and walked another two miles on a nice footpath till we were just in sight of the Rotunda, then turned around and walked back.  So we figured today actually going to the building would be about a 9 mile walk. 

And that's what we did.  Culture is, of course, wasted on me.  It's an old building with lots of intricate carving and fading frescoes.  Seen lots of those.  But Vicki was happy to say she'd seen it and there was a pretty view, at least.  Leaving the Rotunda, we saw a path with a sign to another villa, Villa Valmarana, and Vicki told me the story she knew about this place.  Supposedly, a man had a daughter who was a dwarf and he had statues of dwarves placed all around the villa so that she would feel more normal.  That sounded like something to see, so we trotted up the path.

  

Aren't they sweet?  We were out of Euro so we didn't go into the villa, but were able to walk all along the outer wall where the statues are. 

I came home and did a little more research and found this explanation of the little people villa. 

In Vicenza a visitor cannot miss a visit to the artistic and famous

villa Valmarana, the construction of which started 1669,

and which was frescoed by Tiepolo and his son in 1757. It is said

that once a rich and powerful prince had a gloomy castle built

here, surrounded by high walls, because he did not want his only

daughter Jana, a disfigured midget, to suffer seeing more handsome

people. Thus, all the servants that surrounded her were

midgets too. However, many youngsters were attracted by the

prince’s wealth and the girl’s beautiful face and came to ask for

her hand in marriage, but as soon as they discovered her deformity,

they found any pretext to go away. One day the poor girl fell

hopelessly in love with one of the many suitors, who, like all the

others before, had walked away upon seeing her. She went to the

balcony that overlooked the road and started to call the young

man and leant over so much, she fell down on the road and died.

It is said that the midgets (“nani”), who climbed upon the wall to

see what had happened, remained petrified from shock. They can

still be seen like that, as ornamental sculptures of the villa that

bears their name.

Some of the other stories claim that the daughter committed suicide, which is even sadder, but I have no idea if there's any truth to the stories of the "nanis".

Little people vs. Thomas Jefferson?  No surprise that I enjoyed the strange dwarf villa more than the famous, noble, Palladian one. 

Channel Challenge

Let me clarify from my last post, all the weight I've lost this year has just been Italian weight.  I'm finally just back down to what I weighed when we arrived here two years ago.  I still have about 10 lbs I'd like to drop, but at least I feel like I'm not trying to climb back up a hill that I fell down.

In addition to hiking and going to step class and sweating on the stair machine, I've been trying to swim laps at least once a week.  Now I've got a new challenge:

 

I'm going to swim the English Channel.  Sort of.

The Vicenza Fitness Center is sponsoring a challenge to swim the length of the English Channel, but fortunately I've got three months to do it.  And it's in the post swimming pool, not the frigid English waters filled with creepy swimmy things.  The competition begins June 1st and ends on August 31st.  In that time, I've got to swim 21 miles.  680 laps. 1360 lengths.

On a usual swim day, I do anywhere from 40 laps to my record distance of 70 laps.  In an hour of non-stop swimming, I can get about 60 laps done, so at that pace I should have no problem finishing the challenge in 12 weeks.  And hey, I get a Tshirt when I complete it, so why not?

I wish that I'd kept track of all the laps I've swam since the indoor pool opened in January of 2010.  It would have been fun to see if I could swim to America before I left.

Slump

Well.  I can't deny it.  I've been in a slump.  Two slumps really.  A blogging slump and a knitting slump, which kind of go together from a lack-of-creativity standpoint. 

I got to looking at all my yarn, SO much yarn, and it overwhelmed me and made me feel lazy and guilty.  And really, there are enough people and things and circumstances in this world that can make us feel badly, a ball of string should not be one of them. So I gave myself permission not to knit or weave or feel like I should be knitting or weaving. 

We went to Garmisch, Germany the first weekend in May for the Brigade ball.

 

We had a great time and note that I am wearing the same brown dress from the SGM Academy ball two years ago.  The new dress I ordered arrived just days before this ball and just....didn't work.  Particularly with the bodice.  I described the look to a friend as "two rabbits hiding in a cave."

I took three knitting projects with me.  I never even opened the bag.  All that time in the car I just spent snoozing and looking out the window.  The day after the ball we rented bikes and rode them several miles to the Partnach Gorge.

 
 
We hiked through the gorge and up to the top of the mountain and had lunch at a restaurant there.  It was just the most perfect European spring day.

As for the knitting, I'm confident that the slump will pass.  I still knit when watching TV, but I haven't been watching that much TV.  I have a Jaywalker Wollmeise sock in progress that I keep in my purse and do add a few rows when standing in line or talking on the phone.  The big loom in the the basement has been sending me challenging looks and I'm just about ready to try to whup it into submission.

The blogging slump...well, I've never really made a secret of it, but perhaps never stated it so bluntly, but I hate it here.  I hate living overseas in Italy.  After 2 years, it's gotten to be a dull hate that I'm accustomed to, but it's still there.  There are occasional time when I just mildly loathe this place, but not a day passes that I don't dream of when we leave.  We had hoped to finagle a new assignment this summer or fall and there were a few opportunities, but nothing worked out.  Now Alex has decided to begin attending the high school here in August, so with both kids in school, we are committed to staying until the end of the school year in June 2012.

And in the next few weeks, nearly all of my friends are moving away.  My kids friends are nearly all moving away.  It's going to get really hot.  The US dollar/Euro exchange rate is rotten, making doing things very expensive.  My husband will be going away several times for weeks of training.  I mean, it's all just very UGH.  The best thing about being here, the thing that makes it worth it for me, is the amazing opportunites for the kids.  Although they miss cable TV and big American malls, they do love it here.

But here I am writing a post anyway and I intend to pick up the pace again, even if it's just to write about WHY do my neighbors put their big tropical bird outside everyday, forcing me to listen to it screech and caw quite loudly?  And can I tolerate it for one more year without using my son's airsoft rifle to silence it?

One aspect of my life that hasn't been in a slump is my health.  I've been working out, swimming, taking step aerobics classes, and hiking all over the hillsides.  My friend Vicki (who is moving away..SOB!) and I hiked 12.25 miles last week up and down some really cuss-worthy hills.  I gave Weight Watchers a try in February and although I initially despised the whole Points thing, I eventually figured it out.  I've lost over 25 pounds this year.  Crazy.

I'm still using my beloved SparkPeople website to track my calories and keep my motivation.  I forgot that I used to blog there, too, even though it had been since 2009 that I'd posted.  There's a slump for you.  I started using that blog again for tracking my workouts and anything health and fitness related.  Feel free to take a look if you're at all interested in how we get lost on our hikes, the weird noise my left shoulder is making, or my slip and fall into a bag of potato chips.

Maybe one way of shaking off a slump is to just acknowledge it.

Spring Break - Paris!

Here are the highlights from our trip to Paris!

- Air France is far, far better than Alitalia. 

- Aren't the French supposed to have a reputation for being unpleasant snobs?  Someone needs to tell the people we met that they are NOT keeping up the stereotype very well.  They were so friendly and so nice and so helpful that we were happily surprised with every interaction.  Of course, we are used to the Italians, so maybe anyone who wasn't scowling as they shoved us out of the way seemed nice to us. 

- I could have been happy just taking picture of the outside of the Eiffel Tower, but DH wanted to go up to the top. 

 

There were several different lines to wait in and we spent at least an hour and a half standing in the windy cold with some very rude tourists.  All in all, I wasn't very impressed.  The views were nice, but I think the Eiffel Tower is best viewed from a distance.  With someone you love, if possible.

 

- The Louvre is closed on Tuesday.  Rick Steves did mention it, but it was two words - "Closed Tue."  Rick, could you put that in BOLD print?

- It's like a mosh pit in front of the Mona Lisa.

 

That and the Venus de Milo are the the big attractions at the Louvre and ugh...it was hot and stuffy on that entire wing.  We got away from the mob and it was much cooler and more enjoyable over by the Vermeers and Rubens.

- If you are in France, find a crepe restaurant.  Eat as many crepes as possible during your visit.  The Nutella crepes are magnificent, but I had a smoked salmon and cream cheese crepe, Grace had a potato, cheese, and smoked bacon crepe, and DH had a duck liver, grilled chicken, chive, and cheese crepe.  All of them were fantastic.

- We had both French fries and French onion soup in France.  The soup was so good we went back the next day for another bowl.  Truthfully, it may be that my diet consisted of primarily bread and cheese for the whole time we were in France.

- I wish we'd gone to the top of the Arc de Triomphe instead of the Eiffel Tower.  It looked more interesting.

 

- The open top bus tours are kind of the ultimate in touristy, but they are also a terrific way to see the city! 

 

We got to see many things I don't think we would have seen otherwise, or if we did see them we probably wouldn't have known they were worth seeing.  I loved how we listened to the recording as we went by the landmarks and learned things like a certain pillar was made from melted down cannons from some war.  It was a little chilly when we made stops in the shade, though.  The buses are perfect for seeing a city, especially if you only have a few days.  I'm not sure it would have been worth it in London, since we ended up visiting the major landmarks one by one anyway.  I'm looking forward to trying the buses in other cities!

- I didn't visit any yarn stores in Paris.  I know, I'm disappointed in me, too.

 

- This is the view from our hotel window.  The building on the far right of the photo is the Metro/RER station.  One of my best traveling lessons I've learned is always stay as close to the transportation station as possible.  After a long day of walking and touring through a city, it's so nice to get off the train and just cross the street to the hotel, rather than face a 10-15 minute additional hike.  We weren't in the heart of downtown Paris either, so things were less touristy and I liked that.  Also, the crepe restaurant was two doors away.

 

- I would have liked to have gone in Notre Dame, but we saw the line from the bus.  It was long and in the chilly shade.  It's not as big as you'd think, though.  I blame Disney.

- In conclusion, Paris was a good trip and the 4 days was just enough.  If we'd stayed any longer, I might never have left this place:

 

What I must remember to forget.

Of all the things I hate about traveling, one thing I really hate is that part where you've left the house and you're too far away too turn back because you'd miss your plane or whatever and your mind is just cataloging all the items that you are hoping you didn't forget.  I check for the passports every three minutes and try to remember if I locked the balcony door.  In fact, it's almost a relief when I figure out what I DID forget, because there's always something.

This trip, it was the Rick Steves' Paris book.  I borrowed it from the library to be all thrifty-like and then left it sitting on the kitchen table.  Since I hadn't done much research on Paris, I was counting on Rick to carry us through.  Luckily, I remembered this while we were still driving to the airport and therefore still in Italy and the data plan for my phone was still working.  (I can sometimes make phone calls from other countries, but I can't do any internetty stuff on my phone once I leave Italy.  Gah...it's like having just a regular phone and I dislike going back to those days!)  So I downloaded the Rick Steves' Paris book for the Kindle to the Kindle app on my iPhone.

And it turns out that leaving that book on the table wasn't a bad thing at all.  The Kindle version was so handy for traveling!  No pulling the heavy paperback from my purse and flipping through all the dogeared pages looking for the directions that one Metro station.  With the e-version, I just tap to the table of contents and tap the museum or monument I want to go see and it takes me to that chapter. And while the paperback lists the websites of these places, on the my phone, I can just click them as a link and it takes me right there like magic (assuming I'm in a country where my data plan is happening.)  It was definitely worth the $10 and now I'm going make a point of forgetting the paperback and downloading the e-version for any other trips.

I'll share more detail of our Paris trip and a few pictures if I ever stop sneezing every 8 minutes.  I can't remember ever having allergies this bad before and as lovely as spring is, I need it to go away NOW, please, before I actually sneeze my brain right out of my head.

 

It's 9 am and I've been awake for 4 hours this morning. I'm sitting near gate 14 at the Marco Polo airport in Venice tapping this out on my phone. I'm also squinting madly because this airport has huge floor to ceiling windows and it's super bright out. There's no escaping the glare if one plans to board Alitalia.

(We ended up arriving half an hour late this morning because the sun was blinding us so seriously that we missed the turn off sign for the airport. You can't just turn around on the Italian highways and our GPS was doing that thing where it was felt it was necessary to punish us for our navigational sins by making us take nonexistent exits. I hate it when trips start like that.)

Italy has had gorgeous weather this last week. Highs in the upper 80s, sunny & breezy. Last week two friends and I went for a hike in Vicenza. We had the idea to walk down from one friend's house way up on the hill, along the footpath to the Rotunda, the building that Monticello was modeled after. We figured it would be about a 5, maybe 6 mile walk. Yeah. More like 8.1 miles and the last 2 miles were all uphill. We were very impressed with ourselves and also kinda sore the next day.

On our walk we were wearing shorts and tshirts or tank tops. After an hour we were sweating. And yet all the Italians were dressed as though it was 45 degrees. I'm talking wool coats, turtlenecks, and scarves. Even the other people walking on the footpath were in long pants and jackets.

I came to the conclusion that the Italians don't dress for the weather, they dress for the calendar.

Anyway, Alex rode a bus all night and should be in Naples by now and we are bound for Paris. I'm fairly sure I have packed all wrong and will be too cold. Unless I'm too hot. Or I might not have the right shoes. We shall see how the French dress in April, at least.

Saturday night, the fail version

Tonight is one of those nights that I am just consumed with frustration and fury about living in Italy.  Okay, maybe I'm also overtired and hormonal, but somedays I can weather the challenges of European life with patience and other days I just kind of lose it.

I only wanted to watch a movie with my daughter upstairs.  Not in the living room, but upstair where we could sprawl comfortably in my bed.  We rented a movie from iTunes, which took 4 hours to download for some reason.  When we tried to watch it from her iPod onto the TV, it didn't work.  She transfered it back to her computer and we plugged that the the TV.  It didn't work.  We gave up on iTunes and chose a DVD.  That didn't work.  We could get sound but no picture.  Everything just worked a few weeks ago!  The whole family was stressed out and aggravated and we tried everything, but Grace and I are not watching a movie tonight.

Sure, we could have watched it in the living room, but that's not the same.  And sometimes you just would like to have things the way you would like to have them.  Not huge things, just simple things and when they don't work, it just makes you nuts.  That's tonight.  I miss cable TV, Netflix, pay per view, and the many, many other ways we could have just watched a movie upstairs tonight in the US.

So instead of whatever else I was thinking of blogging about, I'm borrowing from New Girl on Post and doing a Friday Fill-In, but on Saturday.

1.What romance movie scene reminds you of your s/o or spouse and the LOVE you share?
An Officer and a Gentleman.  DH would totally march into a factory and pick up me and my stupid hat and carry me out of there!

2.If you were allowed to deploy with your husband to a war zone would you and why?
Now that he's a SGM and works mainly in the operations center, I would consider it.  Back in the days when he was out leading patrols, probably not.  Of course, this is assuming the kids are somehow taken care of.  I generally choose the option of us being together rather than apart.

3.Have you ever done anything (intentionally, or unintentionally) to embarrass your spouse/significant other in front of his military cohorts?
Probably more times than I know!  But the incident that comes to mind is when we were still dating and I was still in the Army.  My unit and several others were training on the 4 story high rappel tower and my boyfriend thought it would be funny to make a big announcement about me (because I'd recently won Soldier of the Year) and bring me up to be the one to go off of the rappel tower.  I'm sure he thought he was embarrassing me, but he was the one who ended up embarrassed when I got harnessed up, leaned over the edge, and immediately refused to go.  I can still remember the guys on the tower calling down to him in amused bewilderment.  "Hey, Sergeant....ummm, we've got a jump refusal up here."  I did finally go down the wall an hour or so later.
4.What is your most irrational fear?
Falling over a balcony railing.  It's getting worse the older I get.  When my kids stand by the railing and lean out, I immediately see them flipping over the edge.

5.If you could only live in one kind of climate for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
Probably someplace like Tennesse that has 4 seasons.  As much as I love Florida's sunny climate, I miss the fall colors and spring blooms.

Insert Pepe LePew accent here.

 

Can you tell I made a decision about where we're going for spring break?  C'est Paris!  (Finally I get to use those three years of French I took.  I can't wait to announce that my friends and I are going to the library!)  As much as I wanted to go some place that would be warm and beachy, there's really no place in Europe that's as warm as that in April.  I wanted "sundresses and sandals" weather and although I considered Greece and Spain and Portugal, those locations would still be "light sweater after sundown".

If I wanted to visit some where that was bikini warm, that would require going south of Europe.  Africa.  I did look into Morocco, after a recommendation from someone who read this blog, and I was all for checking out that country.  But the world situation being what it is right now, traveling that direction from Italy is not the best idea.  Have you ever looked on a map to see how close Italy and Libya are?  It's not comforting.

Crazypants dictators aside, we only have 4 days to spend so that we can drop Alex off and be back in time to pick him up from his trip to southern Italy.  Grace and Alex have already been to Paris, so we don't feel bad about going there without Alex.  (He was bummed that we were thinking of Amsterdam without him.)  I'll be happy just seeing the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, and the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.  I can do that in a few days.

April in Paris.  It may be a cliche, but that's the plan.

 

A whole lotta blah and one pretty.

It's been a pretty lazy weekend around here.  After the non-stop pouring rain we had all week, you'd think we would have gone outside and enjoyed the beautiful spring weather today.  Instead, we all just sort of flopped from one inactivity to the next.  DH used up most of his energy cussing at iTunes while I just longed for cable TV and tamales.

I did accomplish one thing on my list: package up all my returns that have to be mailed out.  I was feeling spendy last month and was totally over winter so I ordered some, okay 6, summery dresses and two bikinis.  Also a few things for the kids and a new set of bedsheets for my bed.  How I have lived the last 19 months with only one set of sheets when it takes a whole day to wash and dry them, I do not know.  No more I say!

Of the 6 dresses, I am returning 3 for various reasons.  At least one dress made me look pregnant and another was not so much "summery casual" as it was"Julia Robert's roommate from Pretty Woman".  Both the swimsuits are going back.  It's hard enough buying swimsuits in the states when I can try them on; buying them online is ridiculous.  Neither suit was terrible, they just didn't DO anything for me, you know?  Both kids had stuff that didn't fit and so I have 4 packages to haul to the post office tomorrow.

I made a half-hearted attempt to try and plan something for our spring break. Alex did indeed get picked for the Youth Services trip lottery, so he's going to Naples, Rome, and Pompeii.  DH, Grace, and I are left to decide where in the world we should go.  In order to be able to drop Alex off and pick him back up, we only have 4 days that we can take for a trip.  I found a good price on airline tickets to Madrid, but ran out of motivation trying to find a hotel for 3 people.  Morocco was easier to find a hotel, but flights there are a pain.  So I still don't know what we are doing.

I've been knitting some, but am nowhere near finishing anything.  I warped up my little loom for another scarf then looked at it and realized I wanted to do it differently.  Now that the basement has warmed up, I have started to figure out my big loom down there.  All I have figured out so far is that the instruction book sucks and I need to find some YouTube videos for warping it.

A little bit of pretty that I finished last month is this scarf:

 

The yarn is from a Wollmeise grab bag, so it's a "We're Different" skein without a proper color name.  I think it's probably meant to be the color Edelstein, but it doesn't matter.  It's bright blues, purples, and some green that doesn't show up too well in the photo.  I made this for a friend and it was hard to hand it over.  I definitely wanted to keep it.