Forward Motion

Channel Conquered

 

On June 1st, I began the challenge.  Swim the length of the English Channel.  21 miles.  680 laps.  On August 5th, I swam the last lap on got my tshirt.

It's a little too big, but I'll wear it anyway.  I'm proud of myself for finishing this.

Honestly, even just standing outside for 5 minutes in this heavy cotton tshirt to take these photos had me sweating and cussing at the heat.  It has reached 89.5 degrees at my desk now.  I saw the weather forecast shows that we might get out of the 90s this weekend and I'm so ready.

Random post for August

- I know I'm being repetitive, but #%$&!, it's hot.  That's really strong expletive there, just so you know.  My little garage/office temperature is currently at 88 degrees.  I'm trying to only run the AC at night upstairs to save on our electric bill, but I can't take it much longer.

- We got our winter gas bill this week.  That's right, I'm just now getting the gas bills for Oct. '09 thru Feb. '10.  I told the family they'd better enjoy the warmth now, because everyone is bundling up this winter.  Those bills were painful.

- Speaking of gas...and speaking of expensive: I stopped to get gas for the van one morning last week.  It was early and I was kind of not totally awake, plus most of the gas stations here are full serve, so I rarely pump my own gas.  One moment of inattention and I ended up with 16 liters of diesel fuel in my unleaded van.  At least I noticed it before filling up and driving away, but the tow truck and repair ended up costing over $200.

- So far, I hate August.  Let's go, September.  Hurry up.

- My family is currently working their way through the entire series of Rocky movies.  I don't know why.  I can't stand Adrian, but I love hearing "You're gonna eat lightning and you're gonna crap thunder!"

- It's almost too hot to enjoy our weekly pizza night.  Almost, but not quite.  That's why there's gelato.

Lovely Barcelona

Barcelona has amazing buildings.  I don't know an Ionic column from a flying buttress, but I loved the architecture in the city.  I've never wanted to take so many photos of buildings anywhere before.

 

 

 

During our ride on the open top tour bus, there was lots of traffic.  So I had plenty of time to look at all the buildings and take a gazillion photos of them.  Unfortunately, I forgot most of the details about what the places were, so I just have a bunch of random photos of cool buildings.

This is the Columbus Monument.

 

Columbus is not pointing toward the New World.  He's pointing in the wrong direction, which amuses me.  You can go to the top of this monument, but that column is skinny!  Then I read in the guide book that the elevator is very narrow and knew that no view would make that worthwhile.

We got a fine view riding on the cable car from Montjuic to the Barcelona Castle.

 

Barcelona has it's own Arc de Triomf.

 

Next to our hotel was the Arenas shopping center.

 

Recently opened, it was built from an old bullfighting ring.

It felt like we did so many things on this vacation.  The tour bus, the chocolate museum, the aquarium, three different shopping malls, the cable cars, the Parc Guell, seeing the Sagrada Famila church, walking down Las Ramblas....what else...oh, and the Magic Fountains (that I thought were more like Mildly Diverting Fountains, but whatever).

 

We stayed at the B Hotel.  The main reason I chose it was because of the rooftop pool.

 

There actually is a space between the plexiglass and the side of the 9 story building.  But not much of a space.  Basically, Grace is floating around on the edge of the hotel.  She was also the only one who enjoyed the pool, because that was some chilly water!  The weather in Barcelona was lovely, warm but not hot.  Breezy but not windy.  In fact, that's the adjective I'd use to describe Barcelona altogether - lovely.

A taste of Barcelona

It's hard enough to get back to the drudgery of regular life after a great vacation.  Being sick just makes it that much more cruel.  We all seem to be better now, except Grace because she's indestructible and never felt sick anyway.  Alex still has a cough, but the fevers and bad stomachs and general ick feelings have passed.

As much as I loved Barcelona, I was not impressed with the food.  Perhaps we just didn't eat in the right places or maybe I'm spoiled by the fabulous meals here in Italy, but we never ate a meal that was really delicious.  There were some excellent pastries and an occasional yummy side dish, but overall?  Meh.  I tried tapas, I tried paella, and felt like I got the idea of Spanish food, but it didn't do much for me.

I think our favorite meal might have been at the Hard Rock Cafe, a place we usually avoid because of the crowds and the prices.  But while I could have looked at churches and stunning architecture all week, the kids were bored with it and requested something fun like this.  And it was fun, once we got a table.  And the food was so American!  That was a treat.

We often had a difficult time finding something we wanted to eat on the Spanish menus.

 

I don't think cava glaze, whatever that is, is enough to get me past eating hooves.

We visited a food market that was one overwhelmingly display of ingredients after another.

 

Some sections were more overwhelming than others, at least to our sense of smell.

 

Is 65 Euro for a whole pig a good price?  I don't know.  That doesn't include cava glaze, I'm sure.

 

Someplace that smelled a LOT better was the Museum of Chocolate.  Check out our entrance ticket:

 

A chocolate bar!

I think there were many informative and educational displays in the museum, but I was way too excited by all the different chocolate scupltures to learn anything.

A chocolate bullfight!

 

The dirt is chocolate sprinkles.  Never have I so much wanted to eat dirt before.

Not a vacation post. Yet.

I have just today returned home from our vacation in Barcelona.  And I am that satisfied kind of exhausted that comes from a good trip, a long day of traveling, and the comfort of my home around me after staying in a very modern hotel.

I can't yet face the thought of dealing with all the photos that are on my camera's memory card right now.  It must have been that 45 minutes waiting for our bags at the carousel with the team of young Spanish women softball players.  They were a boisterous bunch. 

I meant to post about a recent finished project before I left for Spain, but I was too busy.  Our hotel did have wifi, but it was so weak I swear I could hear the ghost of my 1997 dial-up connection.

 

This is how it began.  I had a small skein of Twisted Fiber Art Evolutions yarn (colorway is Lagoon), which has the colors in very long segments.  I've seen a lot of triangular and semi-circular shawls knit with yarn like this, but I can't get excited about those.  Plus,this skein was the Kabam yarn, which has bamboo.  And I don't really like knitting with bamboo yarns and life is too short to knit with yarns that feel freaky on my fingers.

I thought it would look neat to do do both the warp and weft in the same yarn, so I'd have large sections of solid colors on the scarf.  But I didn't have enough of the Lagoon for that, so I found a natural colored fingering weight wool and used that for the weft.  I do have another, bigger skein of this stuff in a different colorway, so maybe I'll try my idea with that one.

 

It muted the colors considerably, but I still like the overall effect.  I tried to weave more loosely than usual so that the weft (the crossways yarn) wouldn't bunch up and further obscure the colors of the warp.  It was an interesting experiment and a great way to use up a skein of yarn that was too pretty to be neglected but that I didn't really want to knit.

And it's not even the middle of July yet....

I have just one thought continually on my mind.

Hot.  It's so hot.

Sometimes there are curse words involved, but really, it's miserable and sticky and gross.  Just typing is making me break a sweat.  Our two little air conditioners are not making hardly a dent in the temperature in the house - which right now is 85 degrees according to my clock - at all.  And of course we can't run them both at once, or run one with any other major appliance or the fuse blows.  I turn the downstairs one on in the afternoon and the upstairs one goes on all night.  I feel like I haven't slept decently since mid-June.

I got all Scarlett O'Hara-y talking with a friend yesterday at the cell phone store, ending my rant with "As God is my witness, I'll never live without central AC again!!".

So, yeah.  HOT.

It makes total sense, then, that I did this:

 

Sat my butt down on scalding hot flagstones wearing thick wool socks!  But hey, it's been so long since I finished a project, it was worth it.

Yarn: Twisted Fiber Arts Duchess, color - Warlock

Pattern:  some kind of squiggly rib from one of my stitch dictionaries

I started these back in December and thank goodness I knit them two at at a time.  I really like the way the rib pattern looks but it was not fun to knit. I'm sure if I'd done one sock at a time I never would have wanted to knit the second one. Or it's just possible that I have no patience for patterns anymore and I want to knit plain and fast.

I'm gonna go stick my head in the freezer for a while.

Boom Boom Blah

It's always a little strange celebrating strictly American holidays in a foreign country.  The post tried to have a 4th of July festival, but it fell a little short.  There were carnival rides, but they were contracted out to Italians.  It was jarring for little kids to be jumping on the bouncy slide while rap music containing incredibly foul language blared.  I hope MWR remembers to screen the musical playlist of the carnies if they hire them again.  As we walked by the bumper cars, we stopped in horror and asked each other, "Did I really just hear that?"

They also opened the post to the local Italian community.  I didn't mind that so much, but I was startled at how many of them came.  The Americans were outnumbered by about 3 to 1.  By the end of the evening, it didn't feel much like an American celebration.  Too bad DH isn't here right now or I'd get him to send me the photo he took of this one schlumpy Italian guy proudly wearing a t-shirt blinged out with the words "Rich and Cool".  Likely he was neither.

The big excitement this year was the fireworks.  For some reason (I've heard it was the construction being done on the now complete health center), the post hasn't had fireworks in years.  They've tried to make do with a laser light show, but it's a poor substitute.  This year, they planned to shoot off the fireworks from Mount Berico, a hill about 4 miles from post.  Knowing the geography of post and Mount Berico ,and all the buildings in between them, I had some concerns as to how we were going to able to see the fireworks from the festival field.

Since the days are sooo long here - seriously, the stupid birds start chirping at 4:30 in the morning and it's broad daylight by 5:30 - we had to wait until 10:30 pm for the fireworks.  Finally, we heard them.  The crowd all stood and shuffled around, trying to see.  There were flashes of light, for sure.  Pretty much the best any of us could see was something like this:

 

I think just about anyone who was NOT on post probably had a better view of the fireworks.  I know there were places in the US that had fireworks bans because of drought, so at least we got to see something.  Still, it made the laser light show not seem quite as lame.

It occured to me on Monday that in my life, I've celebrated the 4th of July in four different countries.  Jamaica, when I was in high school on a youth trip.  Germany, 1992, when I was in the Army.  Italy, 1993, 2009, and 2011.  And of course, America for most of them, and let's hope, the rest of them.

 

One more year....

July 1, 2011 marks two years that we've lived in Italy.

More importantly, the date signifies that we have only one more year before we leave Italy.

I bought myself a little something as a reward for surviving the second year here.  Last year, I celebrated enduring our first year with a vacation back to the States.  Not only would that be far too expensive to do again this year (and I did check), but there's the problem that if I set foot in the US, it would be way too hard to come back here again.  I hope that I only have to make one more transAtlantic flight in my life.

So I presented myself with this:

 

An iPad2.  I adore it for many reason, the Kindle app especially.  I do not know how anyone who enjoys reading can live overseas without a Kindle.  My regular Kindle was an older version that didn't work wirelessly outside of the US and I often read ended up reading books from the Kindle app on my iPhone.  But the iPad is all big and shiny and bright and so much better.  I also use it for news and magazine apps.  I feel so very out of touch living here and not having a newspaper or easy access to 24 hour TV news.  Being able to read news on the iPad is keeping me much better informed now.

I ordered it directly from Apple, even though they would not ship to an APO.  Why, Apple, why??  What's your problem?  The US mail not good enough?  I'd pay a little extra if that's what was needed, since I had to get this shipped to my dad and then he kindly sent it along to me.  Anyway, when ordering from Apple, you have the option to get free engraving on the back of the device.  I thought for a while and then couldn't resist:

 

If you can't see exactly what it says, just refer to the title of the post.

 

Summer!

- It finally stopped raining!  The sun has been out all day today.  I'll be complaining about the heat pretty soon, but for right now, I'm just so glad it's not raining.  It really feels like summer now that the mosquitos have been biting me.

- I got the taxes done today.  Such a relief.  I didn't get one of the important tax papers I needed until April 8th, so rather than scramble to file by the 15th, I just filed and extension.  And then kind of forgot about the whole thing.  Today I spent nearly 3 hours in the tax assistance center, but they are done.  As it turns out, I was doing them wrong anyway and would have missed out on a huge chunk of refund money.  So hooray for the military tax assistance center!  Let's hope I don't get audited.

 - This was the Jaywalker sock I've been working on since February.

 

I kept it in my purse and would knit a few rows here and there, but the more I knit, the less I liked it. You'd think I would have recognized this before going all the way past the heel.  At least I didn't knit a second sock I didn't care for.

- This is the new version of the sock.

 

Not sure I love the blurry stripes, but I like it more as I knit, not less.  I certainly like it better than the first try.

- Everyone is moving away.  Well, it sure seems that way.  I hate goodbyes.  Would it be rude of me to just wish they would all leave already?  One more year....

- Tomorrow is the last day of public school for Grace.  Alex has still a lot to finish before August, but he's working really hard and doing great .  Next week, they take a Youth Services trip to Germany for hiking, water skiing, and a ropes course.  Not a bad way to begin summer!

The wettiest wet

It has been raining, raining, raining.  From light, misty drizzle to loud monsoon type rain.  For days and days.

 

I don't know why I think anyone wants to see a blurry cell phone picture of rain (you're all probably familiar with what rain looks like), but the amount of water pouring from the downspout was really impressive.

It's totally screwing with my laundry schedule because in summer I hang the clothes outside to dry because the house is too warm and humid.  At least, though, it's a break from the heat.  We've went back to wearing jeans and sweatshirts yesterday.  Totally not normal for an Italian June.

Josie, the mostly chihuahua, is very unhappy with this weather.  She hates thunderstorms and reacts by panting, shaking, following me around, and when she's really at max freakout, she tries to burrow and hide.   Jenn at Weirdy Pants mentioned the Thundershirt, so we bought one for Josie. 

The first time she wore it, the results were amazing.  She stood there, kind of stunned, then slowly lay down.  After a few moments, she stopped panting and put her head on her paws.  She still shook a bit, but mostly she was calm.  Unfortunately, the more she's worn it, the less effective it is.  She doesn't hide as much, but still pants and stresses out pretty badly.  The other night, the rain briefly cleared and just as Josie started to relax, someone started lighting off fireworks.  Poor dog.

DH has leave at the end of July, so that means I am trip planning again.  Our destination, chosed mainly because it had the least expensive airline tickets, is Barcelona, Spain.  Also, DH speaks Spanish and I'm in the mood for tapas.  I was going to say I needed some sort of Thundershirt of my own for when I'm freaking out over flights and hotel reservations, but then I remembered there's booze.