Day at Home

We woke up to a cloudy day today. Its not raining right now, but the forecast is calling for heavy rain and flooding.

Our apartment is a bit of a mess after a busy weekend. I also have two nightstands and some balcony furniture to put together, laundry to do and the floors need mopped. Life is not all wine and cheese in Italy. Normal daily life keeps us busier than it did in the US.

Camping. Why camping? Well, sometimes it seems as though we are camping. Yes, we are 'camping' in a very nice apartment, but we don't have a lot of our usual daily items. We are cooking out of two pots. Until yesterday we only had one bath towel between the three of us. I know, we have furniture, beds and we now have Wii. So I guess its not really camping. I just wanted to use that term in honor of our good friend Katey who suggested, when we talked about our belongings taking 7-10 weeks to arrive, that we could live as if we were camping. We miss you Katey...and the Noel family.

Oh wow, I must say it is nice to have music again. Our new Ipod player lacks a little bass, but just hearing my favorite music while I do laundry and other household chores is fantastic.

Quality. Katrina was mentioning a conversation with Mike, the other HP engineer here. In the US we are all about convenience. Stores are open long hours or 24 hours. If we don't want to make food, we can buy just about anything premade or eat just about any type of food at a restaurant. Even daily chores are convenient. Washing machines are bigger - and we have dryers. We tend to buy groceries for a week or two at a time. Here in Italy we are finding that convenience is not an impotant aspect of life. Italians will almost always go without convenience. They will almost always choose quality over quantity. Why buy food premade when you can make it from scratch with the freshest of ingredients. My opinion of this, Americans and Italians can both learn from each other. One example: daily chores could be made easier here in Italy and we could do without so much convenience food in the United States.

I just arrived home from picking up Brandon at school. We didn't stop at the park today due to the wet conditions. Its been lightly raining all day. We did stop at Supermercato Punto for a few items. We seem to need a combination of fresh items and more stock items as we go along.

For dinner this evening I made insalata di fogioli con tonno e radicchio - warm bean salad with tuna and radicchio. The recipe is from our authentic Italian cookbook. It was very good and tasty. Even Brandon ate everything on his plate.

This evening we had some fun playing Wii. What a great game. Too much fun!!!