Sunday, October 26, 2008

We've fallen...




...back an hour, that is. Have you?



In New York Sunday meant the newspapers and eggs and bacon on a roll. Here the Sunday newspapers don't appear any different than any other day (are they? well, they certainly don't weigh 3 pounds each!) and anyway, the articles are difficult for me to read in Italian, so I usually don't bother (which assures that they'll never get any easier, I know). So, instead I catch up on the terrific blogs that so many are writing (see "Blogs I Read" section), sometimes the newspapers online (though they're often full of bad news, so why bother?) and have Pio bring home a cornetto with Nutella inside! A typical sweet Italian breakfast, except I have mine with a cup of tea instead of cappuccino.


What a lovely Sunday morning. Sunny (where is that rain that was supposed to have arrived yesterday or the day before?), warmish...and only 7:15 a.m. (OK, "what used to be" 8:15, as we'll say every day for the next month around here, I guess we have trouble adjusting our routines)!





This is welcome as we will once again be able to walk at 6:30 a.m. and not have to wear our reflective safety vests. Oh yes, it WILL get dark earlier, maybe 6 p.m., which I'm hoping will make it easier to get Dante to bed at a decent hour (kids in Italy stay up LATE by American standards, partly because many only eat dinner at 7:30 p.m. or later).

Work is going well. How I enjoy working with motivated adults (no behavioral issues, hurrah!) and they make me feel like a genius just 'cause I can speak English! The ego is happy. The regular paycheck is nice...oh, and the free lunches from their cafeteria are really good (how I'd love to bring the family so each could choose what he wanted for lunch...fruit, pasta, rice, fish, meat, vegetables, salad, then we could all bring our trays back and walk away. No messy pots and counter tops to clean, no dishwasher to load...I LOVE it!) I'm just learning, however, little by little, the differences between American and British English when we talk about the weekend (I even told students the first week that they should say "ON the weekend" instead of "AT the weekend" thinking they had chosen the wrong preposition (American friends and family, AT is correct in British English!).

Now it's time to start the day...make breakfast for Dante, get dressed, etc. We're going out for lunch later with some friends at one of our favorite places (rustic Capofiume Restaurant, in the mountains about 20 minutes from here, with a freezing cold shallow stream behind it which is just beautiful--and delicious too my son tells me!).