Christmas Toy

This is Michael.  Look at the toy Jeremy and Florence made me for Christmas!

It is about 10" by 7" by 3", made from a food storage container, and wallpapered with the wrapping paper I teased them with last year.

It comes with many useful features.  For example, it plays music:

If you get tired of the audio, you can watch the pretty lights instead:

Did you catch that message?  That is OK, it is just a taunt.  It seems likely that I will get further with the information on the DVD.  You saw that eject button, right?

Too bad the information under the help function is so thin!

Serious kudos to Jeremy for assembling this from scrap electronics.  He had to use imagination and perseverance to mount the components in a non-standard platform, not to mention designing the electronics and program!

Michael

Presepe...pronto!

Last weekend, I finally put together the presepe! We have moved its location to the upper landing, since our downstairs neighbors (who come intermittently and unpredictably) complained vociferously last year about our having co-opted all the space for our uses (fair enough!).

Leaving our front door

The shepherd and sheep in the hills!

The cave all ready for Mary and Joseph

Villagers

Joseph, Mary, and donkey: "Are we almost there??"

A little further to go!

But there's a musician to help you on the way...

Love,

Alexandra

Winterland Progress

Things in the Piazza are just moving along beautifully! We now have a garden (complete with grass!), a little bridge over what looks like a planned pond, a skating rink with some ice, and more!

The covered bridge has a painting of Consolazione

The rink goes around the Christmas tree!

Life-sized figures for the world's biggest presepe...all the way from Viterbo!

Seeing these drive up the main road cracks me up

For moving mulch. And trees.

Love,

Alexandra

Winter Wonderland, version 2.0.17

There are fabulous things afoot in the Piazza this year for Christmas! The lights are already up throughout town, pending illumination on December 8 (the feast of the Immaculate Conception). However, the new activist group, LOOP, has even more elaborate plans than last year's ice rink. Rumor has it that this year will have an ice skating loop, with an internal garden and a bridge. So far, there are admittedly no signs of an ice rink, so that may be erroneous.

However, garden, there will certainly be!

They have brought in enormous trunk sections, rocks, greenery, and intriguing scaffolding. Here's how it's shaping so far:

Will keep you posted as it progresses!

Love,

Alexandra

First Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers!

We generally don't celebrate this holiday because our family tradition is to go to Michael's parents...which is rather a commute from Italy! A few years ago, Jim and Sharon were here for Thanksgiving, so we did the traditional spread (thanks to Sharon, who by now is an expert!), but that was the only time.

This year was a different story. Although Michael was traveling, we were going to have a guest! Trey, son of my dear friend Tricia, is studying this semester in Rome; he came to spend the night with us prior to getting ready for his final exams.

As always, it was a treat to see him; he's visited us several times now, and swears that it only ever rains in Todi. Given his experience, it's a fair comment, so I was delighted that we had great weather today!

In any case, I'd decided to cook a more traditional meal rather than just an "everyday" dinner. When Ashley and I went to the States in early November, I brought back (legally! I checked) a few bags of cranberries for the cranberry sauce. I bought the pumpkins last week, cooked them up, and Ashley and I made the pie last night.

Foreground:colorflower (brighter than in the photo because of steam).
The green in the background is Umbrian mashed potatoes: cooked with greens!

Umbrian mash plus the stuffing

The pink is where I added lemon-juice; it turned fluorescent!

 Since a turkey is a little large for our oven (and is difficult to get this time of year, since they're being fattened for Christmas), I punked out and decided to do roast chicken pieces. Stuffing, gravy, salad, and potatoes were done today. We also had a new-to-me vegetable: purple cauliflower, dubbed "colorflower" by James! It's the most marvelous stuff: it starts this delightful lilac/magenta, then as it cooks moves through amethyst and into indigo. However, the steaming water turns a beautiful turquoise or emerald green, depending.



As we sat down, I realized that this is my first time ever cooking a Thanksgiving meal! Thanks to Sharon's example over the years, though, I knew what to do and won the highest praise: completely silent chewing punctuated only by "mmmm" for several minutes!

Grand finale!

After dinner, we played sjoelbak (a Dutch bar game) and the kids played with the Spirographs. And then pie! I was pleased with how the color turned out, because it still had a good bit of yellow to it rather than its turning brown. I whipped the cream with brown sugar, which gave a nice complex flavor that worked well with the pie.

All in all a success! And the best thing? Having my sweet kids (a portion of them, anyway!) with me and getting to see Trey.

With thanks for all our blessings,

Alexandra

Smoking pot

While I don't fry often, a copious amount of olive oil disappears from my kitchen on a weekly basis. The ubiquitous non-stick coating does not do well with oil at high temperatures, and nor does standard stainless. I decided it was time for a new pan, and had a heavy-duty metal pot with an enamel lining in mind...like Le Creuset or something similar.

I looked at the market, but the best I could find was a flimsy thing that just didn't seem right.

This week, I finally got to our local kitchen goods shop (Michael doesn't usually allow me to enter, because it is a complete gimme store; I want EVERYTHING they sell, please!) and spent some time looking at their offerings. They had a nice-quality non-stick pan and lovely heavy-gauge metal pans, but not what I was seeking.

True confession time: my Italian was not up to asking them for the type of pot I was looking for. In fact, I forgot some of the basic words I did know in the heat of the moment. I stumbled around, talked about "ceramic" instead of enamel, and was generally just pathetic. Luckily, they know and love me as a customer who pays them a month's rent every time I go in there, so they took me back to the pots and pans section again. I explained everything. I looked pleadingly.

Aha! She had exactly the solution I was craving. She ferretted around in the shelves, pulled out a cardboard box, and...it was a flattish crock. You know, cooked clay with red glaze internally, brown glaze externally, to be put in the back of the fireplace. The dimensions were great, but duh, this is not an item you put on the stove.

I explained the problem. She looked "duh-ishly" right back at me and virtually patted me on the head, while telling me that all Italians use this cookware, it goes right on the stove no problem (not fridge to oven, however, but it can be used in the oven without a problem). I stuttered something about thermal shock and direct heat and she looked at me very kindly and told me to can it and the she knew what she was talking about.

What could I do? I whipped out my credit card, and brought it home. The instructions said to soak it for 12 hours before using the first time, so I took care of that part right away. I'm using it tonight for my greens, but true confession: after all the explosions I've had in my kitchen over the years, I'm staying well away until I trust this thing.

Love,

Alexandra

Small Mystery Solved

As part of a general policy of keeping offensive weapons off the street, Italy severely limits carrying a knife.  You have to have a legitimate reason to be carrying the knife, and it is best if it is carried in a way that it clearly could not be deployed in an altercation.  Italians are very aware of this, in much the same way that Americans think about carrying handguns.

Yet long, very sharp knives are in use everywhere.  You aren't carving prosciutto without one!  What do you do when you need your knife sharpened?

It turns out that one option is for the knife sharpener to come to you.  I was walking over to Antonella's for the day's groceries.  A man wearing an apron entered before me, negotiated quickly with Antonella, and left.  I didn't think anything of it until I was walking back across the piazza and saw him working on her knives.

He and his co-worker had a small hatchback with a custom fold-out work table.  Their honing equipment was mounted on the table and powered by the car.

Simple!

A small victory

Yesterday, for the first time, I managed to finish the tutorial work during the tutorial (usually I have to finish the last two or three questions on my own at home).

It was a really satisfying tutorial because it built on itself. Each question, instead of being about how to do one particular command, was about how to build one part of a text-based video game. 

I still have until next week to work on it before it gets a mark, so I'm planning to use the weekend to look it over and try to streamline some of the code, because I think that I can reduce the number of lines. However, I most certainly am not getting rid of the version I have right now, because even if it might take the longer route, it spits out the right values. 

Florence

The Local Bookshop

I've dropped the ball on describing some of the places I shop regularly for basics like groceries, medical supplies, and so on. Tonight, I present the bookshop where we get school supplies, have items scanned/faxed/copied (particularly in volume...we have a low-budget printer in the house, but copies and scans are slow, and I've never figured out the fax), buy wrapping paper, and more.

Sergio runs the copier

Behind Sergio are all the notebooks, erasers, binder covers, and so on

Welcome to Sergio's place. Tucked into the alley and built into the foundations of the Duomo, Sergio is a local character who is known for his moodiness. On bad days, you might get a grunt. But on good days? There's no one more smiley or liable to burst into song as he walks through the piazza. A kindly soul, and well loved here in town.

The children's section

His shop is crammed from top to bottom with a variety of office supplies, tourist items, books, specialty pens, calendars, packing materials, and more. When closed, it looks like a few barn doors in a wall...as is usual here, there are no exterior signs.

Love,

Alexandra

OKTuderFest 1.0

This year, the powers that be decided to stage Todi's version of Oktoberfest. We had live music in various corners, street food, dining tables in the piazza, local restaurants with recipes featuring beer, and...beer stalls!

We had to laugh at the pretzels, though: the local bakery they used knows how to make fantastic breads (and it's where we get our panettone at Christmas), but pretzels were a sealed book to them. Proper pretzels of course must be boiled to produce the skin and then baked lightly, allowing the chewy outside and soft interior. The local version was cooked (not burned, but rather dried) to the point of being crispy like a snack pretzel!

Michael tried several different beers, which he declared to be delicious, and we had some Sicilian snacky foods for dinner. Activities included a "beer relay" (it appeared to be that teams were supposed to try all the beers on offer, and the fastest to finish won a prize), "beer pong" (don't know if it's the same as in the US), face painting for the kids, and more.

This is the "beer relay" announcement

Local businesses decorated their shop windows with yellow balloons clustered to form steins, with white balloons on top for the foam; larger versions were scattered around town to add to the festivities.

The weather, though, was appropriately brisk for an Oktoberfest, and we decided to warm up inside!

Love,

Alexandra