Nighttime Visitor

 After we turned out the main light, I was reading in bed and heard this formidable whirrrrrrr. I felt a sizable thing clunk against my chest. Brushing it away hastily, I turned the light back on. 

There was the largest wasp I had ever seen flying around. Michael courageously grabbed a broom to shoo it away while I cowered under the sheets any time it came near. This crazy beast had no desire to go outside. We (ha! Michael) tried easing it towards the window. Every time he got close, it decided it would much rather be somewhere else in our room.

Finally, it zipped outside. Despite the relative warmth, we slept with the windows closed and hoped it had a good night elsewhere.

In the morning, we were greeted by her highness on the terrace:

Turns out, it's a European wasp, one of the biggest in the world if I'm remembering correctly. I measured this one and it was nearly three centimeters long. It is crazy large. They're not hugely aggressive as wasps go, but will punch a really good sting on you if they get flustered.

By the evening, it had left us. I wasn't sorry.

Love,

Alexandra

Garibaldi's facelift

It was actually last month that I was able to enjoy the sight of Garibaldi's getting a full cleaning. Car pollution had taken its toll on the statue, and workers were busily scrubbing away from the bucket truck:

All clean now!

Love,

Alexandra

Marathon completed

 I've been working since June on a ridiculous project in the context of rising temperatures and no air conditioning: a heavy, double-knitted blanket for Michael's office. I've only ever done one double-knitted project (a hat), so this was quite an extension of the concept. In order to finish it before the house got impossibly hot, it's been a daily goal to knit 8 rows. That might not sound like a lot, but that is more than 4000 stitches, since each row was 510 stitches. Needless to say, I haven't had a lot of time for blogging or anything else other than basic cooking/house tasks/bureaucracy.

Double knitted = reversible, in a negative sense

But it's done! More than 227,000 stitches later, it's ready to be put in a storage bag to protect against moths and wait until the winter. I'll try to catch up with other news and events in the next few days, but my wrists are inexplicably tight at the moment.

Love,

Alexandra

Graduation and more

 As one might expect in Covid times, my academic career (for the time being at least) has come to an end with what might be described as a fizzle. While there will be a graduation ceremony, I elected not to stay in Aberdeen to receive my degree, preferring to return to Italy to celebrate with loved ones. Somewhat amusing that I have managed to skip all possible graduation ceremonies one way or another. Part of me wants the closure that a graduation ceremony would bring. At the same time, I know that I would hate it the whole time. I want the idea of a graduation without all the waiting around and without being in the spotlight. For those who want to watch, there will be an online ceremony of some sort, which you can watch here on Monday, July 19^th  at 3 pm UK time, but I have no idea what it will be like.

The next step is, of course, job hunting. I enjoyed my graduation project immensely, and I am working on my programming skills to make myself as employable as possible in the cyber-security sector. My project (the department’s version of a thesis) was centered around a specific attack on an ElGamal elliptic curve cryptosystem. This attack is easily avoidable by setting up some checks along the way, but they need to be set up. If anyone wants to read it, I’d love to show it to you. There are a couple mistakes that didn’t get caught in the editing process, and more than a couple of things that I would like to expand on. Overall, I am satisfied with my work. As I have time, I’m continuing to do an unsupervised continuation to include some of the things I didn’t have time to explain fully.

While at university I have found words to describe myself and the way I experience the world. I’m genderfluid and asexual! I’m so happy to FINALLY have words and not feel like I’m wrong or should just ignore the feelings and hope they go away.

Genderfluid means that my gender and how I want to be perceived changes. My pronouns float a bit, but are primarily she/her and they/them, but I do go by he/him as well. They/them is never wrong. I now go by Florence-Edward, and I use the title Mx. (pronounced either emmex or mix).  So, my proper name is Mx. Florence-Edward Marie Hook. An example of how to use all of this information would be “I wrote a letter to Florence-Edward. The first time I wrote their address, I forgot that they go by Mx. Hook now so I had to get another envelope to correct it.” While I have yet to change my name to this legally, I’m eventually going to look into how to do this, especially given the rather complicated situation I have.

What happens when your photographer (thank you Ella!) makes you spin around to show off your cape.

Mandatory "graduate with the unicorn" graduation picture

Asexual just means that I’m not really attracted to anyone. I can still fall in love; I just don’t pass by people and go “they’re hot”. I spent a good number of nights wondering what sexual attraction was and if I felt it. I also worried that I was somehow weird or broken for it. While I may be in the minority for it, I’m not alone. While this may limit my romantic partners, I’m certain I don’t want to spend my life with somebody who doesn’t accept me for myself.

It’s so exciting to be able to put words to these vague bumbling feelings I have always had and have everything snap into focus. I feel like I have a good understanding of myself. While some people may ask how I recon my catholic beliefs with being LGBT+ twice over (which are stereotypically conflicting), the answer to me is exceedingly simple simple. God is love. God created us as varied beings, and loves us as he created us. I believe that he created me as genderfluid and ace (abbreviation of asexual), and that it is natural for me to live as I was myself. A creature created in God’s image.

Even with all the Covid mess and the unusual end to everything, I am immensely pleased with getting through university. I have made some very good friends, learned quite a bit about mathematics (and at the moment I’m not planning to shelf my academic interest in it forever), learned about myself, and I feel like I’ve done good things during my time here.

Stay safe.

Ciao,

Florence-Edward

Tea for Two...Thousand

We drink tea. Daily. More when we can't get our morning coffee in the piazza. And our afternoon coffee. Instead, we gravitate to our terrace, assuming we get up early enough that it's still cool.

I found out, though, that the tea bags we use contain microplastics, and I'm not a fan of that. Plus, all the paper and so on felt a bit wasteful. Loose tea is not an option in the shops here, and online you are confined to very "special" (read: expensive) teas or ordering from Twinings at a huge shipping expense.

Deciding to get a little creative, and remembering where tea is produced, I searched for shops online that would ship from India. And, boy, did I find a lot! Most of them wanted to sell me hundreds of kilos, though, and I figured that four kilos would be about a year's supply. 

I found a vendor who was really sweet, shipping from Kolkata. After a little back-and-forthing (she wanted to sell me the option of free shipping but individual tins, which still seemed like too much packaging, along with the fact that I couldn't get all the flavors I wanted), we settled on her sending me heat-sealed plastic bags of 500g and 1 kg of the different varieties I requested. All in all, I think I ended up with 4 kg of tea. 

The tea itself cost $40. The shipping? Another $60, at the cheapest possible rate. The customs duties were $3.60, and the post office charge for handling the customs duties came to an additional $9. That said, we figure that had we bought retail here, we would have ended up paying $420 minimum, plus had all the plastic and paper waste and microplastic ingestion.

And the tea? Truly delicious. 

Another cup? Don't mind if I do...

Alexandra

A Shot in the Arm

Three of us finally have had our first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, and we couldn't be happier. Here's how it came about: 

There is a site for the regional health system where we could sign up to get our appointments. Access to signing up was restricted based on age for a long time (Umbria has a huge number of elderly people, and they were focused on immunizing the 80+ group), but finally Jeremy and James were able to request an appointment. At this point, neither Michael or I had received our appointments but were in theory waiting to hear back on our dates.

However. As one would expect, there was another way. One of our friends called to say that the neighboring region, Lazio, was offering an "Open Day" (in English) to provide the Astrazeneca vaccine to all comers. We excitedly and hurriedly signed up, because the appointments were for last Saturday and Sunday. Since we had plans for all of Saturday, we elected for Sunday. We heard that the follow-up appointments would also have to be done in Lazio, and that our friends' dates for the second Since that sounded way better than waiting for late August, we decided that Michael and I would go for our local health service rather than using the Open Day.

The Lazio set-up was a very temporary-type location essentially set up in an old strip mall. The important thing, though, is that vaccines were being given. Unfortunately, James was not able to get his there due to an allergy to crab. They wanted to have his administered in a hospital setting just in case there was a problem, so they recommended that he call our family doctor to start that process.

Curiously enough, Michael and I had appointments in different towns altogether. Michael's was down in Ponte Rio (just down the hill) and mine was all the way in Marsciano, a town about 20 minutes away. As it happened, we both got appointment times that were perfect for us.

The Marsciano location is housed in the permanent structures associated with a local park. These were two concrete-block buildings. Along with our appointment, we were sent links to documents to fill out prior to arrival; this greatly reduced the amount of time we had to spend at the facility. I arrived 10 minutes before my appointment time, and made it through the intake (three separate processes, including bureaucratic and medical) well in time to have my shot at the original appointment time. They asked that I stay for 30 minutes after the injection since I have an allergy to penicillin instead of the usual 15. I was out of the facility within 45 minutes of having arrived.

We just can't wait to get out and see people again! We've been so diligent about staying in so as to protect our fellow citizens and ourselves, but the weather is so lovely and the piazza calls.

Love,

Alexandra

Gardening day!

I can't believe how time has flown during this time. We're still in a family-driven lockdown, since Italy has been slow to receive vaccines from the manufacturers. The good news is, though, that Michael and I have signed up to get notification of appointments, so that's a step in the right direction. With any luck, we'll at least have an appointment scheduled sometime in the near future.

In the meantime, we're just contented to have lovely surroundings, good food, and enjoyable company. It's a good thing that we (mostly) like each other! 

This morning, Michael went out for the first time in months to go down to the weekly market. James accompanied him, and they chose flowers for us to enjoy in this new season, since the pansies were really looking tired.

Our home improvement activity for the weekend, therefore, was doing some planting. Here are the results:

Our upper terrace, just off the bedroom

Kitchen balcony

Kitchen balcony

Everything still looks very young and needs to fill out a bit, with the exception of the asparagus fern. That was removed from a larger pot that I wanted from the upper terrace, and it required that I really whack at the roots. Not sure it'll make it, but I wasn't emotionally attached to it other than the fact that it's one of the few plants I've kept alive for about four years now.

Love,

Alexandra