LIFE IN ITALY CONTINUES

Winter in Umbria doesn’t look a lot different than winter in Louisville…dreary. The sky is gray and cloudy. If only the sun would shine for a few hours, the difference in the temperature would be amazing. But still, it’s Italy, so it’s better to have dreary gray skies in Italy than to have dreary gray skies in Louisville, right?

We had a major snowstorm on Thursday night. We had been to the IperCoop to load up on groceries, and it started to snow the second we arrived home in San Venanzo. The snow was very heavy, and it accumulated quickly. I guess it snowed for about three, maybe fours hours at the most, and we ended up with a good eight inches of snow. The snowplow (a bulldozer with chains) came down the street twice during the snowstorm, and all things considered, the roads weren’t too bad the next morning. We didn’t venture out in the car until Friday, and by then we had no problems at all. From the looks of things, we must have been at the edge of the storm, because Marsciano only got a dusting, and heading north towards Deruta we saw no snow at all. The mountain tops were covered, and Art said he felt like he was live in Colorado.

We had seen Mauro, and told him that Rolando had painted our living room the wrong color. Mauro said he would call Rolando and see when the room could be repainted. We are anxious to get this done so that we can move the furniture out of the hall and into the living room. We aren’t sure which wall we want to put the TV on, and for me, the only way to be sure is to move the furniture around and live with it for a while.

We found a surround sound system that has a receiver and a VCR with it, and all for a price we want to pay. I hesitated at first, not wanting an “all-in-one” system, afraid of what would happen if one thing broke, but the cost of buying individual components changed my mind in a hurry. Right now things are a tight, and we are trying to watch our pennies but still make progress.

We bought some dishes in Deruta the other day, and then found some glasses we liked at Gran Casa. And believe it or not, Gran Casa is having a month long sale, and EVERYTHING is 15% off! January seems to be the month for sales in Italy, but in general, you don’t see things on sale like you do in the U.S. I am now hoping that I don’t have a problem when I go back to Gran Casa…I pick up the display box for my glasses, and am missing one….the one that is on display! Since the box has “expo” written on it, I am hoping that they will believe me and let me have my other glass!

We spent our first day back from the states doing laundry and putting stuff away. Art got hit hard by jet lag this time, and took a nap on Wednesday afternoon. We had made a quick trip to the Coop in Marsciano on Tuesday afternoon to get bread and milk, so we weren’t in dire need of anything. On Thursday we went to the IperCoop for groceries, stopped in MediaWorld to see if our replacement freezer door had arrived (it hadn’t) and then went to Ternana’s for dinner.

Pino told me that he had been checking his email every other day to see if we had written to him while we were in the states! He knows how little Italian I speak, and how bad it is when I do, so I’m not sure what he thought I was going to write to him, but I was still sorry I hadn’t send him at least a “hello” form the U.S. Who knew? While we were there, we noticed a sign on the door…”For Sale or Rent”….They’re selling our pizzeria! Where will we eat when we’re on our way home and it’s too late to cook dinner? We realize that for Pino and Rita, retirement is probably well deserved and long overdue, but what about Marco and Verushka? Don’t they have to earn a living too? Needless to say, this was the low point of our evening, and probably our month!