I did it

Lily and I took a walk down to see the Gulf. I somehow stubbed my toe and pulled off the nail about half way, ouch. We came across a man who was fishing. He spoke in the exact accent that the guy on King of the Hill, who you cannot understand, uses. It cracked me up. I had no idea what he said. Instead of saying, what? I asked him if he had seen seen the alligator. He said he hadn't seen her today, but that he say her earlier in the week. Then he started going off in that accent I cannot understand. I just kept walking. I wonder what he said? He wasn't cute like the guy on King of the Hill, he was old and had a dirty shirt, with his big belly sticking out. I think he was the first back water good ole boy I have met since moving to Mississippi, he seemed nice.

Pompeii

In January 2002, shortly after my first miscariage, Jeff decided what we really needed was a trip. He picked Pompei as our destination. We rode the trains from where we lived in Pordenone to Pomepei. Picture northeast corner of Italy to mid to lower west coast of Italy. This train trip took us through Rome, the only time in my two years living in Italy that I saw Rome, was out the train window. I guess our time in Italy was spent taking the road less traveled. We kept putting off Rome and then we were gone.

Pompeii was completely destroyed in the year 79, by a volcanic erruption of the nearby Mount Vesuvius. The entire city of Pompeii has been escavated and you can go there and see an entire Roman city. There is so much detail. It is not a couple of buildings but blocks and blocks of buildings, an entire city. There is so much detail, the paintings on the walls inside the homes and shops. The address outside each house along the street. Sidewalks, billboards, two arenas, fountains, so much detail. We were the only people there that day, the whole city to explore on our own. It was amazing. The hotel we stayed at was phenominal. We didn't have the opportunity to stay in hotels very often during our time in Europe. We lived there. When we did stay in hotels it was always on a budget, and our rooms were always so small you would not believe it. In Pompeii our hotel was lovely. Our room was good sized. We even had a balcony.

We hoped on the train from Pompeii and explored a bit of the northern portion of the Almafi Coast. We had a lovely dinner and bought some lovely jewlery. I think that I had the best lasagne of my life on this trip. As luck would have it I was able to find photos of this adventure. Enjoy.

Are we there yet?

Does anyone have any ideas for a blog post? This is excruciating. How many days left in November? Why do I always wait until the last moment?

One of the things I love most about being a stay at home mom is the fact that I am never in a hurry or running late. I like to live my life at my own pace. It is peaceful. Someone taught Lily how to tell time. She is driving me crazy.

Every day we have the same tentative schedule, we do things in the same order and most likely at about the same time. I don't really look at the clock so who knows. I wont bore you with the details of our mundane schedule today. At breakfast Lily has started asking me what time are we going to do this, that and the other. I tried to tell her, whenever. She did not accept that answer. I tried making up approximate times. She is now holding me to those arbitrary times. All day long she is like the rabbit with the watch, telling me we are late, we are late. I am going to have to read her Alice in Wonderland.

I am being hustled out the door by a four year old so that we are not late for the playground. Today was a lovely day at the playground too, a short sleeved shirt day, with blue skies. I think Lily gets the majority of her personality from her dad.

On the other hand... We were at the grocery store later and Lily was being her normal incredibly happy and social self. Saying hello to all the people and to all the isle numbers, the apples, etc. She has a bounce in her step that make it seem as if her feet don't even touch the ground. She is always talking, with so much happiness and love for life that people tend to stop what they are doing and take notice. I am used to the child and I don't know that I particularly notice her love of life every moment. Occasionally someone will say something, like is she always that happy and it reminds me of just how lovely it is to be with her all day. After that reminder I spend the rest of the day marveling in how happy and fun she really is.

Even if she is reminding me that I have to hurry because we are eating lunch in exactly one minute, not when we are hungry, or when we happen to think about it, we must eat lunch at exactly twelve zero zero.

Assisi

Another of our day trips while living in Italy was to Assisi, which is also located in the Umbria region. Assisi is the birth place of St. Francis. We went to Assisi on a tour bus instead of driving there ourselves. We discovered on this trip that we preferred to travel with our own car. Tours are nice, you get to sleep instead of drive and you get a guided tour. Jeff and Mandy do not like the guided tours, too much talking, and I don't like to ride on buses so much.

We arrived in Assisi on a very cold, rainy day with extremely cold and strong winds. The town of Assisi is full of hills, so imagine us walking up steep hills in the rain with 100 mile per hour wind blowing toward us. This is how I remember Assisi. Whenever we got to a location of interest and took shelter inside. We got to see the church that St. Francis attended as a child. We got to sit in the pew and look at the cross he was looking at when God spoke to him.

My favorite part of the day was at the church built after his death a monument built to him. Inside this enormous cathedral was the small home that he lived in during his adult years. St. Francis was born into a wealthy family and grew up as a playboy of sorts. He enjoyed spending money and having fun. When he was fighting in the army and then held prisoner for over a year he contracted a fever and almost died. During this time of extreme duress he found a deeper meaning to life. He began a journey of discovery and eventually became a saint. During this journey of discovery, at one point he was feeling that he wasn't close enough to God, or that his spirituality wasn't enough and he decided that perhaps if he were to go outside and roll around naked in the brambles, that the pain and duress would help him to journey even closer to God. When he began to roll in the brambles just outside his house they were miraculously changed from brambles to roses, but roses have thorns and would hurt just as much, not these roses, these roses were thornless roses. He found himself rolling around in thornless rose bushes.

Inside this cathedral made as a monument to St. Francis is his old home, a tiny brick house no bigger than a closet. But, also there is a garden, a garden filled with those thornless roses. Which have been carefully and lovingly tended for over a century by the people of Assisi. Within this Cathedral, you go down a hall and you look through a window, and through that window you can see the rose garden. You cannot go into that garden or touch those roses but even on a cold and blustery winter day there were a few blossoms on the very truly thornless rose bushes. I felt an enormous spiritual connection to St. Francis that day. I believed the miracle of the rose bushes. I don't normally believe in the supernatural aspects of religion all that much. If I hadn't been in that church I would have thought of that story as a fairy tale like that of Cinderella, but having been there I have to tell you it felt very real to me that day. I am most certain that a miracle happened, the miraculous thornless roses.

I like to think of God in this way, I take that thought of a loving God who would not want his child to suffer, I take that with me everyday. I don't believe that people need to suffer to learn or to grow.

All quilted out

I have spent the last few days doing almost nothing but quilting. Trying to complete my very first quilt. It has been a long road. I have found that I am not very good at measuring, not very good at cutting, not very good at sewing a straight line...All that and it was still going pretty good. But, today I found out that you should actually read all the directions and not just assume you know the rest. So I am not very good at following directions. I made a huge mistake and spent the rest of the day trying to fix it. I am a little disappointed but the end result is ok. I still have a bit of fixing to do tomorrow and then maybe I will take a picture or two.

Lily helped me with the whole thing. It is a new quilt for her because she has outgrown her baby quilt. She loves it tremendously, I guess that is all that matters. I really learned a lot and I can now say that I can thread the machine, fill the bobbin and sew a very straight line.

In other news Trent Lott resigned but I cannot figure out why. He is actually from a town just down the road from where I am currently living. He is also responsible for doing a great deal of good for this community after Katrina. I always say that we all have more in common than we imagine.

The Christmas Tree

We still haven't gotten the lights outside put up, I guess the turkey still has us in a fog. It is almost gone, back to having to cook I guess.

We own a fake white Christmas tree. You can go here and watch a video I made last Christmas of Lily singing her ABC's next to our Christmas tree. Ok, you only see a little bit of the tree, but isn't Lily cute? We originally bought this tree because I am allergic to the real thing. Jeff went to the store and bought the cheapest tree he saw, he didn't notice that it was white or that it was only about 3 feet tall. The picture on the box was of a green really tall tree.

We had the little white tree for many years. The first few years we covered her in Christmas lights that had a green wire, we finally found a white strand of lights last year and our tree looked almost respectable. The thing about fake trees is that through all the moves and all the time spent in boxes the tree starts to look pretty bad. This year when we took it out of the box it was not only all scrunched up and pathetic but it had turned brownish. I don't know if it was the water damage from the move or from the high heat and humidity of our garage this summer, but our little white tree was retired this year.

Instead of getting another fake tree, I let Jeff get a real one. He was so excited. So here I am typing to you sitting next to my enormous real Christmas tree, anyone have any Clariton?

Now we couldn't very well put our white strand of lights around our green tree. We decided instead to take the green strand of lights that we had bought to put up around the house, around the tree instead. Except Jeff didn't think that was such a great idea, because the strands are terrible long and it was difficult to get around the tree. I was also complaining that Jeff had put the tree too close to the wall making it even more difficult to get the lights up. Chad sat back and took intermittent pictures of our tree trimming "discussions". I have a feeling after spending time with us Chad will never get married.

Mandy had a hard day at work and did not want to participate in the tree picking or tree trimming. Or even the going out to Chinese food for dinner. Lily helped decorate the tree by throwing ornaments into a hole between the branches. Which I did not notice for some time. Who knows how many of our ornaments were tossed into Lily's black hole. Now we just have to do the outside of the house and we will be set.

A perfect day

While I should be doing homework, we are sitting around watching the Virginia vs. Virginia Tech game. Go Virginia. My belly is full of leftovers. Don't have to cook. Another perfect day.

Nice Matters

Dixie was kind enough to give me the Nice Matters Award that I would like to pass on to some of my blogging buddies. Of course you are all very nice!

Lynn, one of the nicest people I have never met, always kind on her blog and on others, always finds something nice to say. I hope I can be more like Lynn someday.

Shelia,is a great combinations of nice and smart. Always giving good advice and thoughtful blog posts and comments.

Lorelei, OK so she is a bit of a Yankee, but still sweet underneath it all. I bet if I ever needed anything Lorelei would be there, stand by your friends thick and thin kind of girl. And it is nice to have someone who always makes you laugh and tells it like it is.

Angel, Can't ever have a list without Angel. Not only are you nice but you are fun. Where is the Moscato.

Kimberly, I know you are out of town and wont even see this, still I would feel bad not putting your name down.

Laura Capello, We have been blogging buddies forever now. Always nice to get a chance to sit with the popular kids.

Mrs. Grumpy, I know that nice is not how you are currently feeling about yourself, but that is how I see you. Sending good thoughts.

Everyone else who takes the time to stop by and read my blog, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your friendship and comments. I almost forgot to post today and just got this in by the skin of my teeth. Hopefully I will tag those I left out on the next one that rolls through. I still have a ton of these to pass out. I am slow, sorry.

Jumping the Fence

Our dinner went well. I cooked the whole thing on my own, with a lot of help from Wal-Mart. Nothing was perfect, I actually forgot to put the mashed potatoes and stuffing on the table until we were done. I made everyone sit back down and eat some. Most years my turkey gets done a couple of hours past the time I estimate, this year it was a couple of hours earlier. Is that Karma? Otherwise it was a perfect meal. Everything tasted great and we were all happy and thankful. The only thing Lily will eat today is carrots, raw sliced carrots. The rest of the food she wont even taste.

We played football in the yard. It was a crisp fall day. We are not terribly athletic and Lily was not having any fun. She said, "Excuse Me Everybody, I want to play hide and seek". So we did. We were hiding in our neighbors yards, crouched behind garbage cans, jumping fences, laughing our butts off. I am surprised we didn't get shot.

After dinner, I took a lovely nap. Then we had the outdoor games, dessert, and then... We went to the Big Lots sale and got our Christmas decorations. We haven't had the opportunity to decorate outside of the house before so we stocked up. It was so much fun. We saw many of the Griswald type decorated houses on our way home. I am excited to be in the competition. Tomorrow we are hitting the sales bright and early. We have marked down all the stores we have to hit and what we are getting at each store. This is my first holiday season in America is many years and I am so excited.

Don't forget to check out, Ugly Christmas Lights.

happy Thanksgiving

I hope y'all have a lovely turkey day.

Turn that frown upside down

This post is brought to you today by the word SMILE, lol-I crack myself up-too much Sesame Street I suppose...

We did eventually make it over to Pisa. It was a bit of a drive from our home in Pordenone. If memory serves it was a 5 or 6 hour drive? We left our house at 0'dark early and arrived at around 10AM. We were of course hungry, but there is no food served in Italy until 12:30PM therefore we stopped at Camp Darby, an Army Post, and grabbed a quick bite at the Burger King.

When we arrived at Pisa I was very disappointed. The whole thing is a courtyard with the tower and a church and I think there is another building? We did not have a reservation to climb to the top of the tower and it was very expensive if memory serves. For some reason we didn't climb to the top. We walked around, went in all the buildings and an hour later we were looking at each other like, what now?

I had noticed on our way to Pisa that we had driven past the city of Vinci. I looked it up in my travel book and it was the Vinci - as in Leonardo di Vinci (Leonardo from Vinci). It was on our way home, if you think getting off the main road and driving on tiny back streets for a hundred miles is on the way. (that is a really rough and most likely exaggerated estimate). Mandy and I were able to convince Jeff to take the detour. We arrived in Vinci at about 5PM. By this time we had been on the road for a very long time, Jeff was not in the mood to do a lot of museums. I love museums and Vinci has tons of museums all about our dear Leonardo. Jeff made me pick one.

I picked the closest museum and we entered. It was like a house the had been turned into a museum. There was an entry way and then you traveled from room to room. This was the most wonderful and fabulous museum in the entire world. You really have to go. Leonardo kept a sketch pad of ideas. He would think of an invention and then draw out a sketch, he would include dimensions and mechanical jargon. Most of these inventions never made it past his sketch pad. The people of Vinci had taken these sketches and built the actual item from the sketch. The actual sketches are housed in Paris, but copies of the sketch are framed on the wall next to an actual rendering of the object. They also show the year Leonardo made the sketch and then the year that object was actually invented. You see he invented all kinds of things hundreds of years before those things were invented by someone else. I always wonder if the second person who saw his sketches or if it was a coincidence? Some of these items include the bicycle, the helicopter, the machine gun, the hand glider, that is all that comes to my mind. It was so much fun to see all these things.

We also bought a print of one of Leonardo's sketches for only a couple of dollars. It says on the bottom of the sketch that it was printed in Vinci, Italy. So cool. I had it framed and it is one of my most treasured pieces.

By this time we were very hungry, it was around 6PM no restaurants serve food at 6PM in Italy. So we stopped and ate dinner on the way home at a rest stop along the Autostrata, an Auto Grill. It was pretty good.

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I have been tagged for a ton of Memes and I have been so very bad at keeping up. So sorry, I feel like an ingrate. I am going to try and put a meme at the bottom of every post until I catch back up.

This first one is an award given to me by the Nap Warden. This is the makes me smile award. Thank you very much. Be sure to check out her blog, Chronicles of a Stay at Home Mom. Her blog is smart, funny and very upbeat. I am passing this award along to some of my blogging buddies who have left comments that made me smile this week.


meno, I loved your yellow lab comment.
mamadaisy, I loved that you felt about the Colosseum the same way I felt about some of the places I have been-feeling history.
marion, sitting on the stones that told the stories of the ages, I love that you put into words what I was thinking.
luckzmom, I too have been moved to tears by the history of a place, glad to have a kindered spirit.
lorelei, you totally made me smile with your comment about a good meal, "The only thing I can make is reservations."

Walking

Jeff and I are doing a walk your way to fitness through the holidays thing with the base. We got pedometers and we have to keep track of our daily steps until Jan. 1st. Jeff and I are competing with one another to see who does the most steps between now and the end of the contest. We haven't decided what the winner will get. So far he is beating me, big surprise. We did go for an evening walk together. I am amazed to see how sedentary I really am. Hopefully I can kick it up a notch. Any ideas what I should ask for when I win?