Jonathan read an article online touting the health-giving wonders of intermittent fasting. It was on the internet, so it must be true. On Mondays and Thursdays, we are only allowed to eat a quarter of our usual calories. Since our usual calories lately have included consuming entire bags of mini Snickers bars (thus the need for drastic action like fasting), you would think that eating only a quarter of them would be a cinch. But (in the spirit of taking ourselves firmly in hand) we are interpreting this as having one scrambled egg for lunch and a very small plain green salad for dinner. The rest of the week, you can eat normally (as long as your "normal" doesn't include entire bags of mini candy bars -- see above.) They say the first few times you do this are the worst and then it gets easier. All I have to say to that is, dear sweet Mary Mother of God, I certainly hope so.
So last night (a non-fasting night) we got very excited about trying out our lovely salt-cured lemons for the first time. We found a good sounding recipe on the internet (where, you will recall, everything you read is true) for salmon with salt-cured lemon, parsley, and olive pesto. It smelled great!
It turned out that it smelled great because you can't smell salt. You can taste it, though. In fact, salt was ALL we could taste. So. Much. Salt. It was like we had made Dead Sea sauce. We scraped the pesto off the fish as best we could and tried to eat the remaining salmon because when you are going to be fasting the next day, you do not throw out your dinner -- no matter what. Last night's Festival of Salt is a testament to that.
We are also reluctant to waste any food (although we may make an exception for the salt-cured lemons) because we are feeling rather poor lately. We got our first tax bill from the Italian government and it was slightly more than my entire take home pay for all of last year. Our friends in America keep saying that this must be a mistake, but it is not. It is this year's taxes, the advance payment for next year, and the Italian wealth tax to punish us for having squirrelled away all those American 401K nuts for the American winter of our old age. We should have just spent it all on hookers and blow when we had the chance.
But this is the price we pay now for living the life of grasshoppers who sing all summer. The good news is that our tax dollars support things like maintaining the terrifying-but-at-least-very-well-maintained vertiginous road up to our little mountainside haven, the pub where we eat and drink so cheaply (it is somewhat tax-supported because it is technically a social club for workers and pensioners), and the free national health care that we receive.
And we are certainly getting our money's worth with that. Jonathan went to the physiotherapist last week for his back. They massaged him and stretched him. It is sometimes hard for us to completely understand all of the unfamiliar medical terminology in Italian, but it seems that the national medical establishment has determined that Jonathan's problem is that he is both too tightly wound and too short. I said that I could have told him that. He has another appointment tomorrow. When this is all over, I expect he will look like Mike Teevee at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
With Jonathan and I both less mobile because of our injuries, it takes us a long time to get the basic housework done. We hobble down to hang out our laundry in the back. We hobble from the car into the veg store and then hobble back to the car with our haul. (Fortunately, the veg store is so tiny that we can reach almost everything in it with just a few steps.) We hobble to the kitchen with our dirty dishes after meals. (Again though, fortunately, there aren't very many of them on two days each week.) Last night I was hobbling back to the house after putting our trash out at the street for pick-up this morning, when some animal very distinctly growled at me from inside the roof of the cantina as I went by. Given the way things have been going lately, this is probably no more than I should have expected. In any case, my rate of ambulatory speed suddenly increased quite dramatically. It was a miracle.
And, to complete the small disasters of the week, we are of course both angry and morose about the political situation in the US. But, to be fair, that one is not our fault.
