The Ikea instructions quite clearly promise that if Jonathan and I put this furniture together as a team, we will be happy and smiling. This is a goddamn lie.

Also, never in the entire history of human migration have two people gone so shambolically two hundred yards down the road. Yesterday, for example, we bought four salted caramel KitKats as a little treat for ourselves as a reward for working so hard. We immediately lost them somewhere in the house and now have no idea where they are. This is also true of our big mixing bowl, but somehow the salted caramel KitKat loss seems more tragic.

Dear everyone --

I'm starting an email mailing list in the lead-up to the release of Armadillo Massacre Number Three. There will be giveaways of books and merch, sneak peaks, videos, recipes, games, trivia contests with prizes, and whatever fun things occur to me in the dark hours of the night. 

If you would like to be on the list, just email me at kathygiuffre62@gmail.com and say "I'm in!" 

This will be fun! Love and kisses, Kathy

Things that I have found to be surprisingly moving while unpacking:

1. The soft feel of our old sheets,

2. How battered and worn and dusty everything is,

3. How it still feels, even after all these years, like Jonathan and I are kids just playing house and hoping that the grown-ups don't come home any time soon.

 

Renata is back for a short visit and we went with her and Alice and Celeste to visit Nonno at his house last Tuesday. He had a hospital bed in the living room and his niece Cristina there taking care of him. But yesterday he was moved to a Casa di Riposo in Lido di Camaiore where he can get professional nursing and physiotherapy. 

Valerio took him and got him all settled in, but half an hour after he left, Valerio's phone rang and it was Nonno saying, "There are only old people here!"

The physiotherapist says that Nonno is very motivated doing his exercises to try to get some mobility back in his legs. He wants to get back to his life and his friends at the pub. Jonathan and I are going to see him again tomorrow and taking Ugo with us.

We are in the final dregs of moving to the new house and may start sleeping there in a week or so. We still haven't found our drinking glasses or our duvet. I suspect we never will. But the boys' baby shoes made it and the Christmas tree ornaments and the drawing of a sunflower that Tris made when he was six and the easel my grandfather made for me when I was a little girl and he believed I would become an artist someday.

The wisteria vines out back all have big buds on them and the cherry tree is looking ready to burst into flower any day now. Jonathan saw a lizard yesterday -- the first so far this year. The fava beans are in season and we sit around in the pub shelling them all together. Summer is coming.

We are still in the process of moving, although this is so embarrassing to admit that whenever anyone asks me if we have finished yet, I say, "Almost!" I have been saying that for a week now.

Putting out the (increasingly copious) trash at the rustic farmhouse a couple of days ago, I saw a young man standing in the middle of the road scrolling his phone while a little white dog on a long leash snifted at Fabio and Luciana's wall. I spoke to the dog, naturally ("Hai trovato qualcosa di interessante?") and then to the young man ("Buona sera. Come si chiama il cane?") The young man looked very startled and said, "Oh! Errr! Ummm... I don't speak Italian." And so I said to him in English, "I asked what your dog is named." And we chatted together for a bit. He is visiting from London and his dog is named Whiskey -- meaning that both of the dogs whose names I know in Capriglia are named Whiskey. At the end of our chat, he complemented me and said that I speak excellent English. I don't want to brag, but this is absolutely true.

I turned to go back in and realized that our electronic security gate had closed behind me while I was talking to dogs in the street and I was now locked out of our property.

"Oh, shit," I said, demonstrating that my mastery of the English vernacular extends even to the most colloquial and profane. "I'm locked out." 

"Ah," said the young man. "You can probably climb over it." And with that, he and Whiskey took off. It's a tall fence and he could see as well as I could that he didn't want to get involved.

But I did manage to climb over it, even though it is much taller than my head and even though I am 63 years old. I tell you this because I am prouder of this achievement than I am even of fooling ungallant English sops into thinking that I am Italian.

But really, I am hardened now to these sorts of trials and tribulations by having faced down, just this week alone, both an American insurance company and also my dire mortal enemy -- the Italian Post Office.

The battle with the Post Office involved me spending two entire days (10 hours each) sitting on the belfry house terrace overlooking our mailbox from a hidden position and then suddenly pouncing out on the mailman, taking him by surprise just as he was planning to leave a notice saying that he couldn't make the delivery because no one was at home. I mean, he still sent an email notification later saying that, but at least now he can't look me directly in the eye. And I did get the delivery the next day.

So I won that one. The American insurance company, tragically, is still up in the air. They are so evil, the insurance companies, that -- on the FIFTH international long-distance telephone call -- I did something that I have never done before in my life: I cursed at a service worker. The curse I used was "bullshit."

I'm not saying that I have never cussed anyone out before, but I think (as best I can remember) that that sort of thing has always before been reserved for boyfriends. (As one of my colleagues at Colorado College once said, apropos of a faculty meeting that went especially awry, "'Motherfucker' can actually be a term of endearment.")

So this morning, I went to have blood tests ordered by my doctor, who is upping the strength of my blood pressure medication. I am not joking.

But the big news these days is that Daniele is a finalist in the Tordelli D'oro Competition. Tordelli are a filled pasta, sort of like ravioli, a delicacy of this region, that Daniele serves with a zippy and aromatic meat sauce. He goes next week and all of the finalists will make tordelli for the judges at a public event in Bologna. We would go and cheer him on, but tickets are 60 euros each and it is a school day for Jonathan. But Daniele says if he wins, we will all eat free tordelli that night. "Aw, c'mon," Manuela says to him, "even if you don't win, we will all eat free tordelli that night!"