Sheep Guarding Llama

Thursday.  We are nearly done in Noto so I took the chance to do a long walk and I managed to explore a lot.  I went way outside of town to the west, up past the hospital and up the hill on the main road.  I even saw our fruit guy driving his little truck to the next town.  I did eight and a half kilometers.  Not too bad, and with a lot of elevation changes.

Leftover pizza for lunch.  This is it, just scavaging whatever is in the house.  Tonight is our last meal in Noto.

The house was nearly all packed up this evening.  Hard to believe that it is really time to go.  No more Noto.  We really like Sicily, but it is pretty easy to say that this is the least disappointed that I have been to be leaving a place.  Too many problems, too much stress here.  This has been the roughest of all of the countries that we have lived in thus far.

By later in the evening the house was out of food but the girls were still hungry.  So we decided to take one last walk and get more gelato as a final treat.  Otherwise they would just be hungry.  Why not.

I did a webinar this evening with Starwinds.  After that Dominica and I started rewatching How I Met Your Mother.

Was busily attempting to upload Flickr pictures before going to bed.  Even simple things like uploading photos, not vidoes just normal pictures, is a huge problem here and can take days to get a handful uploaded.  Our Internet is a complete joke even when it works, and that’s not very often.  The struggles of trying to upload stuff never end because we never get to a point of having the things uploaded that need to be uploaded.  There has been a backlog continuously for months.  This is all just so frustrating.   But it is nearly over.  Only hours left to go.

This is it.  We are all done.  Our time in Noto is over.  Off to bed and we have to be up early tomorrow to get underway as we move to Ukraine!

The rain was clearly coming today so I went out for a morning walk to do some exploring of the area before the rain hit.  It was a nice day for a walk.  The Internet was down today, so no means of me working.

Once the rain stopped, since there was no ability to work with the Internet down (seriously, I am so ready to be done with Noto) I took the girls out for a walk to go down and get our last gelato in town.  This is it, our  last gelato!

Read bedtime stories and got the kids off to bed.

Tuesday.  The clock is running down for Italy.  Just a few more days.  We leave this week for Kiev.

Today we did a bit of work around planning for Dominica’s new business doing websites.  Her business website business is Presidio Productions.  She is working on building up a portfolio before getting too public with it.  I’ve been thinking that websites are a perfect business for her for over a decade now.  But convincing her of that takes a long time.

In a similar vein, I continued working on the design and build of my high performance web hosting system.  That is coming along nicely.

We had pasta for lunch and dinner today.  We are working hard to get through all of our food in the pantry before we leave.  Over the years, we have gotten pretty good at that.  We used to leave so much behind.  Now we can plan it pretty well.  That makes traveling a lot cheaper.

Packing started tonight.  No more buying food and just riding out the leftovers is the first sign that we are about to relocate.  Then the packing starts.  Just a little bit, but the first items are being gathered up and put into suitcases to prepare for the move.

Monday.  This is it, just a few days left in Italy.  It feels so much like we just got here.  We got some flight information today and it looks like we are flying out at noon from the airport in Catania to go up to Munich and then in the evening from Munich to Kiev where we will be, with the current plans, for a month.  We are thinking that we will head to Catania, maybe on Friday morning on the bus.  The train is way too far to go without a car.  The bus I can do taking the luggage down in a few trips with Dominica waiting down at the bus stop with the girls for me to finish bringing it all down.  If we go on Friday morning, we can take Friday during the day to maybe see a little of Catania while we are in the area.  It would be sad to miss it.

That means that there are only three days left after today for everything to be packed up and ready to go from our Noto home here on Vico Nea 2.  That is not much time at all to be ready to relocate.  This, like most of our major moves, sneaked up on us.

Dominica made breakfast this morning.  Overall it was a quiet day.  Lots of normal work, of course.

This evening we had spaghetti at the house.  No money for going out to the expensive restaurants here in Noto.  Dominica really missed out, I at least got to go out once or twice when Ryan was here.  Dominica really does not enjoy going to restaurants much, though, so she is only so upset that she missed out on that as she really enjoys staying home a lot.

While eating dinner we watched Get Him to the Greek which was not very good, but was not awful.

We tried watching Scott Pilgrim vs. The World which neither of us have ever seen.  What a horrible movie.  We made it maybe a third of the way in and it was just garbage.  One of the rare movies that we actually shut off and stop watching.  Not worth it, at all.

We then watched The Man Who Knew Too Little with Bill Murry.  Such a good, classic movie and Dominica had never seen it.

Sunday.  Most likely our final Monday in Italy.  This is our last week.  Our visas are almost expired and we have plans to be in Kiev, Ukraine shortly.  That is our next destination and we are very excited to have a new country and, to some degree, a new region under our belts.  Italy has been exhausting, we are ready for the comforts of eastern Europe.

I did some testing with the upcoming FreePBX 14 first thing this morning.  A storm rolled in and it was thunder and rain all morning.  A very quiet day on both MangoLassi and Spiceworks.

The kids took over my office to play video games today.  I moved down to the living room so that I could work while Dominica was making our finalized travel arrangements.  Nothing like trying to get things worked out just five days before we have to move internationally.  We’ve done this so much, it doesn’t even seem odd to be doing this any more.

While we were in the living room together, we took the opportunity to put on some movies to watch.  We watched Rumor Has It, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, No Reservations, The Wedding Ringer, and Down Periscope.

I did a bit of web site maintanance work this afternoon before taking the kids down to the park to go to the playground.  On the way home from the park, we stopped to get pizza and discovered that they have vegetarian arancini available tonight at our local corner pizza place.  What an awesome find!

I wish that we had found a place to get arancini in Noto prior to tonight.  I would eat this regularly.  So delicious if you know how to order it.