Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is Saturday.  We have been in Noto for about a week now.  What a week it has been.  We are feeling kind of worn out.

My day turned out to be one interruption after another.  We started off needing to take a hike down the hill to go to the big grocery store down there.  That is about 2.2 kilometers which is not very much if the ground is flat.  But it is a bit of a hill here and on the way up the hill I have to carry all of the groceries so it is hot, sweaty and slow going.

We were only home for an hour or two before we had someone that we did not know stop by the house to inform us of the Noto cultural society (or the swarm as they call themselves) meeting this evening in town.  Of course the person who came by only spoke Italian which made the entire thing so much more challenging.

She was probably at the house for most of an hour, but we eventually got things figured out that we were to go to this meeting across town about two hours later, take the kids, pay twenty Euros… meet people or something.  All very complicated and surprising.

So our day ended up being absolutely nothing like we had expected it to be.  Dominica was in the middle of cooking dinner when the woman arrived, too.

So it was a scramble to get everyone showered, bathed, dressed, prepped and whatever and out the door to walk across town and try to find this place.  This is not what we pictured ourselves spending our evening doing.

We actually did pretty well finding the place.  You had to enter an ancient building and poke around a bit and fit a door going to a stairway and go up to what is basically an apartment upstairs.  We were actually decently early so took the kids for a walk down to city hall to kill twenty minutes before going back to be on time.

It turned out to be a very interesting evening.  There were only a few people that spoke English, mostly ex-pats from the UK and Scotland.  There were three kids there and after a bit our girls managed to break the ice and the five of them had a great time playing for hours.  They ran around the whole place like maniacs and did not want to leave.

There was a small dinner there and we visited with people and learned about town, although mostly what people want to talk about is American politics, unfortunately.  No escaping it here.

We stayed out until late then walked back home.  Definitely a very interesting and educational evening.  Well outside of our comfort zone.

Friday in Sicily.  Nice day today with the windows open again.  Sun is out.

I did some back end website work tonight.  Dominica is going to give it a try and see how she will do at doing some web design work.  She has talked about doing this for a long time but it has never come to fruition.  It takes time to get past the initial barrier of figuring out the platform, figuring out the theme(s), getting the hang of the latest styles and trends and you really need a bit of time to just concentrate on that.

I put in a normal day then spent the evening with the girls in the living room working on our long standing Full House marathon and playing Minecraft on the Apple iPads with each other while the show is on.

Thursday.  The weather is nice enough today that I opted to open the windows around the house and get fresh air in.  It’s chilly, but not bad.  About fifteen degrees and the sun is out.

Very busy day of emailing, writing, posting and all of the usual.  Plus some new scrambles caused by yesterday’s news.

This evening we finally got (I guess “finally” is a strong word, we have only been here three days) got the Amazon Fire Stick set up in the living room and got everything working so that we can use Netflix.  Like back in Romania, Full House is available for us here.  The girls have been asking to be able to watch this for more than six months now.  They love this show.

So we picked up where we left off with Full House back in Romania in June and are over halfway through the series now.  Making our way towards the end so that we can start watching Fuller House all over again.

We stayed up quite late watching Full House and snuggling on the couch.  Dominica has a recliner sort of thing in the living room that she uses and the girls pile onto the one couch with me.  The television that comes with the rental house is tiny and only 720p but it works okay.  We will be getting our projector hooked up at some point, although we have no idea when or where we are going to put it.  We’ve been contemplating it and walking around the house trying to figure out where it could work and there are several places that are almost great and none that are really good.

We had a bidet mishap this evening that literally had the water pressure turn on so high that it blew Ciana’s pants right off and shot water all over the room.  That’s one bidet that is going to need some careful management.

The girls are anxious to be video gaming again.

Wednesday and our second full day on Sicily.  This morning we were up a bit earlier and we went to the local produce market and picked up a small number of supplies to get us through another few days.  Liesl has discovered yellow delicious apples and cannot get enough of them.  She goes on and on about how much she loves these apples.  They taste exactly like the yellow delicious apples from New York, but she has never wanted to try a yellow apple before until they were the only ones available and now she realizes that they are the best apples that there have ever been and she is eating them with reckless abandon.  Not only does she eat one after another, she eats them right to the core with the seeds falling out.  There is nothing left but a stem!  Yellow delicious have always been my favourites, so I guess that she gets that taste from me.

I did a lot of writing and posting today, was at it all day.  Loving that this house has an office for me to work from.  Most places that we rent do not and that makes it very hard to get anything done.  Either there is nowhere comfortable to sit or I’m stuck in the middle of where the girls need to do school or whatever.

This afternoon I got some work related news that might turn out to be good but for the moment has us rapidly trying to figure out our work, living, finances, travel and overall situation.  Lots of things are suddenly up in the air that were not before so our time in Sicily suddenly became rather hectic.

Dominica made pasta for dinner.  I have very little free time today as I am trying to catch up from all of the travel time and busyness and our week off in Rome.

Had some wine and worked until late in the night.

Tuesday, our first full day on Sicily in the little hill top city of Noto. I was up at eight. Of course, there was no Internet so there was not very much to do. I set some things up and did a little posting from my phone, but that was about all that I could do. It was rather stressful because no one was responding to us and we have never had working Internet here so we did not know how bad this was likely to be. You expect that when you arrive at a new place that the Internet will be on, tested and working for you at least upon arrival. Hiccups happen, a lot, but they should be working when you get there! They have had unlimited time to make sure that that part was working.

We were very pleased when the Internet came on between ten and eleven this morning. We got everyone online and started doing some catching up. Now we can really start to get settled. And we know that we do not have to find a new house right away! That would be a major problem, of course.

Around noon I finally had a chance to set out on a hike around the city. We need supplies and I have to figure out where to get them. I had been out for a walk last night and came across nothing at all, so that was not promising.

I walked all over town, doing a lot of kilometres. I got down to Corse Vittorio, the main street in the city, and made it the entire length of the city! At least of the old town. On the way I found the big cathedral that is the main attraction in the city. And the amazing baroque city hall. And next to that was a large tourist information centre, although they were pretty much just into talking to one another and did not seem very interested in the fact that a family had just moved in for three months. They handed me a paper map and seemed to feel that their entire, large, three person office was only there to hand out a paper map. Odd. I did ask, though, and they showed me some stuff in town and where some mini-markets were.

I set off on a very long walk which got me to the edge of town just fifteen minutes after the only market on that side of town had closed and would not open again for two more hours. I took a picture of their open times, told Dominica and set off to walk back home. That really sucked.

I got quite the walk in, though, and got home and spent a few hours doing work in the new upstairs office. This is my first chance to start to actually catch up in weeks. I need the quiet, alone time of the office.

In the late afternoon, we went to the market after it had opened and did our first real grocery shopping. We got as much as we could carry, maybe a little more, and hoofed it back to the house. Now we have ingredients and can cook. And now we have bottled water so we can drink since we can’t waste the water in the house because we need that for toilets and showers and stuff. Having so little water is a major issue.

That was an exhausting walk, and I had done it twice (plus more.) I was super tired. The stairs up to my office are a flight and a half of very narrow, very stone stairs that wear you out quite quickly, too. I am getting a workout.

Dominica made pasta for dinner, what else would we have for our first homemade meal on Sicily?

We did discover that there is a market right around the corner from us, but that it is only open in the mornings, so we will check that out tomorrow if we can. There is a bakery near there as well. Hopefully that means simple, fresh, daily bread is available.

The evening was spent posting, writing and getting the house in order. Tonight we hooked up the Amazon FireTV in the living room and got Full House up and running so we started watching that as we only get to watch it when we are not in the United States and the girls love the show and have been waiting to watch it again since, we think, Romania. A long time, no matter what.