Sheep Guarding Llama

Medifast Status: Day 126, Down ~53lbs

The temperatures have really broken now.  Dominica got up early this morning and went out for her run.  She is really dedicated to her C25K program.  I’m impressed.

I slept in a bit with a very snuggly Boston Terrier and then, when I got up, I headed outside with the girls to relax in the fresh air.  It was actually quite a bit colder than I had anticipated and I actually had to come back inside to get a fleece jacket to wear in order to keep warm.  A fleece and warm coffee out on the patio.  You would not have thought it possible just two days ago.

I continued to read Lonely Planet’s immense tome on Italy as long as the battery on my Kindle lasted today.  Dominica finished reading her book on traveling in Europe with kids, read some of Lonely Planet’s guide to Switzerland and bought a Kindle book on Florence and Tuscany from Rick Steves.  Our Kindles are going to be absolutely loaded with European travel information by the time that we get there in May.  We are going to have every inch of our trip memorized at the rate that we are going.  That or we might not have any idea where we are going at all.

After my Kindle died I read a little bit more in one of our paper-copy European guide books and then we watched Under the Tuscan Sun via Amazon’s VOD service as it was the best Italian film that we could find.  Netflix does not appear to have films like Roman Holiday or the classic La Dolce Vita.  So we had to improvise.  Overall we weren’t too impressed and when towards the end of the film the combination of Amazon’s service and PlayOn stopped working we just gave up and decided it was not worth the effort to complete the film.

I’m feeling very worn out today.  The excitement of last night and this morning is a little bit overwhelming and we are now stuck waiting to get the paperwork for the consulate filled out and to get into contact with them, hopefully tomorrow.  Until then we want to start considering the possibilities but doing so could do nothing more than get our hopes up.  We are stuck in that horrible state of not knowing and not being able to make plans.  My regular readers will appreciate how stressed that can make me.  I’m good with change but I like to be able to plan, too.

Going through six months or a year of tracking down all of the necessary paperwork for Dominica and the girls will be fine as long as the consulate has told us that we are expected to be successful at the end of the process.  Putting in the work is fine.  Putting in the effort not knowing if it will turn out or not is very stressful.

Dominica is busy working on tracking down language learning resources.  We are going to attempt to learn at least one foreign language before we go to Europe.  Originally the plan was that I was going to focus on German and Dominica was likely going to focus on French.  Given the current situation we are seriously considering changing those plans and learning Italian.

We watched a little more of Star Trek: Voyager tonight and then went to watch House Hunters International (watching shows on Italy, of course) when Andy called me back after I had been trying to reach him yesterday.  He and I ended up talking for about five hours from eight in the evening until one in the morning.

Medifast Status: Day 125, Down ~53lbs

Dominica got up this morning, walked outside and immediately declared that we were going to all go out onto the back patio and enjoy the weather.  The heat wave that we have been living under for two months has finally broken and it is actually below one hundred degrees today.  Amazing.

We spent all morning sitting out on the patio.  It was so awesome to have fresh air again.  This is the first time that it has been cool enough to spend any time outside since we purchased our outdoor furniture.  We took our Kindles out and Luciana thought that it was great getting to sit on the couch outside in her Bumbo next to Dominica and Liesl had a great time playing.  She likes being outside in general.

We read for hours.  It has been forever since we did anything like this.  We really are fresh air, outdoors kind of people but the last two months’ heat has just been so oppressive.

Every so often I would run into the house to look something up online.  We are doing tons and tons of research on what we are going to want to do while in Europe next year.

I was doing some research on immigration laws and long term stays in Italy when I stumbled across the doctrine of jure sanguinis or “the right of blood” by which any Italian descended from another Italian is an Italian.  Living in the United States where we use lus soli where we determine nationality by the location, not the heritage, of the individual.  To us, as Americans, we care about where you were, not who you are.  This demonstrates our general xenophobic tendencies as a nation.  Americans often remark about how American customs officially treat you with contempt for having left the county and daring to return.  Everyone says what they are thinking: “If you don’t want to be in American, why did you come back.”

Other countries don’t necessarily see the world in those terms.  It is perfectly acceptable and accepted for an Italian, apparently, to come and go from their home country.  They are Italian by the nature of being of the race of Italians and being away from Italian soil at the time of their birth in no way detracts from that.

So in learning about this and assuming that Dominica was unaware of it, I asked her about the naturalization process that her Italian family would have gone through coming to the United States.  She wasn’t sure but when I started explaining how the jure sanguinis worked she started to wonder if it wasn’t possible that she might qualify under that.  So the research began.

We called Dominica’s parents and got what information they had.  And we joined Ancestry online and did some research.  Pretty quickly we were able to find original ship records that gave us information about her great grandfather arriving at Ellis Island from Sicily.  Then we tracked down the 1930s census records and found her family listed there, still living in Frankfort, in 1930.  On that paperwork we could see her five year old grandfather listed and her great grandparents listed as non-English speaking aliens.  That’s what we needed.  The overlap of citizenship needed to demonstrate jur sanguinis.  We will need a lot more paperwork by the time that we are done but we have the really important parts now – at least we have seen copies of them.

So at this point, Dominica and I having both poured over all of the documentation that we can find online and having already grabbed a copy of the initial process paperwork from the Italian consulate in Houston, it would appear that to the best of our knowledge that Dominica, her dad, her grandfather, her siblings, all of our kids and more are all now and always have been Italian citizens!  Take a moment to let that sink in.

This is pretty big news if it is true.  It is so big that we really can’t believe that it might actually be true.  The ramifications of it are immense.  This is not really a possibility that we had ever imagined.  Dual citizenship is a massively big deal.  Really hard to define just how big it is.  And this is not simply Italian citizenship but citizenship in the European Union as well.

So what does citizenship in Italy mean?  Here are a few of things that we thought of in the first hour or so as the shock began to wear off: we could move to Italy, we could move to anywhere in the European Unions (basically all of Europe except Switzerland), no wait – Switzerland too as they participate in the work/live group with Europe, we can work anywhere in Europe, we can buy property in Europe, we can invest in Europe, we can get those credit cards with the chip and the pin, we get free healthcare in Italy, our children get to go to Italian state universities for free, we can travel anywhere in Europe without worrying about the ninety day US non-visa visitor’s limit, we can start a business in Europe, we can make fun of uni-citizenship people – and we can do all of this without giving up our current access and freedoms from the United States.  This is really, really big.  It is going to take a long time before we really have a good idea as to how this will impact us and we will never really know to what degree it might impact Liesl and Luciana.  Boy are we glad that we thought ahead to give them European names now!

We also researched and found that it looks like I, being married to an Italian citizen for over three years, qualify for my Italian citizenship as well.  For me it will be a lot more work.  Dominica just has to prove that she is an Italian.  I have to convince the government to let me have the same citizenship as the rest of my family.  But the generally policy is that after having been married for three years while living outside of the country that that is good enough.  We hope, anyway. There are some potential roadblocks and I cannot do anything about it until her paperwork is all done so it might be quite a while before I can even start.

Our first step is to get a preliminary form filled out and sent in to the Italian consulate.  We have the form and much of the information.  Since tomorrow is a holiday we hope that we will be able to submit it on Tuesday and get the ball rolling.

It’s really hard to describe in a blog post how excited and wary we are at this point.  Today is one of those days that could be completely meaningless or a total turning point in our lives.

Medifast Status: Day 124, Down ~52lbs

We were a bit late this morning when we got down to Las Colinas to pick up Brian and Katie.  They were up long before us and went trail biking before we got there.  We picked them up around ten thirty and then drove out to Fort Worth to go to the zoo for the day.

The heat has not yet broken – we are expecting that to happen tomorrow – so today is about one hundred and three degrees in unfiltered sunlight at the zoo.  A cooler day than we have been getting for the last two months but still very hot and the humidity was noticeably higher today which made it feel quite a bit warmer than it has been.

We had a nice day at the zoo and Liesl definitely had a lot of fun.  It has been a while since we have made it to the zoo because of the intense summer heat so it was nice to get back.  We spent a few hours there.

Liesl was really happy to see the animals again.  She is very into the zoo and she loves playing with all of her plastic animals at home.  They are her big toys.  She has all kinds of adventures with her animals.  She organizes them into families and categorizes them by size.  They have long conversations.  They go swimming in her water table.  She loves playing with her plastic animals.

Liesl’s plastic penguins were destroyed by the Grice’s dog Liza some months ago since the last time that we were at the zoo.  Her penguins were always her favourite within her plastic animal army.  She has been very sad about them.  One lost a leg, one lost its face and so forth.  She would tell us how they had boo-boos.  So today Dominica managed to replace the injured penguins with new ones from the zoo.  We also got a penguin poster for Liesl which is a picture of one of the actual penguins that she goes to see at the Fort Worth Zoo.

On the way back we all went to Rockfish for lunch.  It has been a while since we have been there.  Brian is on Medifast now too so it was three of us on that and Katie is the only one not doing it.  It is easier for Brian to go out to eat with us since we have a good idea at this point of how to eat out on the plan.  We have it down to a science, more or less.

After lunch we took them back to Las Colinas and then went to Barnes and Noble to check out the travel book selection.  I was tempted to buy some books there but Dominica convinced me to go out to the car, get my iPhone and do a price comparison on Amazon.  Boy am I glad that we did.  It turns out that the price difference was about 35% more at Barnes and Noble.  Not only was the price much higher but B&N was selling older editions of the books at full price while Amazon was selling the current versions at deep discounts!  Talk about getting ripped off.  I really need to drill it into my head that I should never, ever, ever shop at Barnes and Noble.  What makes me think that I should give them another try from time to time is beyond me.  I’d really be foolish to try shopping there again.

We went home after the book store and spent the evening relaxing.  Our plan is to actually get some time to just be a family this weekend.  I don’t have anything needing me at the office and nothing really pressing at home so this is a really good opportunity for a nice, long weekend of doing nothing.

Medifast Status: Day 123, Down ~51.5lbs

Today is the monthly non-farm payroll announcement so it was important that I be in to the office nice and early.  Not a big deal since I am always in early these days but normally I am rather casual about it and today I needed to make sure that I was quite on top of it.

After the morning calls were done the day was not too busy for the most part.  I was able to go home for lunch and hang out with the girls.

This evening was decently busy.  Lots of deployments.  After work we were scheduled to meet up with Brian and Katie at La Cima for dinner.  There was some miscommunications between Dominica and I so I ended up going to La Cima on my own and she met me there a few minutes later.  We did actually manage not to be late overall, though.

We sat at the same table that Brian and Katie first met at several months ago, February, I think.  Dinner was very nice.  It was all quite excellent.

After dinner we had coffee and then went back home.  A fairly relaxing evening.  Tomorrow we are meeting Brian and Katie early in the morning to go to the Fort Worth Zoo shortly after it opens before the day gets really hot.  The temperatures are expected to finally break on Sunday and by Monday it is supposed to be really awesome in the Dallas area.

Medifast Status: Day 122, Down ~51.5lbs

I am completely exhausted today.  Really dragging.  Even though I am so tired I woke up twenty minutes before my alarm this morning.  I couldn’t make myself get up extra early, though, so I went back to sleep until the alarm went off.  Not normal for me.  Normally if I am up I just get up and get started.

I came home for lunch today.  La Cima keeps forgetting to email out the lunch menu in the mornings and when we don’t receive it we really don’t even consider going over there since we have no idea if there will be something that we want to eat or not.

Work was not too busy today.  The market volatility, nature disasters and everything else have caused us to really have very little to do as we just go from one freeze to another.

This evening Dominica decided that she wanted to read and not watch anything – which is good because it makes us a lot more production.  Once the television is on we are pretty much trapped in the play room and it is very hard to do anything.  That is the biggest disadvantage of the playroom television situation.  It keeps the television from taking  over the main parts of the house but it also causes us to be isolated when using it.  If the television was in the living room than walking around and doing whatever is relatively easy as the television can be seen from just about everywhere at the same time.  In the playroom there are just the two seats and even walking over to the bar to get coffee makes you go behind the television.  So the bar and kitchen not having line of sight to the television is bad for everyday use.  No different than using the one in our bedroom, though.

I had my two hour Thursday evening call tonight.  While I was on Dominica brought me dinner.  She made her cauliflower pizza which has now gone through another iteration of development and is continuing to improve.  It is really tasty and actually begins to satisfy the craving for pizza.  That is one of the foods that I miss the most.  This is not the same but it is far, far closer to the real thing than you might imagine.  We even use vegetarian pepperoni substitute.

Dominica spent the evening reading travel information and I spent the evening working in the office.  Luciana went to bed so early that she was in bed while I was still on my call.  Liesl painted and watched Wonder Pets most of the evening.

I was on FaceBook tonight looking to talk to Roni from high school, she graduated with me, because she lives in Tuscany and I needed some travel advice.  It turns out that she moved to Dallas just last week.  How bizarre is that?  Having grown up walking distance from each other, being about nine houses away, we now live thousands of miles away and are just twenty minutes separated.  Pretty weird.  So I talked to her for a bit and we are having lunch on Wednesday.

Roni also told me that Peggy, also who was in our class, moved to Dallas as well.  So there are at least three of us from my graduating high school class of only sixty four people now living in Dallas.  That means that 5% of my class is here.  Now that is not something that I would have ever suspected.