In Love with France, At Home In Italy

We try to steer clear of the mal'occhio (the "evil eye" that causes bad things to happen). But the same week of our little bumper mishap, a close friend told us about his own "contretemps." That's a fancy French word for problems that can arise when one is entering a parking lot at the same time when someone is exiting, but when one of you has the sun in his eyes.  One might say to oneself, as he did, "All I can really see right now is "niente," but what are the chances that anyone would approach during the second it will take me to cross this threshold? Well, because our local Lidl grocery store is very popular at that hour, a quasi-invisible someone could indeed be close enough for anyone entering the lot to scrape two of her car doors.  There was a witless eye-witness to this event. To clarify--the door-scraper's wife who had been following behind in another car and also had the sun in her eyes did not yet realize tha...

OOPS! Ivy-covered walls in the Italian countryside are picturesque, but not always as innocent as they look. We thought it would be a good idea to hop into our 1999 Renault to take it for a spin. After all, the poor thing had been sitting there for far too long exercising its primary function as a fruit dryer. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that the windshield of this proud French vehicle is the linchpin of our efforts to manage all the fruit we produce. The method goes like this: put the fruit of the moment in a foil-covered IKEA roasting pan on a sunny Umbrian day, and you're good to go. Or rather, you will be going nowhere for a while, while that fruit caramelizes nicely.  The red-lit "STOP OR THIS VEHICLE WILL EXPLODE!" did not deter my optimistic husband in the least. "This car is so old that it often says alarming stuff like that, but doesn't really mean it." But I was not convinc...