In Love with France, At Home In Italy

I would have liked to continue the Ferragosto Holiday in Italy saga by adding   STEP FIVE:WHAT TO DO AFTER DRIVING FROM ORVIETO TO TERONTOLA TO GET YOUR MRI. But my being a Technodunce has once again gotten in the way of my plan.  I was also thinking that after not posting anything for so long, it kind of worked out well that the last post I had put up in November 2013 featured photos taken in the Sanitaria Surgical Appliance store where we were renting J's crutches and wheelchair in the wake of last Ferragosto's mishap. Husband J of the pinched nerve, who has no trouble understanding technology, says that EVERYBODY knows that blog chronology works backwards, so that what you see is the most recent, and there's no need to fret about what looks like goofy timing. OK, I'm going to try to set aside my antediluvian sense of proper order and just continue. As I said before in my two favorite languages, AVANTI! EN AVANT!  Here we go.  STEP FIVE: SHOWING THE LENGTHS ...

Here is a little quiz to test what you know about Ferragosto.  Ferragosto is: (Check all that apply) 1. a major holiday in Italy when most everything closes down and anyone who can, especially professionals, gets out of town 2. a very bad time to have a machine or car that needs reapir 3. a REALLY bad time to have a medical emergency 4. NO time to have a husband who had the right idea to flee the country for Ferragosto, but then managed to get into medical doodoo on Day One of our 5-day stay in the non-Ferragosto-celebrating country If you checked all of the above, you are right! And on the subject of things in need of repair, it's not unusual in Italy to encounter the word "GUASTO!" (aka "BUSTED AND NOT LIKELY TO BE FIXED IN YOUR LIFETIME"), especially on elevators, escalators, toilets, and more. WE ENCOUNTERED THIS PARTICULAR GUASTO ELEVATOR AT THE GUARDIA MEDICA HEALTH CENTER Last year, for us, just in time for Ferragosto, it was J's...

WELCOME TO WHAT COULD BE A NEW OLYMPIC EVENT  Tonight the drama factor was down a bit on the Olympics. Part of the problem is that we can only get the German coverage, which means that if you don't care only about German athletes and you only had one semester of German back in 1966, you are not going to be sitting on the edge of your seat. But then I heard it: the sound of either an enormous piece of agricultural equipment or a dangerous bit of Umbrian fauna. Since it was in the kitchen, it had to be the latter. In such an emergency, I tend to run the other way, close the bedroom door so as not to have the thing land in my room, and hope that it stays downstairs and disappears over night. There is, however, another solution:I can tell someone more courageous than I about the problem. All Olympic events pale in the face of my fearless daughter-in-law going up against a HUGE deadly hornet--the kind that regularly sends Umbrians to the hospital--with a frying p...