You, Me and the Kids

Whew…is it winter yet?

It has been so hot here. It’s actually not the heat but the humidity. I’ve been able to not turn on the air conditioner. Electricity is so freaking expensive that I don’t want to use it until it is absolutely necessary.

Well our car is giving us a headache again. This time it’s a wheel bearing. So it’s being fixed and we have another rental car until tomorrow. Since Geno is on leave now we don’t really need a car anyway. If our car takes until after tomorrow to get fixed (which I’m guessing it will) our friend, Julie and Jamie said they would take us to pick it up, so that’s good. The good news is we have found another car, a 1994 BMW 520i, that is in MUCH better condition and better cared for. The guy we are buying it from is a professor on post. He put over $3,000 into it only to find out he has to return to the states for a family emergency. He has also agreed to let us make payments since he saw how desperate we were to get a car that was reliable. We do plan on selling this car with the understanding it is “As Is”. We will tell them what is wrong with it that we know of and agree to a price accordingly. The best thing about the BMW is that it’s an automatic which we have found is soooo much easier then a manual in this place. Although, I did admit to Geno that I will miss shifting, heck, I’ve become REALLY good at it.

Geno started leave yesterday (June 30th). He’s off for 18 days then it’s back to work with a short stint in Germany for 3 weeks JUST before the baby is due. We are planning a trip to Verona during this leave and also at the end of this month we are taking the boys on a trip to Switzerland. We went to Venice this past weekend. I will post some pictures of our trip at the end of this post. The rest of the pictures are on our Flickr account.

Other then that things have been busy trying to unpack all the boxes the movers brought, packing up the stuff we can’t or won’t use here - mostly electrical things like our eletric skillet and whatnot. Our tv turned out not to be multi-system like Best Buy told us. So we have to buy a PAL converter to be able to use our tv here in Italy. The US runs under NTSC. Don’t ask me the actual meaning of all of this, other then NTSC is not compatible with Italian television, only PAL.

Here are some pictures from Venice -

Our gondola ride