Venice…

Sorry for the sparcity of updates; we've been just doing day to day stuff, and that's not a lot of fun to read (or write about). We did take a trip over settimana bianca though. What's that? Perhaps I should back up a bit...

In addition to bunches of other strange customs over here, a lot of Italians take a week off in February to go skiing. The schools evidently got tired of seeing so many empty desks for that week in February, so they declared it an official school vacation. I wasn't able to find any additional information on this holiday online (that wasn't in Italian), so you'll either just have to take my word for it, or do your own research on the history of it. Anyway, for settimana bianca this year, we loaded up the kids and drove to Venice.

School Concert

Kids had a concert today, and Cori talked me into taping their performances. Apologies for the size of the videos, but I wanted to post the whole thing, rather than clips.
A quick disclaimer: I am not a professional videographer, as you’ll soon see. The video quality sucks, and the audio is a bit jumbled. If mediocre quality home videos irritate you, skip the movies and just believe me when I say that the performances were cute. Otherwise, enjoy our feature presentations.

“Latest” Updates, part 2:

After we returned from the states, we slept our way through the jet lag, and for Cori’s birthday we went camping at a recreational facility that the military runs outside of Naples. They’ve got a really nice facility down there that’s in the caldera of a volcano with well manicured grass and trees all over the place; We had fun, and it was a learning experience for all of us. For dinner on Cori’s birthday we went to the restaurant at the facility, and the staff there brought out a cupcake for her and sang “Happy Birthday” for her. After they gave Cori her cupcake, they gave Palmer and the other little girl who was there a cupcake as well; we thought that was pretty nice of them.

A couple of weeks later, we decided that we’d had such a good time camping the first time, we would try it again at another recreational facility, this time up north outside of Pisa.

“Latest” Updates, part 1:

Sorry it’s been so long since our last update. While things have been happening over the last couple of months, most of it is of interest only to those involved, and I suspect I’m not as entertaining a storyteller as I’ve tried to be. I’ll make an effort here, and you folks can tell me if it was worth the wait.

We went back to the States for a few weeks this summer. The flight there was an absolute nightmare.

Cori's class play:

Cori's class play was a couple of days ago, and I videotaped it. Unfortunately, the video is MASSIVE. I'm only posting the first act, and this will take you a few minutes to download before you can play it. I'll make the whole thing available for download, but I have to break it into more pieces. Sorry!

Paestum:

Palmer and I went on a 3 day field trip to an ancient Greek village last week. The Brownies from the school were going on a camping trip that weekend, so I agreed to drive one of the dads (who was going on the field trip, and also camping with his daughter) down there, and drop him off at the campsite on the way back (to meet up with his family).

Spring has broken.

Well, Spring Break is over. We’d been looking forward to it, and it met our expectations. We can also add another country to our list. More about that later.