The missing post!

Somehow, in that flurry of updates, I missed one. I was pretty proud of my writing in this one too... I don't know how it happened, but now everything's gonna be all out of order. Sorry. Before our Christmas trip (for Thanksgiving, specifically), some friends of Becca's came to visit. Here's the post I wrote about their visit - it's a good one, you should click through and read it!

Christmas Vacation

We decided to spend Christmas skiing in Garmisch, Germany this year at an Armed Forces resort called Edelweiss. When we've gone up there before, we've driven up to Verona on the first day, then driven the rest of the way the next day. This time, we drove all the way to Innsbruck on the first day, and visited the Christmas Markets there that night, before finishing the drive to Garmisch the next day.

Home Leave

Home leave is supposed to be more relaxing than ours was, I think. We got into Austin and left a few days later to go to a Farnham family reunion in Iowa. We drove up. We stopped in Fort Worth to have breakfast with some friends of ours who had recently moved there from Rome, then drove up to Wichita to spend the night. The next day, we drove from Wichita to Clear Lake, Iowa (where the family reunion was).

For those of you keeping track at home, that's 5 states in the first week.

Boy, what a year!

You're still here? Holy moley, I didn't think anyone was still reading this. I guess I better post an update then, huh?

Here's part of a year worth of updates. You might want to get yourself something to drink first, this is going to be a long one, and it's going to be so gripping that you won't want to stop until you get to the end. I may even throw in a teaser or two, to make you come back and read the rest.

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.