NO NEWS FROM SICILY-SICILIANMAMA TAKES A MEDIA BREAK

If you are reading this, the media break is over.
At first we thought it was not intentional. Telecom Italia made us believe either 1. we had old lines that had problems, or 2. they were moving some lines. The reason that we are not sure which is that we got different stories depending on who we talked to and when, and besides, there is that language barrier. But we got Joe and Brigette as well as Paolo, whose line has been out for weeks, to ask also about our phone number, but in Italian. They repeatedly said everything would be fixed by the 27th (Friday).
Then we started getting cell phone calls about our requested move of the phone line. We told the same story each time…we DID NOT request a phone line moved, and it was our line not working that was the problem. After two phone calls from the “tecnicos” this morning however, someone finally found an English speaker. And surprise, surprise…they even listened to us. There was nothing wrong with our line for a week. The company had merely turned it off in anticipation of moving the phone line (a week in advance???).
Now everything we said in Italian was not believed, maybe because we did not speak Italian very well. But that does not explain the conversations that Italian people had concerning out number with other Italian speakers. Someone had made a mistake at the company and so no one listened to us, ever, when we told them we did not want our phone line moved. Amazing!
Well, so how does that affect my life? instead of my usual routine of going to the computer a few times an hour to see who is online to Instant Message, or to try to reach my kids or my sister or sister-in-law, or to call my dad if the time seems right, I did not even turn on the computer most days and I looked forward to just checking for a dial tone on the phone a few times a day. This has given me the great opportunity to do all sorts of things I would not normally get a chance to do-to clean out my mailbox and desktop icons, to straighten out my picture labels and look through my photo files, for the few things I can do when the machine is turned on. But I do miss the MSN TV and celebrity news and the latest on new books, movies, and travel. I do NOT miss the latest political news, since it is almost always a down lately anyway. I think I have ODed on elections, Iranian threats and nuclear tests, and the Iraq war anyway lately.
But I do get to wondering how my family and friends are. I also wonder if anyone misses hearing from me! I wonder how many more Flickr clicks I got while I was off and what kind of shots have been posted on my Sicily group. And then there is the entirely frivolous need to update what happened on Desperate Housewives this week.
I am just so glad to be back with the wired set.

BOOKS IN "M" BAGS

One of the pleasures of retirement for readers is the added time to read that we now have. And in the US, an old school classmate, Cheryl Gawronski, told us about a wonderful invention called an "M" bag, with which you can ship books anywhere in the world for a dollar a pound. We take advantage of it at least once everytime we are in the states.
Yesterday our M bag of books FINALLY came in! Although we are expecting another much smaller M bag from our California trip (the San Francisco bookstores are fabulous!), this should be the end of the big book loads (I know I keep saying this) and it's a good thing because it was such a huge hassle. I say the end because we went through all of our boxes of books in our storage area and threw a bunch out and had sent over what we wanted/needed.
We sent it about three months ago, in the middle of July, right around the time my mother died. It should take no more than 10 weeks, but I think that is just the US side. So about three weeks ago we get a letter from the Post Office in Milan. They want to know about our business and where the list of products is and invoices, etc. We call and explain in our broken Italian that we are NOT a business, that some of the books are old or gifts, that we are retired etc., and they say fine, just write a letter explaining it. So we do. And start to wait. And wait! I even had nightmares about the bag not arriving.
Now the postal rules in the states do not apply to Italy-that is one of the first lessons we learned here. They don't HAVE to deliver a huge bag of books for which we paid $50+ in the states to send. They also do very little reading here, so this whole thing is unusual. But anyway, they needed to collect some kind of import tax on this package, so they nailed us with another 17 euros. We cannot fathom where that figure came from-maybe a tip for everyone who had to handle this bag?
Part of the US regulations are that you need to package and label separately the books in parcels. When the M bag arrived, they had unwrapped each and every package and maybe even helped themselves to some, who knows? That is pretty normal around here. Anyway, the books were all bent and soiled and I cannot help but think that they had checked out our claims by looking at publishing years, etc.
We're just happy to have our books. And now we are having bigger, better book shelves built to store them.

THE NEWS FROM ITALY 2

A few more tidbits from the news:
1. A report came out from the department of finance listing the relative salaries of certain professions in Italy. The lowest paid job in Sicily is a ceramicist. The highest paid in our area is a “notaio,” a sort of super lawyer/business consultant, who makes more than US lawyers. Since we and our guests buy so many ceramics, we feel we are doing our part for a strong Sicilian economy.
2. The most shoplifted item in Italian stores is parmigiano cheese, followed closely by veal fillets. Now how many people do you know who do not like veal parmagiano?
3. Decent shopping comes closer and closer to Sciacca. An IKEA store is being built in Palermo, and one will open on the Catania side of the island by Christmas.
When I think what this could mean for me, I think of all those times I had to look for furniture with little choice other then cheap cheap cheap or incredibly expensive designer stuff. Now that we pretty much have what we want in our home, I also muse about Sicilian society and the young couples who do not have the thousands of dollars to furnish a house before they get married. Most of them have to buy everything at a store like Paolo’s with his store’s high prices. So two new things can happen: first, more couples will get married younger if they can do their own decorating inexpensively, and second, they can have babies earlier because they don’t have to pay off the huge furniture bills from the wedding.
Oh, wait, what am I thinking? That would only happen if young couples paid cash for their apartment’s furniture, and that is nearly unheard of here. No one pays cash or pays installments on time for that matter, and borrowing over the reasonable amount of credit is very common.
4. In case you are keeping track, Palermo lost today to Atalanta and got knocked out of first place by Inter. Palermo still is tied with Rome for second place.

THE NEWS TODAY FROM ITALY

Today, thanks to the efficient folks at our Chautauqua county (Dunkirk) polling office, we were both able to cast our absentee ballots for the November election (as I wrote the word “November,” I wrote it in the Italian form, proving my assimilation is really taking hold). Anyway, we follow the latest US political news with newsmagazines and internet articles, but we are also keeping up with the news from our adopted country, Italy. So we thought we would share some news that is not related to Congressman Foley in this trio of Italian news items.

1. The mega-bridge to Reggio Calabria from Messina, connecting the Italian mainland with Sicily, has just lost its national funding. With Berlusconi’s defeat, the forces of the left do not see this project as a political priority and so it has been put off for awhile. Sicilian politics being what they are, this may just be a negotiating point to keep some politico in line (like Salvatore Cuffaro, the Berlusconi supporter who is our regional president, who is GUNG HO for the bridge). Expect to see it back in the money when the political right again makes its way back into power, or when a deal has been cut between the mafia and any left wing financial guys who can persuade lawmakers it is an indispensable political need.

2. A satirical comedy show, Le Iene (“The Hyenas”), has always been a favorite of mine, but especially after their latest show premiering the fall season. These young wise guys always make the established politicians look like fools, like when they interview an important person and start talking to them about people and places in the news and half of the politicians do not know even know common names that anyone knows (even me!), like Nelson Mandela or where Darfur is.
So for their season premier, somehow these guys got access to a make-up person who worked on about half of the members of the national Parliament (50 of them), and to the Q-tip like cotton swabs that were used to wipe the sweat off of their faces. A standard drug test was done on these 50 random samples (no names were attached to any of them), and a full one third were found to have been under the influence of either cocaine or marijuana in the last 36 hours (12 marijuana, 4 cocaine). When the TV network got wind of the program, they cut the part about the drug testing, but the full news story had already been leaked. So the hyenas Luca and Paolo went ahead and reported on the story they were not allowed to report on, quite humorously, and then editorialized that these same lawmakers who are using drugs are making laws against other people using them. The last few night’s news have been full of the various political leaders calling for a full investigation of the invasion of their privacy, and finally, of leaders calling for national drug testing of all political leaders.

3. Periodically we have to renew our “permisso di soggiorno” (permission to stay) in order to live here legally. We have to go through a process that is time consuming and annoying, and in order to circumvent it, we have thought of obtaining dual citizenship by becoming Italian citizens. But our big question is whether Italy would tax our pensions even though the US is already taxing them. It seems like a simple question, and we have had a few answers that involved a process where we would pay the difference between what the US taxed and what Italy taxed if our pensions originated here. Well recently we got news that a friend’s mother is a dual citizen of both countries and son-of-a-gun, she is paying taxes to both countries. Boo! I don’t like paying even once! Guess we will have to put up with our renewals of our permissos as a cost saving measure.

OCTOBER LULL

Happy Columbus Day weekend! Most of you will be reading this on a day off. A lot of our friends and family are talking about retiring soon, and so just to show you what it is like to be retired, and never have work holidays again, I am writing about out life here this month. This month of October is probably unique in its inactivity.
Things are sure boring around here. There are no neighbors and the weather is about the only thing that distinguishes one day from another. I love it! I remember when I was younger and I was warned that being idle was a bad thing. I took that to heart when I raised my kids and tried to make sure that they always had things at hand to keep them busy. But I am just now seeing the charm, the beauty, ah no, the glamour of being idle.
First off, there is no necessity to have to hurry through anything. If I want to take a dozen pictures, plant a new bed of flowers or take a really long walk, there is not much stopping me from doing that. There is no question of making food from scratch or not-we enjoy cooking leisurely with tons of fresh ingredients and as long as Steve will chop, I’ll clean the veges and cook them. Dinner can be on the table between 12 and 3. Supper can be between 7 and 9.
Most nights we eat supper in bed in front of the TV set watching the news. After that there is the big decision: shall we read, watch a movie, or a few episodes of the latest TV series we are in the middle of? We have gone through all of the Sopranos, The Seventies Show, and Scrubs. We are now alternating Red Dwarf, Family guy, and News Radio. Next time in the states we will pick up the latest of each of these if we can. But we really are not slaves to TV, it is just fun to see what is up on our own selected shows. Italian TV used to have Gray’s anatomy, Lost, and Desperate Housewives, which I used to follow religiously in season 1. Now there is only House and Sex and the City, two shows I enjoy, but not that much in Italian. They are on after 11 PM and I am usually reading myself to sleep around then. But if I did, that is one of the other joys of idleness. If I wanted to stay up until 1 AM watching TV or a movie, I very easily could without work repercussions. That is another big plus of managing your own time.
Then again, you have time to notice everything, no matter how trivial. Take the weather and the monthly moon phases for example. We are very attuned to both of these because they play such an important part of whatever activity we do the next day. Whether it is a walk (we have routes for short, medium, and long walks), planting or hoeing, laundry, or how muddy our lettuce from the market is, it is always noted. I never had time for that when I worked, barely sticking my head outside to see what kind of coat and boots I had to wear that day.
I guess for retirees like us who had to do what we had to do for so many years, the best thing is that the only people we need to consult is ourselves. We are learning to be selfish after all those years of saying we could not do things because of our commitments. Comfortable? Extremely! And, well, there is not exactly a glamorous part, but it sure feels luxurious to roll over and sleep another hour whenever you want to.