TGIF 03-30- 2007

Today, well not much new, we have decided to try and rent our guest rooms out for a little extra cash. And I'm working on our Help U Design blog trying to drive some traffic to it. All of this is about an attempt to create multiple streams of income. Doing architecture in California while living in Italy is a cool idea and works just fine as far doing the work is concerned. The problem is getting new work. What we really need is an agressive partner in San Diego who can pass on the work to us. Juergen the fellow who works for us more or less one day a week has been a life saver, but the time he can give us is very limited.

Yeah, I've added adsense ads here, hey every click counts. So go ahead click away.

What a life, my two oldest daughters are pregnant at the same time, I'll be going from a grandfather of 1 to 4 almost over night what could be cooler than that. At the sametime I have Julia and Giovanni to raise, life takes a lot of strange turns but these are all good.

Looking forward to Easter, Erin, Uli, Davis and 1b (no name yet) are coming down here Thursday night.

I am feeling too healthy lately, always makes me wonder what lurks beneath the surface waiting to raise it's ugly head at any moment. Get this I'm skiing better than I ever have and swimming a mile (1,700 meters) two or three times a week. Wow, at 63 the body can still get better. Now if my ankle would just stop hurting most of the time.

So Luisa just brought a glass of wine, salami, and cheese, that must be what's making me so healthy. I guess that's the signal to sign off for now, ciao tutti.

Sella Ronda

We did the Sella Ronda which is basically a skiing day around a group of the Dolomites that takes one through four mountain passes. The skiing is pretty much intermidiate. The big challenge is that it makes a long day of skiing and one can't make too many mistakes or one doesn't make it back to the starting point and the car. It was the first time for Luisa and she was a little nervous. I did it last year with a friend. We did make a couple of mistakes that added about an hour total to our trip. In all it took
5 hours. More than half of that time is spend on lifts. It has to be one of the most
beautiful ski tours anywhere.

Pre School Ski Lessons

Carnevale

We went to Venice on Sunday for the last day of Carnevale. The costumes were fantastic and the crowd was so huge it was almost unbelievable. Walking around through most of the city was like leaving a theater after a big concert. At times one could not even move. The good part was that in general people were pretty nice. Julia had her Cinderella dress on and once we bought her a mask with feathers a few people stopped her to take her picture. I think she was pretty pleased about that.

Julia was out of school the last two days so Monday we went skiing with her while Giovanni wanted to go to preschool. Yesterday was his class party and they put on a big show. That was great, very cute. I'll post some pictures.

The weather here is Spring like, almost warm. If fact in the afternoon yesterday the kids and I went on a bike ride to the park then stopped off to have ice cream.

What we have been doing

The last big activity was three days of skiing the weekend before last. We went to Valdaora and stayed in a nice little apartment. A friend of Luisa's came there to spend their "white week". They came on Sunday but we just spent the weekend arriving on Friday afternoon leaving Monday afternoon. This area is in the part of Italy where most everyone still wishes they were part of Austria. German is the first language, though everyone also speaks Italian. The skiing there is wide open slopes and very long runs, mostly intermediate. The weather was sunny, cold and extremely windy on the top of the mountain, but lower very nice. It's a great place to ski except for one problem, too many people.

Big event there was Giovanni getting lost on the slopes. He was insisting on skiing ahead of everyone, I warned him the day before if didn't stay with us he would get lost and the next day guess what. We had a very tense hour but as I thought would happen, he started crying when he could not see us and a German couple took him up to the top and dropped him off at the Carbinieri so once we got the word out they told us where he was.

This last weekend I had a cold so we did not do much, but we did go to the "Carnivale" in a nearby town. I guess if the kids liked it must have been good. Anyway it was pretty boring. Basically they had this sort of parade in which they had about ten participants and somehow managed to make it last over two hours. Each group had to come up on the bandstand and have their picture taken with the town queen and get a little prize for participating.