Delayed Un-gratification

So on Friday I was checking through a particularly large pile of mailbox leavings.
Throwing out the small book's worth of ads and credit card offers, I noticed the rare gem of a real piece of correspondence. Well, not actually, it was from Hertz. For those of you in a different country, oh wait, I guess you have Hertz there too.

Opening the letter, my eyes fell on some charges and official looking documents from the municipal police of Como and Venice. The pages had their logo anyhow. I started daydreaming about how incredibly scenic both of those places are, but then quickly snapped out of it. It had been around seven months since I was over in Italy. My first thought was that this was some sort of scam and I quickly doublechecked the postmark for 'Nigeria' or some such place.

Unfortunately though, these infractions were real and the kind of thing those of us from the US are not familiar with. More specifically, I had driven into some limited traffic zones (ZTL) while touring around with my hired car. The ZTL areas are accessible to local drivers only, and only during certain times and moon phases.

The signs themselves are quite small and sometimes difficult to spot. Luckily, they used the red circle on a white background so it's a bit like 'Where's Waldo' (Wally for the UK types). Of course this finding game will cost you around 100 euro per infraction automatically enforced with computerized cameras. 'Where's Waldo' never kicked me in the nuts like this...






*Actual size of sign...


These limited traffic zones seem nefarious to visitors because as you are driving along trying not to be hit or get completely lost, the tendency is to follow other vehicles. You know, so you don't end up driving demolition derby on the floor of the Colosseum, or maybe floating behind a gondola in the Venice lagoon.

The actual purpose of the Zona Traffico Limitato is noble, it helps keep the old monuments in the town centers less exposed to pollution and not as many cars actually on the road so it looks nicer. But, it can't be ignored that this is a major money maker for the cities of Italy. I read a statistic that just the city of Firenze (Florence) rakes in 53 million euro per year in ZTL tickets.

Trying to remember the specific times of my infractions, I thought of driving in Como and remembered cutting across town to avoid driving out in the wrong direction (I had to get to my rented villa before dark and it was late).
I still can't remember what I did wrong in Venice. I have to presume it was on the land side (Mestre) because there aren't many roads on Venice itself and my rental car wasn't amphibious.

Since I remember being guilty on the first ticket at least, and it's impossible to fight the bureaucracy, I'll pay of course. I plan on paying my two tickets when the euro goes less than the dollar in a few weeks. Hah.

The weekend was great, the culmination of which was a wine tasting party which ended with time trial racing on a four wheeler ATV in an expensive neighborhood at 1:30 AM, but that is a post for another time.

Voting (Suffragium)

I've experienced a political confluence since some of the bloggers from the UK wrote about the recent election, and this past weekend, two friends of mine ran for local political office to keep their seats as city council members.

My friends both won, partly because of my considerable influence in the local political landscape and also because they ran unopposed. For the UK readers, I had nothing to do with David Cameron's win.

After thousands of years voting has not changed all that much, computerized touchscreen voting booths with smartcard ballots were used this past weekend. It's written in ancient sources that ancient Greeks used a large show of hands to vote and that an estimator (who I'm certain was impartial in every vote) tallied it all up.

Romans were fond of giving everyone black and white pebbles so the voter could drop the color representing their choice into a voting pot. I wonder if when exiting the polling place (comitia), there were laws about not checking the pockets of voters? A candidate's thugs might have threatened to beat the tar out of people who still had the 'wrong' stone in their possession.

But luckily, the pot and stoner voting (smoothly increasing hits, oops there's another one) was usually used to pass or repeal laws instead of candidate selection. Leges Tabellariae moved the ancients away from pebbles and into paper or lead tablets for the votes, at which time the ancient Romans sneered at the slightly more ancient Romans and called them animals.

To change topics completely, has anyone ever had a sunburn so painful, it feels like you are floating down a 'lazy river' of fire on your back? Or maybe two hundred midgets are putting out their cigarettes on your back simultaneously?

I was out working on stone this weekend and forgot to wear a shirt, or sunscreen. And I'm paying for it now, still, dearly. Normally I notice the sun starting to affect me, but the cool wind kept me unaware that outside was actually a convection oven.

The Stars At Night (Stelle Della Notte)

Last night poolside with a glass of wine in hand, I looked up into the night sky. The moon wasn't out yet, so even in brightly lit Dallas the stars were plainly visible. Dallas isn't the heart of Texas, so pay no mind to the song lyrics 'The stars at night are big and bright'.

First, I found the 'North Star', or Polaris as it sometimes called since the ancient peoples named it after a popular brand of automated pool sweepers.


They say that we might have a different North Star soon, in a few thousand years.

Then my eyes swept westward and I noticed an unusual star, or it might have been a small cluster of stars. The center one was white and got noticably brighter while I was looking at it. Then a green light emanated from the cluster, which I thought was fairly unusual. The white light in the center seemed to pulse at a steady interval, almost like a strobe light.

By this time I thought about calling NASA to report it, because it seemed so strange. I heard some faint noise coming from the direction of the star cluster and the light changed from a green to a red. While this was going on, the stars passed overhead and turned south.

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In outdoor project news, I set out chalklines for more of my detailed tile work. A handy trick for making sure the wind and rain do not erase your elaborately laid and measured chalk lines is to put clear acrylic spray paint over the lines. I guess it wouldn't protect against acid or falling planes, but for normal events it's fine.


Is anyone having issues with pollen this spring? I put myself to the test this weekend at an outdoor art show called 'The Cottonwood Festival'. (At this point, I'm pretty sure I'm allergic to Cottonwood). Worth it though because I bought two works and found some higher than normal quality local artists. Ciao

Showdown at the Lowes (Scontro di Butteros)

It was a a typical showdown in the old west town of Dallas. I was moseying out of the Lowes general hardware store with a 50 pound bag of mortar, and I looked up into the noon sun. Dabbing my brow, I knew summer was fixin' to be here whether I wanted it or not.

I started out into the open but busy street in front of the store, but a large white wagon lurched forward a bit catching me off guard. A middle aged Victorian lady was moving it forward, seriously, she looked like she could have been a LDS member. I figured she reckoned she could get where she was going fore I was all the way out in the street.

So I squinted and squared off with the wagon showing no fear, but the wagon just stood still like a hungry bobcat stalking a spring foal. The driver's eyes showed cold like death from a cold on a cold day. My foot twitched, then her hand went down to the gearshift... But then I just changed direction and walked around behind her to get to my car.

And not to bore with too much about my yard, but this weekend I proceeded to do some tile layout for the deck. Here it is some pattern layout pre mortar and leveling. Think of this like the paid advertising for the story above. In the afternoon sun the marble sparkles, it's like a monument or something :)

A Different Type of Hedge Fund

In the interest of making the yard similar to the palace of Versailles in some small ways, I've recently aquired *many* shrubs. Despite some formal botanist training at an institute of higher learning, I worry that I'm putting the plants too close together. Sure, maybe they will be a bit uncomfortable, but that's what I've hired them for, to look good.

Unfortunately, the rain has been spaced out just close enough that it has been too muddy to dig. It's kind of like if you are driving your own car, and waiting for an opening in the traffic to pull out onto the main road, but every car is spaced out just the tiniest bit too close to each other to be safe about it. Well, it's not much like that, but you get the idea. And the mud. sticks. to. everything. After 30 seconds in Blackland Prarie clay based soil, you are clodhopping around with 25 kg sandals, sliding off the end of the shovel.

I know, I know... they have people called 'gardeners' to do this kind of thing, but I'm pretty much a do-it-yourself kind of guy. In fact, the step treads and faces in the image above were cut and hand chiseled by yours truly (I mean my image above, not the image of Versailles garden which is immediately above).

To digress, I don't always just go to the store and buy beer. Sometimes, I grow the barley, harvest the kernels, soak them, let them sit in the sun until the sugars of the grain malts, then I mash the grain, boil it, pour in the yeast and then let it ferment for weeks. Then go through an elaborate bottling and quality control process.

Sometimes if you want your plants placed too close together, you have to do it yourself.

Still Great After All This Time

Has it really been so long?

My Bologna (Comune di Bologna)

In Italy, there are two towns named after foodstuffs (or was it the other way around?) that I visited on my last trip. Quick, take a guess what they are! Ok, time's up, put your pencils down and read more. In some ways they were very similar, but in my quick first impressions, they couldn't be more different.

The first town was Bologna. As a food, I generally detest bologna, putting it somewhere between 'Spam' and 'Egg Salad'. But names aside, I met a great family from Bologna on the train from Rome. They were an upper middle class husband and wife travelling with a college age daughter and younger son. They commented on my GPS and I struck up a conversation with them, for a while in Italian, but then we switched to English. Being the cosmopolitan people they were, fluency in multiple languages was easy for them.

The Italian lady made her own sculptures which she showed me on her cell phone and I showed her some of mine which she graciously complimented. The husband was busy at first talking with his daughter who was just recently engaged to be married, yet you could still see he considered her his little girl because their family was super close.

Over the trip, we all talked Italian and US politics, art, business and what it was like to live around Bologna. And, that was before I even arrived in the city. By the time we were all there, I had made genuine friends with like minded people and was actually a bit sad to say goodbye. The city was clean, historic, and home to professionals and the affluent. As a generalization, it seems like people in the North are more career oriented and strive for a really high standard of living.

Bologna has been known for its superior universities and as knowledge center since the middle ages. Maybe long enough for all the smartest people's genes to have amassed more concentratedly in one location. Needless to say, I really enjoyed my time around the city of Bologna.

The other food named town, (Did you guess Pisa? It's not the same as Pizza...) was Parma, as in 'parmesan cheese' and 'parma ham'. At this point, I have to mention that I consider parma ham extremely gross as it is uncooked.

I'd been driving for quite a while on the highway after killing a large apple juice and bottled water in Milan. I arrived around Parma by car on Sunday afternoon on my way to Firenza, and had to go to the WC so bad my berries were about to fall off. So instead of going to an 'Automat', I pulled off the A1 and headed to the city center of Parma over by the museum (of course). I parked in the awesome parking garage and didn't find a public restroom there. So I headed in the direction of the museum. Walked up the stairs, but they were closed, on a Sunday afternoon. At 2:00pm...

Ok, so I thought it can't be that hard to find an open restaurant to order whatever so I could use the toilet. Well, it *was* that hard. I walked across the courtyard of the museum and down *several* long city blocks before I could find anything at all open. Along the way, there were sandwich counters and a few other things which had absolutely no restrooms. I must have painfully walked 2 miles in ever-widening circles like a Coast Guard pilot looking for a capsize accident survivor before I finally found a restaurant with the qualifications for which I was looking.

For this reason, I will forever have an unfair bias against the city of Parma and their evil 'shut everything down at 2:00 pm' ways. Where food named towns are concerned, I'll always go to the city historically more friendly, that is, to my Bologna.