Christmas in Florence (& Rome)

This wee little girl was definitely the highlight of Kevin's and my Christmas - no, she's not ours to take home; her parents, Bill and Christi, are keeping her (& may themselves have taken her home today). If you look closely, I think you can probably see her proud Babbo ("Daddy" for uninitiated Americans) wrapped around her teeny tiny pinky.

Kevin and I spent Christmas up in Florence. We took the train up on Christmas Eve, spent the day napping at the apartment of Amanda, a Florence Academy classmate of Bill's and friend of ours, and went to Midnight Mass with Bill, Christi, and Amanda.

The next evening Amanda, Kevin, and I got to go to the hospital to be the first non-relative visitors to meet Eva - and she is indeed even more beautiful in person than she is in pictures. She looks soundly sleeping in this photo, but she was doing a bit of moving - the nurse had graciously opened the music box that's to the left of Eva's head, so Eva was making vague attempts to rouse herself as "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" tinkled away. We saw brief glimpses of her eyes, and even a little of her tiny tongue. Didn't get to hold her - that privilege is reserved for her parents - but we look forward to seeing more of her & holding her in future Florentine visits, after she's come home.

Whoo hoo! Fonts! (and some free ones!)

I have loved fonts ever since I first sat down at a computer as an elementary school student. Dad wouldn't let me play with them much, though, because anything beyond the standard font overwhelmed the poor machine's memory and made printing (dot matrix, mind you) take fooorrrrreeevvvveeeerrrr.

Then Windows arrived, and not too long after that came the Internet. A split-second later, I was off to college, and my font-downloading really began.

The laptop I'm typing on is my third or fourth computer, and each has seen its share of fonts arrive in the fonts folder, usually to languish there unused, waiting for the day when that One Particular Project that needs a font Just Like That will call upon them. Ah well. I still download them. (& I've also paid for my share of "real" fonts for official graphic design projects, for the record.)

The impetus for this post, though, was an newsletter in my e-mail inbox from MyFonts, the site I mostly use for my font purchases. The newsletter caught my attention because it features handwriting fonts - chief among my font loves (and surprisingly useful, to boot). The newsletter is an interview with the font designer Ellinor Maria Rapp - a Swedish mom and biomedical scientist who plays with fonts in her free time. (Free time?!)

Yes, it’s actually three jobs... I have a hard time finding the time to manage everything. The kids take up most of the time and they should! But often the fonting gets behind, so I have a bunch to do when I get to it. Then I sit up all night and work – it’s the time when I am most likely to get something done. It’s rather cozy sitting up all alone in the dark making fonts drinking tea and listening to some good music.

She started not as a font designer, though, but a collector, and unlike my dusty laptop-bound collection, her collection of found free fonts is online, living at www.FontGarden.com. Poor me. More beautiful dingbats and display fonts to download . . . (Enjoy, Mom!)

Hm?

Dad - you mean this beach?













Yes, it is a pretty nice beach. At least when it's warm. (Funny how going to the beach is free right now but will cost 2 euro when the weather warms up again . . .)

Kevin did go swimming once while it was still warm enough. Despite being the end of October, Uncle Jim would have considered it quite decent water-skiing weather, but all of the Italians in the vicinity seemed to think Kevin was headed for pneumonia. Just as the "No White Shoes After Labor Day" rule used to be held hard and fast by American women, so the "One Doesn't Swim After October First" rule applies around here. Neither has any sort of force of law behind it - or much real logic - just pure unswayable social custom.

(& heaven forbid that one turn on one's heat before November 1 - but that actually has national energy savings considerations behind it . . . It made the news that it was cold enough this fall - the week after Kevin went swimming - for some apartment buildings and businesses to turn on their heat early.)

Procrastinating & Pics . . .

I'm procrastinating right now - I ought to be reading St. John of the Cross or brushing up on my Greek or at the very least unloading the washing machine. But instead I'm going to post some pictures.

This is a shot of the sea at sunset, taken on a brief walk down to the shore that Kevin and I took yesterday, just after a rainstorm blew through. Tough life. (I was wearing a winter coat and scarf, though - it's not like it's swimsuit weather here.)






This is our front gate, from the inside, and our leafless pomegranate tree - the tree being another one of God's funny surprises. The morning that Kevin and I came to see this "apartment" for the first time, I was looking at the pomegranates carved on some of the furniture in Jona's apartment where we were staying and commented that for all the looking I'd done last year, I had yet to see a single pomegranate in Italy. Well, that afternoon I ended up with not one pomegranate, but a whole tree-full, table-full, fruit-fly-mobbing glorious red juice-fest-full of pomegranates. Fortunately, Martha Stewart taught me how to peel pomegranates and emerge unstained - in short, peel the pomegranate underwater (just the pomegranate and your hands - the rest of you can stay unsubmerged). The pomegranates from the tree weren't the world's best - the seeds were more seed than juice-sack - but they were still a punchy sweet-and-a-little-tart snack.








Now - what is wrong with this picture?
Answer: This is what happens when a nifty "retractable" lamp decides that it is tired of staying retracted. The light is currently dangling at the level of the "Michigan" on my Michigan sweatshirt. I can look down on our "overhead" lamp.

This happened last night - just before we spontaneously lost power. Kevin has my great respect for a) making canelloni b) in the dark (partly) while c) dodging a descending lamp and then d) figuring out what the electrical issue was and fixing it! Mr. Wonderful!










Finally, here is my non-procrastinating husband himself. He looks like he's procrastinating in this picture (& I, were you to see me, look very industrious as I type away on my laptop), but looks are deceiving. He's in the midst of doing the transcription of a focus group session for the Angelicum's Strategic Planning office.

New Encyclical!

I live in Rome, but it takes an American back in the States to let me know that the Pope has released his latest encyclical. (Thanks, Thom.) Spe salvi - On Christian Hope was published today on the Vatican website.

“SPE SALVI facti sumus”—in hope we were saved, says Saint Paul to the Romans, and likewise to us (Rom 8:24). According to the Christian faith, “redemption”— salvation — is not simply a given. Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present: the present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey. Now the question immediately arises: what sort of hope could ever justify the statement that, on the basis of that hope and simply because it exists, we are redeemed? And what sort of certainty is involved here?

No small questions, those! This is the first paragraph; I'm looking forward to reading the rest. From the sparse sentences on Thom's blog, it sounds like atheism is one of the main things the Holy Father is addressing - timely, considering the spate of atheists hitting the presses lately: Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and other more scholarly types.

Enjoy, and happy Feast of St. Andrew (especially to those of you with Scotland in your veins . . . or last names...)!

Recent History, the Last Week in Ordinary Time, and Miscellaneous

Last Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, Kevin and I did indeed end up at the North American College, as planned. Beautiful Mass and a wonderful turkey dinner, with the much-anticipated pumpkin pie topping off the evening. This year it was introduced by none other than Elvis - apparently he didn't die, but instead chose to disguise himself as a seminarian of southeast-Asian descent. I would supply the very entertaining Thanksgiving-filled lyrics from this appearance of the King, but my Elvis repertoire isn't that good . . .

Friday we roasted two chickens plus a pair of chicken legs, and miraculously baked an apple pie. Apple pies are supposed to take (and in my experience do take) between 40 and 50 minutes to bake, but when we stuck the pie in the oven, we had around twenty minutes before we needed to head out the door to catch the train into Rome to celebrate Thanksgiving with a gaggle of friends. So we prayed. The pie was done in something under half an hour - perfectly done - and we made the train on time, chickens, legs, and pie in hand.

Continuing the theme of food, dinner Sunday night goes down as a meal to remember. A good friend and mentor of sorts of Kevin's, Dave B., came into town over the weekend on business and treated us to dinner at the Hotel Hassler, which sits atop the Spanish Steps. The Imàgo restaurant is itself atop the hotel (indoors), so the result is a breathtaking view of Rome. Great food, great company - great to finally meet Dave, about whom I'd heard so much - great view, great evening. Great big seagulls, too, perched out on the windowsill toward the end of our meal - two of them. The size of small cats. (They could each have eaten your Little Man whole when you first got him, dear Archibalds.) I never thought I'd say "noble" of a seagull, but it fit these birds.

Sunday was Christ the King Sunday, which also means that this is the last week of Ordinary Time - the Church is approaching her own new year's eve this Saturday. That also means that this is a week I've been anticipating for the whole year - it's the week of Dies Irae, a now-neglected Gregorian chant sequence once sung at Catholic funerals and on All Souls' Day, reminding everyone of the Divine Judge and our total dependence on Jesus' mercy. This is the week of Dies Irae because this week it is the recommended hymn for sections of the Liturgy of the Hours as we contemplate the end of the world, the Last Things, the Final Judgment.

It is a tremendous chant - you can hear the deep rolls of thunder, the sounding of the last trumpets, and see the red clouds boil in as the flaming chariot bearing Christ the Just Judge overshadows the Vittorio Emanuele Monument. You see the setting of my Apocalypse . . . It's taken a little bit of a beating this year because the monument is undergoing renovations & is shrouded in scaffolding and plastic - somewhat anti-climactic. Ah well. There's still the Dies Irae.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from Rome! Kevin and I have a great deal to be thankful for this year (each other, for example), and so we welcomed this holiday very fittingly with a dish that every American elementary school student is told was at the First Thanksgiving, eaten by the pilgrims wearing funny hats. The popcorn pictured was popped by none other than yours truly, Mrs. Keiser, herself. It goes down in Keiser (and Fenton) Family history as the first batch of real (non-microwave) popcorn I have ever popped. And I did it on the stove - no Stir-Crazy. Having a glass lid for the pan helped. A lot. In any case, it was truly an historic occasion (worthy of the "an" in front of historic - a point of style I don't really understand).

In other points of history and Keiser family happenings, we acquired a space heater today, and it's doing a lovely job heating our eating-and-computering space at the moment. Ah, the blissful feeling of not-freezing air on my feet! It's also possible for me to type quite a bit faster when my fingers are not stiff from the cold.

Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day proper (I'm writing this on Thanksgiving Eve), Kevin and I will be heading over to the North American College, where the American diocesan seminarians live, for their annual Thanksgiving Mass & Dinner. We'll be sitting at the Illinois table, since I'm from Michigan and Kevin is from Kansas. Clear? (Okay, we'll be there because an Illinois seminarian invited us.) The highlight of the dinner will (I assume) be the presentation of the pumpkin pies.

While the pie itself is enough of a highlight for me, its entry is further emphasized every year by some sort of song/reading/skit/poem/other creative endeavor. Last year, it was a very amusing rendition of the song "Pumpkin Pie," (which you probably know better, with different words, as "American Pie.") Another year, it was a reading of a section of Gaudium et Spes with "pumpkin pie" substituted for the word "man": "The dichotomy affecting the modern world is, in fact, a symptom of the deeper dichotomy that is in pumpkin pie itself. It is the meeting point of many conflicting forces. In its condition as a created being, it is subject to a thousand shortcomings, but feels untrammeled in its inclinations and destined for a higher form of life...And so it feels itself divided...."

Enjoy your turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, and yes, Pumpkin Pie, and don't forget to thank the One who is responsible for it all! (And say hi to the good ol' U.S.of A. for us if you're there.)

Interesting Book Review

Thanks, George, for the heads-up on Spengler's review of Fergus Kerr, OP's book Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians. Definitely the most interesting book review I've read in a long time - and now I want to read the book.

The review intrigued me for a number of reasons. First, Spengler begins with a rather bold premise:

To win a gunfight, first you have to bring a gun, and to win a religious war, you had better know something about religion. America's "war on terror" proceeds from a political philosophy that treats radical Islam as if it were a political movement - "Islamo-fascism" - rather than a truly religious response to the West. If we are in a fourth world war, as Norman Podhoretz proclaims, it is a religious war. The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West.

None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehend this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address. Who is Joseph Ratzinger, this decisive figure of our times, and what led the Catholic Church to elect him? Fr Kerr has opened the coulisses of Catholic debate such that outsiders can understand the changes in Church thinking that made possible Benedict's papacy. Because Benedict is the leader not only of the Catholics but - by default - of the West, all concerned with the West's future should read his book.

Second, I was able to dig up the table of contents (not found on Amazon.com) and found that I was looking at a list of most of the 20th century Catholic theologians that I'd like to know more about. I have read bits by some of them, know bits about most of them, and own books by a few of them (lying unread in boxes at home), but a real introduction to them would help.

These are the men who have shaped contemporary Catholic theology - not without controversy (a lot of controversy), and not without some tangling with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Schillebeeckx and Küng).

Preface.
1. Before Vatican II.
2. M.-D. Chenu.
3. Yves Congar.
4. Edward Schillebeeckx.
5. Henri de Lubac.
6. Karl Rahner.
7. Bernard Lonergan.
8. Hans Urs von Balthasar.
9. Hans Küng.
10. Karol Wojtyla.
11. Joseph Ratzinger.
12. After Vatican II.
Appendix: The Anti-Modernist Oath.
Index.

Third, I'm not at all sure I'll agree with Kerr's take on things - particularly his presentation of Thomism, which he seems to assert (according to Spengler's review) that Gilson, Chenu, and de Lubac, among others, rescued from the skeletal clutches of the 16th-century Jesuit Suarez.

My husband, I think, would differ.

Nevertheless, I would like to see how the much-misappropriated Aquinas is said to fit into this scheme - particularly when I have Kevin around to read excerpts to. After we finally get our hands on the book, I hope we'll post our own review.

Artificial "Intelligence"

Saturday morning, Kevin and I trotted into the Angelicum bright and early (9:30 - early enough for a Saturday!) to attend a lecture on Artificial Intelligence being given by Fr. Philippe-André Holzer, OP, one of my favorite professors from my philosophy program last year. The lecture was jointly part of an ongoing Angelicum course consisting of different lectures by different professors, and an offering of the STOQ Project: Science, Theology, and the Ontological Quest, a project sponsored by the Angelicum, the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Pontifical Lateran University, the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, and several other universities.

Fr. Holzer had done his doctoral dissertation on Artificial Intelligence, but he never referred to it in class, so I was looking forward to finally hearing a little about it from him.

He began the lecture with a rather detailed but very comprehensible introduction to Turing machines (I won't even try) and then moved on to the Turing test, introduced by Alan Turing in his 1950 article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Basically, if you asked questions to which you were given typewritten answers, would it be possible, within a five-minute "conversation," to determine whether the one answering the questions were a person or a computer. If it were not possible to distinguish a computer respondent from a human, Alan Turing would be satisfied that the computer was demonstrating intelligence.

Turing devotes the entire second half of the article to addressing objections, both objections concerning the possibility of intelligent machines and to his method for establishing their intelligence. The article (linked above) is worth a read for anyone interested in the area, if you haven't already read it (Dad).

If you want to try the year 1966's approach to the Turing test yourself, just check out ELIZA, the "Rogerian-psychologist" computer program.

Fr. Hozler finished the lecture with John R. Searle's 1980 article, "Minds, Brains, and Programs," which effectively establishes that the emperor of Turing's test has no clothes. Searle proposes the following test:

Suppose that I’m locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing. Suppose furthermore [page 418] (as is indeed the case) that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken, and that I’m not even confident that I could recognize Chinese writing as Chinese writing distinct from, say, Japanese writing or meaningless squiggles. To me, Chinese writing is just so many meaningless squiggles. Now suppose further that after this first batch of Chinese writing I am given a second batch of Chinese script together with a set of rules for correlating the second batch with the first batch. The rules are in English, and I understand these rules as well as any other native speaker of English. They enable me to correlate one set of formal symbols with another set of formal symbols, and all that "formal" means here is that I can identify the symbols entirely by their shapes. Now suppose also that I am given a third batch of Chinese symbols together with some instructions, again in English, that enable me to correlate elements of this third batch with the first two batches, and these rules instruct me how to give back certain Chinese symbols with certain sorts of shapes in response to certain sorts of shapes given me in the third batch. Unknown to me, the people who are giving me all of these symbols call the first batch a "script," they call the second batch a "story," and they call the third batch "questions." Furthermore, they call the symbols I give them back in response to the third batch "answers to the questions," and the set of rules in English that they gave me, they call the "program."

Now just to complicate the story a little, imagine that these people also give me stories in English, which I understand, and they then ask me questions in English about these stories, and I give them back answers in English. Suppose also that after a while I get so good at following the instructions for manipulating the Chinese symbols and the programmers get so good at writing the programs that from the external point of view – that is, from the point of view of somebody outside the room in which I am locked – my answers to the questions are absolutely indistinguishable from those of native Chinese speakers. Nobody just looking at my answers can tell that I don’t speak a word of Chinese. Let us also suppose that my answers to the English questions are, as they no doubt would be, indistinguishable from those of other native English speakers, for the simple reason that I ama native English speaker. From the external point of view – from the point of view of someone reading my "answers" – the answers to the Chinese questions and the English questions are equally good. But in the Chinese case, unlike the English case, I produce the answers by manipulating uninterpreted formal symbols. As far as the Chinese is concerned, I simply behave like a computer; I perform computational operations on formally specified elements. For the purposes of the Chinese, I am simply an instantiation of the computer program.

The area of Artificial Intelligence hasn't been getting a lot of popular attention in the last decade or so, despite its popularity in the 1980s. The Internet swept in and grabbed the spotlight, the new millennium dawned without any revenge of the machine, and HAL and his fellow thinking machines quietly fell to the wayside, androids written off as Cold-War-induced sci fi paranoia. Well, at least two creepy steps toward an android are out there: On the level of intelligence, there's this "baby", and on the level of appearance, would you be able to figure out whether you were talking to Hiroshi Ishiguro or Geminoid?

Busy Week

It was a busy week this week. Monday, we got our long-awaited washing machine. Our landcouple (that is, landlord and landlady) had agreed to include it as part of the lease, so they swooped in along with the installation guy from the store. He hooked it up in our downstairs bathroom and then walked Kevin through how to use it, in rapid Italian. I listened to the flood of incomprehensible words in growing consternation, realizing just how many buttons and knobs this pretty white creation has - all labeled with pictures and no words, whether English or Italian. Kevin's comment after he left? "Well, I didn't get everything he said, but it seems pretty self-explanatory."

Fortunately, the loads of laundry that I've done since do seem to have turned out okay - everything has emerged damp, smelling better than it went in, and has remained the same size. Works for me.

Tuesday through Thursday we had classes as usual - which means that it was my first full week of classes, having missed classes due to being sick and then having various and sundry classes suspended due to a Mass at St. Peter's (Thursday) for the pontifical universities and then for All Saints' Day (Thursday). It isn't over yet, either - next week, Thursday morning classes are suspended for opening-of-the-academic-year pomp at the Angelicum, and the following Thursday is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving, of course, isn't an Italian holiday, but with the North American College making up a significant portion of the English-speaking sections of the school, and the invitations they extend to other Angelicum students for their Thanksgiving festivities (both yours truly included), part of the afternoon is effectively knocked out. Poor Thursday professors. They're being hit hard this semester.

Friday dawned bright, beautiful, and wonderfully warm - no jackets necessary for our grocery-shopping trip. In the late afternoon, we hopped on the train into Rome to go to the Mass at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, since it was the feast of the dedication of the basilica. Made it to Mass, then walked out to find that the weather had cruelly changed - thunder, wind, and rain, and Kevin had no jacket. We'd been planning to go see Bourne Ultimatum, having on good authority that it was showing at a theater in English at 9:40pm, after which my last-year's roommate, Mary, had invited us to spend the night at her apartment. 'Twas not to be. They'd changed the showtime to 4:40pm - so we missed the movie, but still got to spend time (and the night) with Mary.

Kevin and Jeff

Kevin is cooking. A lover of omelets, he doubted that anyone could have much to teach him on the subject - and then he discovered The Frugal Gourmet, one of the two cookbooks I packed to bring to Rome.

Since then, it has been a voyage of discovery and new horizons have opened for the Keiser household. Thanks to this little manual, Kevin has mastered - and improved upon - the "Cheese and Tomato Omelet" (now known here as the Italian Omelet), the "French Potato and Garlic Omelet," and used Jeff Smith's principles to create the "Texas Omelet." This morning I got to have the potato and garlic omelet - two thumbs up. He's now looking forward to trying his hand at Mr. Frugal Gourmet's recipes for Cannelloni and for Pasta Carbonara. Who'd a thunk.

I have my own share of gratitude for Mr. Smith's book - last night I made his "Sole with Rosemary" (except our "sole" was cod . . . minor details), and it was the first fish I've ever had that involved no butter in the recipe and that I didn't want to add some to on my plate.

The recipe:

Sole with Rosemary

1 1/2 lbs. sole (er, cod) fillets
2 Tbls. olive oil
1 Tbl. lemon juice
2 Tbls. white wine
1 Tbl. fresh-chopped rosemary
1/2 Tbl. fresh whole rosemary or 1 tsp. dried (I used dried)
Salt and pepper to taste (I used 1/4 tsp. salt and not sure how much ground pepper)

Place the fish in a baking dish so that the fish fits snugly. Prepare a mixture of the olive oil, lemon juice, wine, parsley, and rosemary. Mix the above ingredients, and pour over the fish. Add salt and pepper, and bake for about 20 minutes, or until the fish barely begins to flake.
(Serves 4-6. Or 1 Kevin and 1 Heidi with a little bit left over.)

One other note is that when Kevin translated the back of the fish bag for me, I learned the trick of putting a piece of foil or parchment paper over the fish in the pan as it bakes - instead of drying out, the fish steams/soaks more in its own juices.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As for other adventures around here, yesterday evening Kevin and I made a run to IKEA - our last for a good long while, we hope, given that it involves the hour+ train into Rome, a long metro ride, and then a brief bus ride. Some walking in there, too. After getting (in record time) the sheets/towels/household miscellaneous we needed, we went next door to Euronics, the European version of Best Buy, to look for a printer.

We wanted a laser printer that would take us through two theses and assorted other papers - nothing fancy. Unfortunately for us, we arrived just before closing and seemed to only be able to find the fancy printers - plenty of scanner/printer/fax inkjets, plenty of photo inkjets - but a black-and-white laser printer? You silly person! Who wants to just print in just black-and-white!

Kevin finally asked a salesperson, and he pursed his lips and showed us two printers in the store's center-aisle box-stacks that he said were their two black-and-white laser printers. One was by Lexmark and one was by Epson. The Lexmark happened to be the same printer that Kevin and his roommates had bought there last year - only to find out that this Euronics, besides being a pain to get to - doesn't carry the refill cartridges (nor could they say where to get refills for it). We didn't want to repeat that scenario.

Before settling on the Epson, though, we decided to take a look at which refill cartridges they did stock - learning from experience - and, guess what - neither Lexmark nor Epson was represented. In fact, the only brand represented was Hewlett-Packard. The scavenger hunt began - the less expensive of the HP laser cartridges listed something like eight printers that it worked for, so we combed the printer boxes (figuring that at least one had to be in the store) until, lo and behold, there it was - for twenty Euro less than either the Lexmark or the Epson. Victory!

The Yellow Pumpkin

Well, I'm quite happy to say that our trip to La Zucca Gialla (map) with Henry and Roz was a smashing success. It's a little restaurant off the Piazza Navona. After meeting up at Trajan's Column, near the Angelicum, we arrived at The Yellow Squash around 7:30pm, making us some of their first evening customers (don't try eating dinner at a restaurant in Rome before about 7:15 - you won't have much luck).

The restaurant was true to its name. While it had a fairly standard assortment of Italian dishes, it had various pumpkin ones scattered throughout, and the ones we had were very good. I had ravioli with pumpkin sauce (think of a thick, savory pumpkin soup), and Kevin, Roz, and I all had a dish of either pork or veal cutlets (can't remember) with pumpkin sauce served in a lacy "bowl" made out of parmesan cheese. Very reasonable prices; great food. Definitely recommend it.

And, for the record, despite various Roman news articles with blurbs about Halloween, pumpkins don't seem to be associated with October 31 in Rome - or at least not enough to bring crowds into La Zucca Gialla. The restaurant seemed to be doing good business - I'd just be surprised if they were any busier than any other Wednesday night in October.

It was great to see Henry and Roz and catch up with them a bit - we got to hear anecdotes from their wanderings 'round Italy. It's also just fun to see familiar faces this far away from home.

Kevin and I took it easy yesterday - no classes due to All Saints' Day. We slept in, went to Mass here in Santa Marinella, stopped at the discount grocery store (our main store) conveniently located next to the church, came home, napped, ate lunch, and generally just hung around the house. I made bread in the evening - it's wonderful to have an oven! I'm still getting used to the flours here, though. Flour in Italy comes in different grades of fineness - type "00" is used for pasta and is finer than the type "0" flour that's better for baking. I found this out the hard way last year when I made pancakes with "00" flour and they turned out comparatively flat and gummy. Well, the last time I tried to get flour, the store I was at was out of type "0" flour, so I grabbed a bag labelled gran duro, which said that it was good for bread . . . and I didn't read any farther than that. Turns out that it's good for "rustic" breads - it's an unbleached flour a little coarser than type "0." The bread I made yesterday turned out fine - it's just a yellow loaf and a little more dry than it might have been (could also be due to getting used to the baking times for this particular oven). Poor Kevin - I'll just have to practice. (grin)

Finally.

Well, at long last, here I am again - except that now I'm officially a "we." After a whirlwind wedding, honeymoon, and student-visa-getting, Kevin and I have landed safely here in Rome, found a lovely place to live in the seaside town of Santa Marinella (roughly an hour north of Rome by train), and are mostly settled into classes at the Angelicum.

Pretty much as soon as we moved into the apartment, I got sick - fever and indigestion, mostly - but I am all better now, and very much enjoying my health. Kevin was wonderful through it and took very good care of me.

Life is good. We each only have classes Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, so we have to suffer through a four-day weekend every week. Lest, however, you get the impression that all is fun and games, getting up at 5:15 and getting home at 9pm on two of those three days (at least for Kevin) should make you think again.

It's been good to be back in Rome, now that we have somewhere to live and Internet. We're still waiting on a washing machine (missing part and then our landlady's mother in the hospital), but we've been managing . . .

The "winter" rains have started here, it seems, and it got pretty cold last week, but temperatures are back up to the 60's (F), which I'll take even with precipitation.

As far as immediate news goes, Henry and Roz, friends from Michigan, are in town, and we're meeting them for dinner this evening. We'll be heading over to La Zucca Gialla (map), or "The Yellow Squash." Kevin made a reservation for us yesterday - we'll see how far that gets us . . . Aside from it being the eve of All Saints' tonight, it's a restaurant that I was told about and didn't get to go to last year - we tried once, only to find it closed. As shocking as it might seem, I've only had two restaurant meals in Rome that I was impressed enough with to want again - and one of those was a hamburger from Hard Rock Café. I'm hoping I'll run into something memorable tonight.

In the meantime, a blessed vigil and feast of All Saints to you!