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.