Minor problems and major deliveries

Another week gone and nothing to show for it.  

Ok, that’s not true.  We got our first shipment of puzzles here in Italy.  The truck arrived early Monday morning with 160 boxes of puzzles ready to be stored in the dungeon awaiting shelves that need building in the castle. 

We had Antonio and Elena here to help us unload, and the thing was finished within 1/2 an hour.  This was astounding to us as we expected it to take 4 hours.  In fact, we had a bit of an emergency problem to solve.  I didn’t know we needed to notify the commune in advance that we would have a truck coming.  Problem solved though.  Antonio is brilliant and got our permission.  We put out a few signs to have the vehicles removed by 8 am Monday and were ready to go.  

As expected, people don’t always read signs and one car was left in our reserved spot. No problem, the truck just blocked 1/2 a lane of traffic for an hour.  Now I know this sounds terrible, but it’s October, and well, Panicale.  The 'season' is over and there is little traffic now.  

I got a kick out of watching the truck driver run around the castle taking photos of it.  He looked like me when we first decided to buy the place.  He’s from Prague and thought this was more beautiful.  Nice guy.

When we finished, George and I went upstairs and had lunch.  But me being me, I ran back down and opened as many of the containers with lids on them as I could.  I wanted to see what it was we got.  You see, this is a collection we purchased and much like many things in our marriage, we hadn’t seen it before we bought it.  

We expected to have maybe half of the collection already, but were thrilled to see that in fact, most of it was new to us!   We’ve probably added another 5000 items to our growing museum.  

On Tuesday we had our language lessons as usual, and on Wednesday I decided to go open some more of those boxes.  I managed to go into Tavernella and get some packing tape, so again after lunch I headed downstairs.  This was fantastic!  Like Christmas.  The first 5 or 6 boxes I opened contained company catalogues.  Even better.  When I left Hong Kong I left all of mine behind.  It was just too much to send over.  Our library just grew some more with some very needed missing pieces.  

On our trip to get packing tape, George suddenly shouted at me to stop the car!  I did as requested and pulled into a parking lot.  He saw a field full of Marijuana growing on the edge of town.  This was a real shock to us.  We of course walked over and took a look.  We then noticed a small farmers market stand and decided to look at that as well.  The owner came over and asked us if we wanted to buy some weed!  Pass. But how funny.   

And you just know I'll be buying my shallots and garlic here. 

We have rather substantially increased our disentanglement and glass puzzles with this purchase.  There is of course some 'big wood' as well.  I still have well over 1/2 of the boxes left to open.  Sadly, we decided to leave them taped up until our return next May.  While I am eager to see what is inside, I agree that we should wait until the shelving is all in place.

This of course brought us to another problem.  We have to redo our floor plan of where everything will go.  You see, we bought this castle because ALL of our puzzles would fit in it with room to grow.  We didn’t take into consideration my buying more puzzles on the scale that I do.  Not to worry though, the ceilings here are in many rooms, almost 4 meters high.  We plan to use the full extent of that for puzzle display.  More fun for me to work on while we are here.

We had the man who designed the water and heating system of the castle come out and turn on the heat this week.  It dropped down so cold that we have had an electric heater turned on at night.  As it turned out, the system was still not working.  I had to replace the batteries in the on/off controls.  We did, and no joy.  But at least the weather has turned warm again.  

We had breakfast with a lady from the village on Friday.  Nice girl who gave us a lot of information on the city and how to do things.  I think we will get along just fine here.  Now to get those visas sorted.  One of the things she told us was that people here just stop in the middle of the road to answer their phones. I was surprised to hear this as I'd never seen it.  She cursed us! On the way to Perugia that afternoon, it happened twice!  

Another thing we noticed is that people will just stop anywhere, block the road and talk to their friends and neighbors.  As I write this, I heard a motorcycle stop outside the window.  I got up to look and sure enough, there was the driver chatting away with a driver of a pickup truck.  You guessed it, the road is blocked.  I just love these little things here.  

Last night after dinner, I turned on the water to warm so I could do the dishes.  About 2 minutes later, it just stopped.  No water.  Sigh.  That means no shower and dirty dishes left in the sink. We are Floridians so I quickly ran in the bathroom and filled a basin full of water so we would at least be able to flush the loo in the morning.  I'll have to call out our guy again and get this fixed.  It seems rather odd that this happened right after the heating system got turned on. 

I’ve been to the post office twice this week to pick up packages that were not delivered to the house for one reason or another.  Most were puzzles, but one was a blanket I ordered from Amazon back in early September.  Amazon here uses the post office for deliveries, and the post office is only open 3 days a week.  So much for Prime delivery.  I’ll learn the system eventually.  In the interim we plan to have a punch code on one of the doors so the delivery folk  can open a slot and slide the packages in.  I’ll have to learn how to write that on my address in Italian too.  

And speaking of language, I’m getting along better each day.  I just wish the Spanish vocabulary would replace itself with Italian. That would sure make life easier.  I’ve now got post-it notes throughout the apartment we are staying in with everything labeled.  I’ve also made up 100’s of vocabulary cards to flip through daily.  This will help me lean quicker-or at least that is the theory.  I don’t want to be living here 30 years on and still not understand what people are saying to me.  I mean, if I can get enough Chinese to survive Italian should be a walk in the park right?  Fino alla prossima settimana, continua a rompicapo