April fun!

Before Spring Break, we were busy enjoying the different ways to entertain oneself as an American living in Italy. My friend Sara and I like to go on adventures, the two we went on this past spring was to look for demijohns and we hit gold! Well, first we hit some trash, and saw some interesting, yet typical sights you see living in Italy, then we hit gold...

snapping photos of what Italian cemeteries look like...

And this is how we find demijohns...

We can also "find" them by having date-day and going up toward Benevento to Solopaca to fill up demijohns with wine at a pump...

All this wine... what about beer? We found a local microbrewery too!

After our Spring Break adventure, life continued to more swiftly too - rarely is there NOTHING to do. Those days are rare but hey, we live in Italy for only a short time, so we have to enjoy it! Jamie's cousin, Tess, who was studying abroad in Wales, was on her spring break and got in touch with us. Jamie treated Tess and her friend to a day adventure in the rain in downtown Napoli: cafe at Gambrinus (the old, famous cafe), pizza at Da Michele (made famous by Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love), and then brought them to our house for a non-hostel evening of home-cooked food, a washer and dryer, some limoncello and a comfy, clean bed to sleep in.

I took off on a girls trip with my friends Molly and Kara - we headed first to one of my favorite finds for fun, refurbished Italian furnishings near Siena.

We each left with some ideas and treasures before heading further north to Ochiobello where we stayed overnight, and dined on some fantastic Italian dishes and some wine. Off to Nove, Italy for some fun shopping. Nove is known for their ceramics, specifically ceramics that are made for Lenox, Tiffany & Co, Williams-Sonoma, Crate & Barrel, Anthropologie, etc.

We had fun, got a little overwhelmed, made some good purchases and moved on to another night "off", uniterrupted dinner at a restaurant back in Orvieto - a bit closer to home.

From there, our days were filled with gymnastics performances, surprise 40th birthday parties, and Mickey Mouse kids parties before the four of us were heading back northward to Orvieto. This time, we were meeting Unc & (Aunt) Debi - Jamie's uncle and aunt from Syracuse - they were in Italy for Unc's company's Presidents Club annual conference that took place in Rome. They extended their Italian adventure to spend part of it with us. We thought they would enjoy Orvieto, and then a side excursion for wine and olive oil tasting. It was a fun visit, although a short one.

All this fun had to come to an end eventually. And so PCS season began. PCS?? What's that?? The wonderful world of the military has, what seems to be, about one million acronyms. PCS is the acronym for Permanent Change of Station, and it's a term you hear, especially here, every day. People begin the moving process once orders are in hand, of course. Once those papers are in our hot little hands, we can schedule movers for our HHG (House Hold Goods), schedule the temporary furniture to come in, make TLA (something about temporary lodging) reservations at the base hotel for your last days before you hop on the Rotator - the regularly scheduled military flight that gets people from one duty station to the next. My first sad day came when I volunteered to drive to Rome airport with my friend Kristin, to take their dog, DJ, so she could fly back to the states before the hot temperatures arrived and animals can no longer fly for the season. See, they did not have orders yet, they had already waited as long as they could before they had to make special arrangements for their fuzziest family member to get stateside. It was a fairly easy process considering how expensive it was, but it was awfully sad to say good bye to DJ as we saw her through security checks, paperwork stamping, cargo loading, etc. The good news was, DJ made it safely to Atlanta to spend several weeks with her, ummm, grandmother.

And before another O'Leary family adventure was about to begin, we had to send off another friend to the states... My friend Molly, her husband Andy, dubbed "Googleboy", and their two girls, Claire and Ellie. Lincoln and Claire were like an old married couple - one minute they adroe each other, the next they are bickering, then they are best buddies again and then back to "He/She's not letting me talk!"

We had an "Arreivederci" party for them, but we also had a ladies night of bunco playing to send Molly off in style. I couldn't post them here, but in true Molly-fashion, we did her vogue-like series of photos as the camera was set in timer mode to take 10 shots. This was the *best* one of us all: