Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day.  It's funny that it's called International as I've never heard of it outside of Italy.  The yellow mimosa (pictured above) is the official gift of International Women's Day here in Italy.  Fabri and I bought a small potted tree yesterday for our balcony.  Yesterday we bought all sorts of stuff for our balcony.  We got a nice teak table with four chairs, some more pots and dirt and more flower seeds!  Today we treated the new furniture with teak oil.  It was fun getting dirty and getting stuff done around the house.  We also got rid of the last of the packing material from my shipment.  Getting ready for spring!

On Friday I taught 3 classes in Cuneo in the afternoon finishing at 7:30.  Then I came home and changed and Fabri and I met Giovanni, Brunella, Lulu, Gaetano & Detta for pizza in Monsola near Savigliano.  Lulu is in her terrible twos and was at first shy and upset about being to dinner with us.  She wouldn't even look at her aunts & uncles!  What a little baddy.  But she got over it and started behaving eventually.  I taught her Itsy Bitsy Spider which she really liked, especially when I made the itsy bitsy spider with my hands.  After dinner we invited everyone back to our house.  I made a big batch of popcorn and then played with the baby.  Oh, you know what Giovanni did when he got to our house?  He came inside, picked up the dish of candies and threw them up so they landed all around the room!  Giovanni is CRAZY.  He picked them up of course, but he's an animal that one.  But it was a lot of fun.  

Last night we had 3 members of the band Schneeflock.  Schneeflock is Mickey's band & Mickey was the best man in our wedding.  Anyway, we had Pej, Steo & Mickey over.  They're all friends of Fabri's.  They were going to a concert at this bar/club just a block from our house and we told them to come to our place first.  We had some drinks and showed off the house to Pej & Steo who hadn't seen it before.  Then we all went to the bar.  This pretty famous singer was supposed to be playing an acoustic set starting at 11 or so.  Well sometime after midnight he finally hit the stage.  Instead of singing the songs that made him famous (what everyone was there for) he read his diary loudly and horribly to bad music with a lot of background (not unplugged).  It was horrible!  Fabri plugged his ears.  We grit our teeth through the first song, but then a mass exodus started and we heard that he planned on continuing with his performance for the whole night.  Fabri and I decided we were out of there and joined some friends outside complaining about the performance.  Steo was there and he was really sorry for me because I couldn't even understand the monologue.  So Fabri and I headed home, but we still had fun.  It's good to go to a dive bar/music club and drink a couple of beers with some friends.

We don't have many plans for this week.  I'm teaching classes on Thursday night and Friday evening/afternoon.  I'm volunteering at the museum Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.  Hopefully we'll find lots of fun stuff to do too!