Two Excellent Gentlemen in Ottawa

 In the mad preparation for the move to Sicily I haven't written nearly enough about the various and sundry Canada and CFL adventures this summer. I promise to make up for that. I'll just post a couple pictures of my dear friends Kevin and Erik, that I snapped on our trip to Ottawa for the REDBLACKS game. The game was a bit of a dog, since, well, the REDBLACKS are sort of historically terrible - and may actually finish the season without a win. Still, Ottawa is a great town, and going to a CFL game, any CFL game, is still a wonderful time. And this is especially true when you're at the game with two of your best friends.

We stopped out a posh coffeeshop near the stadium, mainly to get out of the heat. It wasn't as miserably hell hot as the Winnipeg/Regina (especially the Saskatchewan game, which clearly prepared me for coming to Sicily in August).

We stopped for a more substantial meal right outside the stadium, which left us sitting outside, grabbing as much shade as possible (Kevin, as usual, the sensible one, was more successful in shade management). I had forgotten how much French you hear in Ottawa, which is in generally Anglophone Ontario, but is both close to the border with Quebec but also, I suspect more importantly, takes its position as the nation's capital very seriously, thus emphasizing English and French. Our waiter moved easily from English to French with every table.

Erik, either reflecting on life or sorting out the menu or making last minute changes to his CFL fantasy team.

The Glamorous Life in Italia

 There are the big differences when you're overseas, and then there are the small ones. If you've lived overseas you know that one of the smallest (but which has the biggest consequences) relates to washing your clothes. When I lived in Abu Dhabi one of the reasons why I insisted on moving from the hyper posh Radisson Blue to the long-term place next door was having my own washing machine, as compared to carefully counting out the number of free clothes that we were allowed each week (although it was awfully damn posh there - of course, having free access to all that we could drink every night at happy hour would have killed me eventually anyway). Here's a picture of our laundry rack on our balcony at our new place. What you learn very quickly when you live overseas is that owning an expansive and separate washer and dryer is very much an American phenomenon. Here we have a washer/dryer (much I had when I lived in Abu Dhabi or in the places I've rented in Portugal) in one machine. It's a dryer in the sense that a few more spins leaves the clothes "dryer" than simply coming out of the washer alone. You still need to hang them up, which is not a problem when you live in a place as hot and sunny as Sicily.

And this is so much better than what we dealt with at our first apartment in Terrasini, when we had to set up the rack on the sidewalk outside the front door, hoping that the wind or the motorcycles didn't knock it over. And that's not even mentioning the neighbors who would unplug our water pump - and even lock the door to the water pump - so that we couldn't do laundry if we wanted to. Here we have privacy, and you can freely hang out your underwear without inspiring community commentary.

Italian G

 My son captured one of the pictures of me that Janet sent home, and labelled it in his phone, "Italian Dad."  It's not that picture, but another one that Janet snapped when I wasn't paying attention (I like to take the pictures, mainly to control the narrative, which is probably just the historian in me). 

This is a funny picture because it was right after I had accidentally shaved off my beard (I'll recount that misadventure some other time). Happily, the light behind my head helped hide the evidence. And I wasn't trying to cover up the crime, but instead was interrupted while trying to decide which pizza to order. 

Another Middling Success

 And the second box arrived. Again, up to this point we don't have a mailroom, so you just have to wait around for the blessed call to come. There just be some way to include a note on the order to just leave the package outside the door, although I can also understand why a delivery company wouldn't be too excited about that option. Of course, I could also learn the Sicilian (or maybe Italian) exchange for "thanks, could you just leave it outside the door?" Usually, midday, considering that "sono in pensione" and most things are closed during siesta anyway, I'm hanging around the apartment, it's not big of a deal, since our deliveries have tended to come early afternoon. 

If it made sense that the first item out of the other box was a cryptid t-shirt, it makes even more sense that CFL merch would pop out first with this one. This box included my Alouettes sweatshirt and a couple long sleeve t-shirts, so I guess I'm already ready for winter in Sicily. Now, on the other hand, flying back to Vermont for a winter visit . . .

One Year, Really?

 My oldest and dearest friend, Jack, just sent me this picture. He snapped it exactly one year ago, when Janet and I, taking advantage of the short holiday, had flown from Vermont down to Florida to see Jack and his wife Julie. Beyond how happy (and fat) I look, the thing that struck me about this picture is what a difference a year makes. In that one short year since the picture was snapped, Jack's company went bankrupt and he quickly found another job in Colorado, close to one daughter and his only grandson - and I retired, we moved to Sicily, and my grandson is due to arrive in late December. This is not a profound statement, but life is awfully strange.

Janet commented that I looked awfully happy, which I was. And why shouldn't I be happy, of course, sitting on a beach with my dear friend, and well-lubricated with adult scholarly beverages.

Poshification

 When Kevin and I head off for our CFL Trips of Excellent, the one common theme is that our choices are not posh. We did eat a really nice steak dinner in Calgary on the Summer of 2025 Elks/Roughriders trip, but it wasn't that posh of a place in the great scheme of things (although the steak was amazing). However, on the Winnipeg leg of this last summer's trip, we had to poshify the trip because our friend Cyndi was along for the first section of the trip. I don't hold it against her, mainly because of her patrician roots are hard to overcome. Here are a couple pictures I snapped at the crazy nice restaurant where we ate in Winnipeg (and I've completely forgotten the name, which speaks to my yellow clay Hoosier hillbilly roots).

Now, it was a seriously good steak.

I think this very un-Scudder drink was meant to be an homage to the excellent Debi Zale, who is a huge fan of artist formerly known as Prince.

An Occasional Middling Success

 I lament my consistent and embarrassing run of clumsy failures since moving to Sicily, but there have been a few marginal successes. Here's a picture of Janet holding up our first delivery to the new place. Once we were certain of our address (or fairly certain, which is actually true even today), and moved in, I asked Ali to send a couple small boxes of my clothes that we had left behind, with the goal of mailing them as an experiment. They were mailed the same day, and a couple weeks later the first one arrived. Inexplicably, the second one left the US a week after its sister, so it's still in transit. It's certainly not a seamless process here, since we don't have a mailbox and the buzzer is still not clearly linked to our apartment (although it's a sweat buzzer, with a camera). I taped a note below the buzzer with our names, what might be our apartment number, and my Italian phone number. We were walking back from the gym when we received a call on the Italian phone, and it was the very nice postal guy calling us from outside the apartment (I knew this because I handed the phone to my wife, who speaks much better Italian than me). We hurried back to the apartment and met the guy outside our door, and it was a beautiful handoff. Since then we have had a couple other deliveries, and we're getting into the swing of things. When I lived in Mumbai, part of the mailing address was "Next to the Overpass," which I thought was a joke at my expense, but it was actually a suggestion from the post office, and it helped immensely.

So, although the second box is still in transit, we'll consider this a success. For the moment, we're ignoring the fact that it cost $220 to mail two small boxes of my own possessions to me (thank God DOGE fixed the government . . .). The fact that it two (or three) weeks to get here, and was so expensive, was not the fault of the Italian postal service.

And, of course, the first shirt I pulled out was even more (as if I needed more) cryptid merch.