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.