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.

Potemkin Village

 Here's a great picture of Janet trying to will the elevator into working - or, more accurately starting to work. When we moved into our new place we knew that the elevator wasn't hooked up yet, although we did receive one of those classic Sicilian shrugs that said it would happen soon (the Sicilian equivalent of "bukrah inshallah"). It's been two and a half weeks, and we're still waiting. Actually, it's not that big a deal, and it's more of a source of amusement than anything else. The four floors up and down, several times a day, are a bit of a challenge for my aged and infirm legs, but, as I said to someone the other day, "I need the exercise," and, for that matter, since I walk a couple miles every day, I can honestly say that I couldn't have held up two months ago when we arrived. It's a small price to pay for an apartment that we absolutely love.

We've started referring to it as our own personal Potemkin Village (for those of you who remember your Russian history).

The Sunset Pictures Have to Go Somewhere

 My friends at home have long since grown tired of me sending beautiful sunset pictures from here in Terrasini (although I can't believe that I'll ever catch up on the number of stunning sunset pictures that I've sent from the Wadi Rum or Zanzibar). So, they have to go somewhere. One of the biggest selling points as we considered the new apartment was the view from our balcony. Oddly, we haven't watched the sunset from the widow's walk off the bedroom (one floor up), which has less to do with aesthetics than Janet being wigged out by heights. That said, I think it will become her go-to place for morning meditation.

We're definitely enjoying the addition of clouds to the Sicilian skies.

Now More Than Ever

 The other day we dropped our ballots in the mail, as this wasn't going to be my first election since 1980 that I didn't vote. The nice lady at the post office gave an appropriately Sicilian non-committal shrug when Janet asked if they would arrive in time to be counted, but we should be fine.

It would have been a pity to not vote in the last free (well, semi-free) election in US history.

Moon Over the Tyrrhenian Sea

 Here's a picture I snapped from the balcony of our new place the other morning. I'm an old man, and old men get up at 5:00 rather they want to or not. After six weeks behind frosted glass in the sensory deprivation experiment that was our first apartment, having access to natural light and a balcony has made all the difference in the world to our mood.

We'd enjoyed a beautiful full moon, and it was so lovely to see it still firmly in the sky early in the morning. Before I head out for my morning walk, I usually find myself reading on the balcony, drinking coffee, and waiting for the day to come into itself.

Worship Is of Three Kinds

 "Worship is of three kinds: some people worship God out of fear, and that is the worship of slaves; other people worship God seeking reward, and that is the worship of hirelings; and some people worship God out of love, and that is the worship of those who are free, and that is the most excellent worship."

Jafar al-Sadiq

Every time I reread this passage I am moved, and I've probably featured it on posts somewhere along the way. It is from Jafar al-Sadiq, a very important figure in the Shia branch of Islam. To me, if you're praying and you're only doing so because you're afraid - or simply because you want something from God - then I don't really understand the point of your faith (or any faith, for that matter). Why would you worship a God (no matter how you define the divine) whose relationship with you is either a glorified Stockholm syndrome or the equivalent of Amazon? We're only free when, well, we're free to determine our path. If we're not free in that most intimate moment with the divine, then the moment is stripped of its beauty and meaning.