Day to Day

Gene has written about our big adventure to Monte Generoso. I'll fill in about what we have doing day to day. Much of our life revolves around going to the grocery store, whether it be to the big Bennet in Como or the smaller markets in Lenno or Mezzegra. The stores are closed from 1pm-330pm each day and on Sunday afternoons. One buys bread each day and fruit and vegetables are sold ripe so don't last more than a day or two. There are no giant boxes of cereal or large size packaging of anything. We are always running out of something. We have been eating a lot of tomatoes(the ones we planted have fruit but it will be awhile before we'll be eating those)and always need those. We were always searching for orzo which is a rice shaped pasta that I will occasionally cook in Phoenix. Gene and I searched many pasta aisles in various grocery stores looking for orzo. I was making a recipe for a dinner I was preparing for our guests Dennis and Anna. It turns out that orzo in Italian is barley not pasta and what I call orzo is called risine. We've been to grocery stores in Lugano(Migros), in Porlezza(Standa), in Como(Bennet), in Menaggio(Pellicano), in Lenno(Sisa and Dinos) and in Mezzegra(Pellicano)searching for items found everyday in stores in the USA.

During the last week we went to Lugano where a bird crapped on me as we were walking. Just got me on my shorts which was better than last year when Gene got it on his shoulder and neck. We walked to the market in Mezzegra on a very hot, humid day. We've had some sunny, hot, humid days, some thunderstorms and hazy days. We've been to dinner at Dennis and Anna's place in Menaggio and had them over here for dinner. We tried a new restaurant in Menaggio, The Lido, with Dennis and Anna the other night. Yesterday the owners of the villa came by in the morning to try and get the wireless internet set up. We have internet but we had very long cables to our computers. After some hours of trying we gave up. Later that day I Skyped Peter asking if he could help with this setup. After almost 2 hours of trying and with remarkable patience(he is not known for his patience)and after the 4th remote access connection was lost, he said he could do no more. The site for the router was in Italian and he kept losing remote access. The site for the router was still up when I resumed control of my computer and after selecting something that I thought was promising, I tried the wireless and it finally worked. I don't know what Peter did nor what I did but we are estatic and I'm sure that Denis is too.
Denis arrives on Friday and without wireless he will not be able to follow the Dodger games in the middle of the night. Denis is bringing some memory cards for Gene's computer which I ordered from Dell and had sent to his home. Since we have been here Gene's computer has been getting the "blue screen of death"(BSOD) almost every day. I had been on the phone with Dell support for over 2 hours one night trying to figure out the problem. He needed new memory. Since the night Dell worked on his computer the BSOD has not appeared so often and once we install the new memory it should be fine. Thank God for Skype.
Life goes on, the pace is slow. We are loving it.
Ciao.