Burning Up the Projector

I just realized that I have become my creepy Uncle Roger (not really, cuz I'm pretty sure he bad touches his daughters) and have forced everyone in the room to watch 6 hours of slides from the RV trip to Yellowstone. I heartily apologize for that. However, I still feel the need to whip out a few more pictures from my vacation arsenal, but I will attempt to keep the long-winded narrative to a minimum. I promise that I will soon be back to ignoring this blog on a more regular basis, and only surfacing when I need to rant. So enjoy the randomness and feel free to make up your own story to go along with the pics.



Not sure what these were supposed to be (part of a fire pit?), but he was really going to town on them.



What does it take to get arrested around here?

This guy was like a slightly disturbing Paul Newman. I put money in his cup and he waved me over and motioned me to sit down next to him. He handed me his pistol, looked into my eyes and said, "Shoot me, lady." So I did.



These were some ruins that have now been turned into a cat sanctuary. I couldn't figure out why we hadn't seen any cats around, and then we came to the Area Sacre. Apparently, a local animal society catches the strays, vaccinates and sterilizes them, and turns them loose in the ruins. We saw about 15 cats in there, and I gotta say, great for them but a little creepy for me. Pet Semetary, anyone? Sadly, it doesn't always work out for the furry friends either.


Whoever made that sign was pretty attached to this particular feline (click 'em to big 'em). I mean, I love cats too, but I just can't eat a whole one by myself.



This is quite possibly the largest foot I have ever seen, not counting our muu-muu wearing client who has gout.


A portion of a horse and rider in the Colosseum. Hopefully this statue was broken along the way. Otherwise, that's a pretty tragic accident to memorialize in stone. "Look, Billy, this is the famous soldier and horse who got hacked into pieces on the battlefield."


The inside of the Colosseum, where contrary to popular belief, few Christians were actually martyred. Crocodiles and bears, on the other hand, were getting their animals butts hauled out of the depths to go postal on one another on a regular basis.



Am I the only one who did not know there were trees like this in Italy? I really need to get out more.

Ya know how everyone always talks about the hot Italian guys? I firmly believe it is an urban legend. Most of the men we saw looked like Marlon Brando in his later years. And just when there was an exception, I had to start praying he was just really secure in his masculinity.


Please let that be his girlfriend's scooter.


The hobbit house along the Appian Way. I would so live there.



That's it, folks! You have suffered enough. I did not find my mother an Italian stallion, so the quest was a failure. The slides are now over. Can someone turn on the lights?

Are Feet Supposed to Be This Swollen?

(I know I was going to get back to this sooner, but a friend killed himself by setting himself on fire. Needed a break to wrap my head around it.)


Back to Italy we go. Today was finally the day we traveled to Rome. I'd like to say all the excitement was about the sites I was going to see, but let's be realistic. It was all about getting out of that rotten Hilton Hotel. A refrigerator box next to a porta potty would have been more functional.

But this time, we were booked at the Sheraton Roma, and it was worth the money that our travel agent didn't want to tell us we were paying. Polite staff, working elevators, fabulous fitness center, lights that worked, comfy beds, and a pool - I'm pretty sure when those glass doors silently slid open and revealed the grand piano and free internet in the lobby, I heard a heavenly choir burst into song. Is that a functioning ice machine? Look - it's at the end of a rainbow!

Enough about that. Our latest tour guide was Amadeo, and he took us on a walking tour of Rome's city highlights. He was a Frenchman who spoke Italian and English with a British accent. Like I wasn't confused enough about the language. He zipped us past all major sites, like the Colosseum and Circus Maximus, but we would go back later to get good pics.


Well, not all the good pics. Would ya look at that horn of plenty.


And check out this famous Italian statue. I think our bus captain was a little intimidated by the gun.


Once we ditched Amadeo, we decided to hit the city hardcore. Yep, capris and sandals. Hardcore.

We scoped out the Bocca della Verita (The Mouth of Truth) at Santa Something-or-Other. Word on the street was that it was a sort of old-fashioned lie detector. Stick your hand in its mouth and answer a question. If you are lying, it bites your hand off. Lovely. As much as I love jamming my hand into orifices on manhole covers, I decided to pass. I'll stick with my p-p-p-poker face.



After walking and shopping for about 87 hours, we decided to trek over to the Trevi Fountain. I've always thought it looked cool in movies, but it is better in person, especially when it's 150 degrees out and you're sweating like a bloated pig. Not that I was or anything. That would be gross.



Obviously, a tour isn't a tour without every muscle in your legs crying out in agony after climbing a thousand steps, only to travel back down them. So we scurried over to the Spanish Steps, which surprisingly, look like every other set of stairs I've traveled over the years. Cue the shinsplints.


During our travels, we were crossing a street when I heard the most profane language being shouted at someone. Assuming our group had committed some cultural error, I turned to see who was unhappy. This is the only person I saw. Not making any accusations, just sayin'. Nuns and road rage, how do you know they don't go together like peanut butter and fried pickles?

And since the current theme of this post seems to be culturally irrelevant pictures, I'll admit my fascination with things not encountered outside grocery stores in Hickville.


Isn't parking generally used for methods of transportation? I do not want to see the size of a dog people ride to a grocery store.

And no visit to Italy is complete without a gander at ye ole Vatican. Not being Catholic, I really had no interest in going inside, though I imagine the Sistine Chapel would be pretty cool. So I just stood outside in the courtyard and enjoyed the breeze kicked up by thousands of believers crossing themselves.



Our final stop of the day was to the Castel Sant' Angelo.


The place was massive, but sadly has been made a tad commercialized on the inside. While no longer a working castle, there was a killer restaurant at the top and they used a dumbwaiter to bring the food up from the first floor. And we did enjoy watching a completely lame magic/clown show meant for children. It was highly entertaining listening to him interact with the children in the audience. Ok, fine, maybe the children's Italian was all I could understand - colors and numbers - but that's neither here nor there. A five year old girl named Flavia unintentionally gave away his secret and made it all worth it.

Then it was back across the Ponte Umberto for some more pizza and weird hot dog hoagies, live music by the polluted river, and of course, gelato. Is it possible to OD on Italian ice cream? Ahh, well, we'll find out.



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In other news, there is a man sitting next to my desk making the most godawful groans with every breath he takes. I'm not sure if his lungs are collapsing or if he is attempting to drop a load on our newly upholstered chair. I hope it's the former.

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If you have ever wanted to see Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking sing along with autotune, now is your chance.

My Blood Runs Cold

OK, I need a break from the whole "Look what I did in Italy" bit. It's all starting to come out in a monotone in my head. Bueller? Bueller? And I have a little traumatizing story to tell before it takes over my brain and I die of an aneurysm in the shower. Nobody wants that. I'll finish the Tale of Italian Cities later, I promise.

You know that 80's song Centerfold by J. Geils Band? Yeah, well, I always liked that song. Until yesterday.

When I was young, I had a friend that was a year younger than me who we shall call Deadpan Barbie. Her parents ran the local locker plant (where they kill the cattle for your hamburgers) where my brother worked. She had the coolest playhouse above the plant that had previously been an apartment. I always tried to be really well-behaved when I went to their house. I had once heard the grown-ups discussing how her mom had been an LSD freak in her teens, fried most of her brain cells, and now she was teetering on the brink of ending up rocking back & forth in a corner, sucking her thumb. I was bound and determined not to be the reason she ended up in the booby hatch.

Deadpan Barbie's older sister was a red-headed, freckle-faced Lolita - always jumping on the back of one of the male employees, giggling like Fran Drescher on crack, and begging for attention from anyone who didn't look away fast enough. In high school, she started sleeping with a gross, pervy married guy, and ended up pregnant at the same time as his wife. While pregnant, she would strip on the tables at the local bar. I never could understand how the guys would look at that, cuz she was so ugly she'd make a train take a dirt road. Truly, beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

DB's older brother was the golden boy of the family, and he could do no wrong in her parent's eyes, even though he was completely lazy and dumber than a box of hair. If he did something wrong, he would give a bug-eyed stare that was supposed to pass for innocence, and DB would get blamed. I swear he could have mowed down a crowd of retarded midgets, and his mother would have said, "Well, they must have done something to provoke him."

Somewhere in the midst of all that crazy, Deadpan Barbie kinda got forgotten about. She was shy and wouldn't speak to anyone unless forced, and since she wasn't a walking flesh mattress, her parents just assumed she'd be fine. Her sister got even crazier, and was stealing from the parent's home every time they were gone. She finally married a guy who turned out to be the local Peeping Tom. The brother fell in with a party crowd in high school, and ended up wrecking a jet ski while drunk at the local reservoir. They didn't find his body for two weeks. The dad had a nervous breakdown, and our families stopped hanging out.

Though we still saw each other in school, DB and I went our separate ways. She ended up joining the military after graduation, which stunned everyone, but a family friend helped her get out a couple months later when she reported being sexually harassed. She came back to live with her parents for awhile, and the last time I saw her, she had white-blonde hair and was Oompa-Loompa orange from constant tanning, flat as a board, and slumped to the point it was painful to see. I asked her how things were going, and she told me she was going to head to art school in the fall. She seemed excited about that, but she was still the same quiet, expressionless, sweet, insecure girl I had always known. I couldn't imagine how she would survive living in a city.

Fast forward about ten years. I heard that DB had come back for her high school reunion in July, but I hadn't gotten to see her. Someone mentioned that she was different now, but they refused to explain further. "Find out for yourself," I was told. So I Googled her name, and a result came up - 28 yo, living in Denver. Surely, it must be her. It gave a link to a website and I clicked on it. And there was a picture.

Huh. This girl is dark-haired. Well, her face doesn't look quite the same, but maybe it's her. Oh, there's a link to more pictures. Let's click there.

HOLY CRAP!

So, yeah. Umm, Deadpan Barbie is now a model. A nude model. As in, full-on, fortheloveofallthatsgoodandholyshe'snaked! model. Every friggin' picture was some freaky-deaky skin shot. For the record, there is not enough mental clorox to burn away what is now seared into my retinas. Great googly moogly.

Her hair is now long and jet black, and she has had augmentation to the tune of at least DD. I'm pretty sure she's also had some plastic surgery on her face, because there is an oddly frozen quality to her deer-in-the-headlights look. She looks like a premenopausal Elvira. And someone injected her with a serious dose of confidence. Or meth. Either way, I suspect Ron Jeremy.

From what I understand, she works in a bar in Denver and she does the nude modeling on the side. According to a mutual friend, she is pretty proud of it, but I'm fairly certain there is no way she's told her parents about the fact that her naughty bits are posted all over Al Gore's internet. Unless they have both had lobotomies in the last few years, I'm guessing they would be livid. The girl I knew would have been mortified if someone saw her in a swimsuit, so I just can't wrap my fragile little mind around this. All I know is, every time I see her mom in the post office, the same thing runs through my brain:

I hope that when this issue's gone
I'll see you when your clothes are on...

You're Not Really Holding Up That Tower

So, who's tired of hearing about my trip yet? Yeah, me too.

This was the day we traveled to Pisa. We were up at the buttcrack of dawn and I gotta say, there were way too many morning people on our bus. What is it about laughter and singing at 6:30 a.m. that makes me want to drive a stake through another person's heart? Though I must say, had it not been for the old guy's incessant chatter about boiling deer carcasses for their marrow keeping me awake and slightly nauseous, I never would have had the opportunity to see a scruffy, Lurch look-alike stopped along the road taking a leak in full view of God and country. Outstanding.

Our tour guide Lucca explained more about the Tuscan region and the architecture of Pisa as he loaded us on our transportation to the main city square. I felt like I was headed into the Magic Kingdom.


Our baby train dropped us off at the Palazzo dell' Arcivescovado, where I immediately began taking pictures of every nun I saw coming out of the Bishop's crib. What can I say - not everyone can rock the flowing white ensemble, so give credit where it's due. For the record, I did not ring the bell and run, just to get a photo.



Judging by the crowd, Pisa is the it place to visit. Our white-pants-wearing guide, Giovanni, led us past the massive swells of tourists and gave us a private tour of the baptistery, ginormous church, hospital, and cemetery for the bishops. They were arranged in a sort of square formation, so they were commonly referred to as Hatch, Match, Patch, and Dispatch.




But then we came upon the real reason we were all there - to see the leaning tower of Pisa. It leans due to crappy workmanship on soggy ground that started to settle afterward. If they hadn't stopped building on it during the times they were busy killing people from other towns, it would have toppled. It had actually moved much farther than it was supposed to in the nineties also, so they had to attach counterweights to bring it back. It now sits about twelve feet off center. Our guide says nobody knows for sure who built it, because seriously, who's gonna take credit for that kind of craftsmanship? (If you click on the pic, you can see where they are doing restoration on the third floor. Too much erosion from wind, rain, and bird crap.)



While we were wandering through the throngs of people, we saw a Japanese couple getting married. And since we all know there's nothing I like more than taking pictures of complete strangers without their consent, here's a photo of the happy couple.



When we finally got our fill of buying random Pinocchio souvenirs for the children of friends, it was back on the bus to Lucca. Our guide turned us loose with strict instructions as to when we were to be back at the stop, and we were on our own to roam. There aren't any famous sights in Lucca, but it had once been a castle, so there is a large moat around the town. Ok, sure, without the water and alligators it's just a lawn. Why do you have to be such killjoys? Geez.



My friends and I took off wandering around, with no particular destination in mind. While great for taking pictures of random things you wouldn't ordinarily see, it does lead to a bit of directional confusion. We weren't lost, mind you, we were just uncertain as to where we were and how we would get to where we had been. But how else would we get the opportunity to see the skivvies of strangers? I mean, without resulting in a restraining order?



But the path of misdirection was worth it. We got to see interesting sights all over that we would have missed if we hadn't stumbled into the slightly odoriferous residential section. For instance, check out the lovely sentiment on this wall, which is now my wallpaper. Who says the possibility of herpes simplex can't be romantic?


And then there was the curious street lamps covered in spikes. I finally found out that their purpose is to discourage birdies of all sorts from landing on them, thus leading to the crapping up of the streets. I don't know how the birds feel about it, but I'm fairly confident that getting a metal spike rammed up my keister would rather quickly change my mind about sitting there. Moving on!


I do have one question that perhaps someone out there can answer for me. Occasionally, we would come across a decorative door with a photo above it, followed by a plaque that I assume explains who the person is. Is it a saint? Owner of the home that are just proud of their accomplishments? Lady of the evening selling her wares? My Italian is too sketchy to arrive at an answer. Inquiring minds want to know.


Eventually, this nifty little tunnel led us back into the light, where we suddenly realized that after two hours, we were back where we started. Told ya we weren't lost.

I'm Not As Think As You Drunk I Am

Part I Part II Part III Part IV

After all the hideous walking and such of the morning tour, it was high time to be taking 'er easy. What better way to accomplish that than to head to a winery?

We traveled to the Castello di Verrazzano, a vineyard that has been in the Verrazzano family for generations. It is a beautiful area, and they have groves of olive trees as well as well as the endless fields of grapes.


And to top it off, they also raise wild boars. (Question: if you are raising them domestically, can they really still be considered wild boars? Hmm.) We were directed not to try to get near them, unless we prefer to spend the rest of our lives waving with a stub.

Our guide was named Jillian, and she was a lot of fun. She had this great British accent, made even more entertaining by the fact that she was already half in the bag. She was very patient and good-natured, even when being interrupted by the doucheketeers in the crowd who thought they were comedians. She did, however, threaten to feed any tardy tour members to the wild boars. Perhaps that is why they all looked so excited to see us - feeding time!

Jillian explained to us that because of all the weird bureaucracy in Italy, they are very strict about what grapes can be used for each wine, and no chemical sulfides can be used. In addition, no pesticides or herbicides are allowed. I had been worried about drinking the wine, since it normally makes me really sick within minutes. But this wine didn't bother me at all, so I suspect it has been the sulfides that always leave me praying to the porcelain god.



Nick (?) was our host for the evening meal. It was plain to see we were not his first guests of the day. He was doing good to stay upright as he explained each course to us. He clearly knew his wines quite well, as well as his bawdy toasts to go along with them. But he seemed quite thrilled to be serving us, and for a moment, I thought maybe I would have a new stepdaddy. Alas, it was not to be - he was a slave to the mistress in his arms.

Italian meals are made up of several courses over the span of a couple hours. What would we Americans do with all that extra time after we inhale our food? In fact, I think it was the only time when our tour was forced to stop and take a breath. I can't say I'm a fan of the cured meats. They are all super fatty and have a strong aftertaste. I know, you prosciutto lovers will tell me I'm out of my mind and that it's the way it's supposed to taste. That's fantastic. You can eat it all you want. I'll just be over here gnawing on the tongue of my shoe.

I think we've been spoiled by our Americanized Italian food, though. I had this expectation of wonderful soft garlic bread and rivers of pasta overflowing with toppings. Darn you, Olive Garden! Instead, the bread is rock hard and you are given olive oil to drizzle over it, which doesn't exactly soggy it up any. Fabulous. I guess the bread that breaks off and sticks in my bridge can be saved for later. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure our bread had been on the table since the last party. Is that a tooth in the side of that roll?

The pasta, on the other hand, was 100 times better than anything that's ever come out of my kitchen. While they don't drown everything in sauce like we do, it's all fresh and they put a spice mixture on the top that was extraordinary. Joygasm! I finally found a place that sold the spices for an outrageous price and I brought 'em on home with me. The cheeses were strong, but one in particular, when covered in balsamic vinegar, tasted like strawberries. Sure, I'm certain my arteries were hardening as we ate, but what better way to die than with my mouth stuffed with food? If it's good enough for Mama Cass, who am I to complain?

And then, they brought out the wild boar. Just for the record, they were adorable creatures when we saw them earlier in the tour. But they looked even better on a plate drizzled with gravy. That'll teach ya to squeal at me, piggie. I hadn't eaten boar before, but it really was outstanding. And who knew there was a wine to go with wild boar? For the record, I'm pretty sure ours wasn't this aged.


At the end of the meal, they brought out almond biscotti that we were to soak in a dessert wine and eat. The combo seemed a little odd, but I gave it a try and it was wonderful. I don't generally mix my booze and cookies, but after this experience it's amazing to me that we didn't all come home 300 lb. alcoholics. Maybe it works with other combinations? Pass the Oreos and Crown.

Paralegal Barbie and I were seated at a table with the travel agents who had arranged everything. They had actually planned the tours for something like fifteen countries, so they got to go everywhere and check out the sites and features they might want to include. How do I get that job? The agent's wife was asked if she wanted to hold a baby panda when they were in China. Thinking it would be like a small teddy bear, she agreed wholeheartedly. But when she sat down, they brought out a 180 lb. "baby" and plopped him in her lap. I imagine there's nothing like being eye-to-eye with a panda that's bigger than you. Very cool.

Her husband looked like a mildly retarded Boss Hogg, and pretty much the last person I would have expected to have any desire to travel the world in his multi-colored suspenders and high-water pants. But that whole cover-not-representative-of-the-book thing certainly applied here. He was hilarious, and it turned out he and his brother had lived in Peru while single 40 years ago, and their stories kept us entertained all night.

I'd have to say that this night was probably my favorite of the entire trip. It was our first chance to get out of the hustle and bustle of the city, and actually see Italy the way we envisioned. And while you regulars know I'm not exactly the type to get giddy over the sunset, drinking wine on a balcony overlooking a vineyard in Italy as the sun goes down is not a bad way to spend an evening. Being surrounded by slightly tipsy, equally enthralled friends? That was just a bonus.