Happy? Thanksgiving

I want to begin by saying that we are truly grateful for our blessings! And we have many of them! Getting into our house this week is one. Being reunited with my memory foam is another! We're also truly grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ and for the wonderful family and friends who love and support us.

This year, however, our Thanksgiving was a little different than the norm...

Normally, we host Thanksgiving dinner. We realized a number of years ago that we all feel happier when we gather a "family" around us to celebrate the day, so that's what we do. Surprise, surprise, I even have a checklist -- refined over the last 5 years that tells me exactly when to do what so that the day is pretty restful. 

In Ferrara all of the Americans gather for Thanksgiving dinner, and this year it was at the commander's house. They did a fabulous job and there was loads of food that was really tasty! We had a good time laughing and talking with our friends and the kids had a great time playing. It was all the rest of the stuff that wasn't quite normal.

We received our big shipment of household goods Monday.  

Truck #1 of 3 on Monday

We had 9 crates packed "tetris" style

Half of Tuesday was spent trying to get our stuff out of the hotel and into the house.

You can accumulate a lot of stuff in 6 or 7 weeks -- including 2 semesters of school books. These pix are both part of our third and final trip to the house.

Needless to say, by Wednesday afternoon we were still tripping over lots of boxes and trying to figure out where to put things.

The entryway. Ironic, I know...since it's impassable!

Our living room

Standing in the dining room looking toward the living room

Rosa's job. She worked really hard at packing papers down -- while sitting on her throne, as she called it.

Normally, I make lemon meringue pie (and a bunch of others, but that's the unusual one) for Thanksgiving. But when The Linguist tried to make dinner Wednesday night and pre-heating the oven shut down the power to the whole house, I begged out of making dessert. We were able to re-set the power fairly easily. It was the heat that wouldn't come back on. Finally, I figured out (or thought I did) how to re-set the water heater (yes, we have radiators here!) and the heat started. Whew!

Normally, I make mom's delicious cranberry salad for Thanksgiving, and this year was to be no exception. Except that we didn't have a working transformer in which to plug the blender on Wednesday night. Whoops! I called a friend and we set off to make the salad at her house. Whoops! The GPS took as all over the countryside, but not to our friend's house. We learned in Texas that you can't always trust the Garmin, but in Italy it's more a rule than an occasional occurrence. The main purpose of the GPS is for marking your location AFTER you've driven all over the place (or followed someone else) and figured out how to get there -- not for finding a destination in the first place. After an hour, I called her and told her we wouldn't be having cranberry salad after all.

Normally, I mix the rolls first thing Thursday morning. And that I actually did accomplish. However, I couldn't get the oven to come on. Right about that time, the electrician stopped by to pick up his ladder, and I dragged him into the house to look at the oven. He explained to me (in English) why there are 10 different settings on the oven and what each one does (info not in the oven booklet). He then showed me which button was in the wrong place and was keeping the oven from lighting. Before he could get to the front door, the power for the whole house turned off again. It was good to have a witness! He isolated the problem as the oven. Kind of a necessity for baking 5 dozen rolls. I called my friend who said not to come to her house since they had turned on one appliance too many and now had no electricity at all! This is also a fairly common occurrence in Italy. Just because you have 3 ovens, doesn't mean you can run them all at the same time. Apparently you can get the amount of electricity you are allotted bumped up, but we haven't figured all of that out yet. So far, we can run the washer, dryer, refrigerator and vacuum at the same time! Just no oven...

So I texted another gal and went to her house to make rolls. When Jeremy came to pick me up he was not happy. The heat was off again and wouldn't re-set, and he'd learned the hard way that my keys don't actually open the house. So our Thanksgiving celebration was marred slightly by the fact that we knew we were locked out of the house that had a broken oven and no heat!

Long story not longer...we got back in, figured out that there are 2 places you have to re-set the heat after losing power (we just happened to hit them simultaneously the night before!) and someone will come about the oven next week.

But tonight there was water dripping all over from underneath the sink...so the saga continues! 

We've made stellar progress on the unpacking and are almost out of boxes. Despite my best efforts, we've already done a total room rearrange and so have already taken nearly all of the beds apart and reassembled them. Everything fits much better this way...I just wish we couldn't gotten it right when the movers were doing the moving. 

The washer and dryer have been running almost nonstop for 5 days, and I'm finally caught up on the laundry. It takes an 1:40 minutes to wash a load of clothes and between 3-4 hours to dry them with my new European appliances. I think Jeremy's going to be doing the laundry at work...he can do it all in about 4 or 5 hours.