Life on the Vine

When the year began I was skeptical that I'd be able to finish the 2022 Read Harder Challenge .  As 2022 began I knew that we had a full, challenging year ahead and boy did it get even more full and challenging than expected.  I knew that we'd be packing up and leaving Italy after five years.  I knew that we'd be moving home to Arizona and starting new jobs.  I knew that we'd be living in a temporary situation as we prepared to close and build our new home.  Well, if you've read my recent posts, you know that the house we thought was coming in July 2023 actually came THIS July.  And everything we thought we had a whole year to do got packed into just a few short months.  But despite the life-changing move, house delivery, stress and hecticness, I managed to finish the Read Harder Challenge with two months to spare.   Here are the 24 books I read for the challenge and below I've included some commentary on the books.  Five of the books also took care of some of m

I was trying to figure out what to name this post and settled on "Three Exciting Deliveries".  It seemed fitting.  We've had the delivery of the house.  The delivery of our household items from Italy.  And the 'delivery' of another heeler.  I guess you can even say we've recently celebrated the delivery of yours truly!  It's been a busy couple months.  So now to the blog post. I recently celebrated my birthday, and I have firmly arrived in middle life.  At 45 I am exactly halfway through my 40s and halfway towards my 50s. The morning of my birthday Tom and I sat at our newly-acquired dining room table drinking coffee and sketching out plans for our garage and courtyard.  As we were talking, Tom asked me if I "felt" old, wondering if my increasing age was bothering me.  I told him that "I'm old" are words he will probably never hear me say.  At least not for another twenty or thirty years.  I might cop to "I'm getting older&

On May 16, with less than three weeks left in Italy, we FINALLY closed escrow on the house we'll be putting on the property we've owned for 12 years in southeastern Arizona.  Securing and closing on the financing was a yearlong process and it took FOUR notarized signings before we finally closed the deal.  YAY! Back in 2013, after it became painfully clear that we had no reasonable funding options to build the house we had worked with an architect to design, we began work with Cavco on doing a manufactured house.  We settled on a Santa Fe style home and we've fortunately been able to make some personalized changes to the floor plan.  It's something they've stopped doing because of the high production demand but fortunately our house made it in under the wire.     On our property, in the years before we moved to Italy, we laid some ground work.  We pulled in electric, put in the septic tank, dug the well, cut in the road, and had the construction site graded.  While

Earlier this month I reached the halfway point of my 2022 Read Harder Book Challenge .  Finishing my twelfth challenge of twenty-four.  Since then I've ticked off another two challenges so I've comfortably got only 10 more to do in the next six months.  With the total upheaval of our lives this year, I'd wondered if I'd be able to finish this year's challenge but I'm confident now I'll finish. Within days of being home in Arizona I had a new county library card and hold books on the way.  Last night I finished my first of the requested library books:  Pamela Paul's book My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues .    A couple of Books of Books This is a book that has been on my wish list to read since June 2017.  The month we were moving to Italy.  Up until earlier this year, Pamela was the editor of the New York Times Book Review.  I think we can safely say that the woman knows a thing or two about books.  Her book interested me f

We've been out of the house for two weeks now and Italy is feeling less like home day-by-day.  It's probably a good thing because this good-bye will be hard.        Since April 2021 we have known that we'd be leaving Italy.  We didn't over do it but we did have those moments where we said: this is our last Fall, our last Christmas, our last Spring.  Oh, Spring.  How I have loved you even more here in Italy!  And since we had a year to prepare for the move back home, we thought a lot about what we'd like to do for final trips and events.  How we'd like to say good-bye to our Italian neighbors and friends, who have been such a blessing these past five years.    So, here are some highlights from how we've made the most of these final months living in Italy.  Our final big trip was flying over to England just before Christmas to visit our friend Sandra and her boys.  We've been very fortunate to see them twice over the past five years.   Tom and the boys - J