Our neighbor, Arturo Vidal, had over 200,000 dollars worth of cash and jewelry stolen from his house last night.  Look him up, he's the soccer player for Juventus.  Half of that was cash.  Who in hell leaves 100,000 bucks lying around?  Mind you he does not live in our condo building.  But he lives in what would be quite modest for a big time American athlete.  He has a townhouse we can espy from our back garden.  Fortunately, or not, we have little to steal.  But the idea of thieves in the night not 20 yards away is spooky!  We were all tucked up in our beds as we're all sick.  We made it through 8 days in Morocco ingesting God Only Knows how many germs, only to catch something on the flight home.  Damned Italian tourists!  GP was in bed with a high fever for 2 days but I dragged my aching body back and forth every day to school because it has a stupid policy that says you need a doctor's note for even 1 day out.  I have no desire to go sit in the doctor's office for an hour or more just to get a note saying I'm too ill to work.  It makes no sense which I suppose is the
whole point.

This morning GP and I went into the center to do some errands.  There were police everywhere and this afternoon there was a large protest in the main square.  Seems the head of the region of Piemonte, (the Governor more or less), cheated on his election, stuffing his ballot box with 10,000 or so extra votes.  What's sad about this is that it happened 4 years ago and they've just figured it out.  Or gotten around to publicizing it and removing him from office.  Anyway, he belongs to the semi-fascist party, the Northern League, who are very anti-immigration and separatists.  They want the Northern regions, the wealthy, industrialized and therefore biggest tax payers, to be independent from the scum suckers of Rome.  Well that ain't gonna happen.  Those scum suckers don't get their salaries paid by the poor rural south.

Now my next note of exciting news from Italy is that not only our neighbor but also a bank down at the bottom of our hill was robbed last night.  On our way to the city today we passed it.  The front windows were shattered, the ATM looked like it was wrenched out of the building and there were police all around.  Well we just heard on the news that is was "attacked" by a group of Romanians with 2 RPGs, (that's Rocket-propelled grenades people!!).  They shot them from the bakery parking lot across the road shocking the hell out of the baker who was working at 4 o'clock in the morning.  He called the police who arrived in record time and actually caught two of the four guys.  They never should have torn down the wall.  All the criminals came pouring over into western Europe like rats off a sinking ship.  Or more like heat seeking missiles.  The heat being the wealth of eastern Europe. 

Enough cliches.  I'm going back to sleep now.  Even my kidneys hurt.  xxoo me