Oh my God we are hemorrhaging money!  With the "incident" with the car, (that of which I dare not speak), GP's newly broken tooth, Grace needing orthodontics again, and because we are in Italy, the most taxed nation on the planet, there are taxes on the condo, taxes on "space you occupy", (lest you escape by renting and not owning), taxes on this and that, (I think there are 39 different taxes due between May and July in Italy), and then to have to pay the accountants on both sides of the Atlantic to deal with all the taxes!  Holy Moly! (or is it moley?)  We've also started looking at colleges and seriously?  Does she really need an education?  She could go to college in Italy for very little as there is just a registration fee and a nominal yearly fee.  A degree would be less than 1 semester in the States.  But students live at home and go to classes just like continuing high school, (fine by me but for some strange reason this does not appeal to her).  There are no campuses and no real "college life".  Very probably I'm biased but I don't have the best opinion of university education here either.  It is hard to have faith in anything run by the government in this country.  There are always too many people on the take, too many people with "secured for life" jobs who do nothing, too little work ethic on both the part of the students and the professors.  So off to the States she goes and we're looking for scholarships baby!  Lordy.  Didn't Italy used to be considered a cheap alternative to life in the U.S.?  Not so much.  Gas is exorbitant, 4 times the cost at home.  Though fruit and veggies are cheap, meat and fish are very expensive.  I simply don't shop for any apparel here because clothing prices are so high and there are no TJMax!  I need to get back to Maine.  This is the longest stretch I've done away from home in over 25 years.  I'm feeling the strain of having been here too long....

But on a lighter note, today was International Day at the school and  I ate my way around the world starting at India and ending with dessert in Germany.  People from the school got together with their co-nationals and set up stands representing their countries.  It was fun and very yummy.  I offered to give one of the organizers a break and got stuck at the drinks table for over an hour with a Scottish man who talked non stop.  I believe he was very interesting but as I only understood half of what he said I'm not really sure.  He had a very heavy brogue and kept breaking into Italian in the middle of a sentence, (he's lived here for 30 years...I think), plus he seemed either inebriated or senile because he never finished one subject before starting another.  Finally I escaped in time to see the drawing of prizes for a lottery raising money for Burkina Faso, the school's charity.  You know how there are those people who are lucky and always win and then there are those who would lose if there were 9 winning tickets out of 10?  We are the latter.  Our Australian friends are the former.  They won five prizes.  We won nuthin'.  Well the payback is that they have to eat veggie-mite, (a more foul food has never been invented), and we get peanut butter!  Ha!  xxoo me