Back on the grid!!!

Holy cow, everyone. After being in Italy for 4 months, 3 of them in our house, we FINALLY have our high-speed internet set up!!!! What a pain that was. But the important thing is that now I can blog and post pictures and we can use Vonage and stuff!!! So... Rob's old cell phone number has been transferred to Vonage... and now if you call it we can answer it! YAY! (If you need the number email me...) We're also on Skype and Facebook now too.

Here's what's been going on in a nutshell since I blogged last.

We moved into the house we wanted, the "Geothermal" one... here's a sunset from our rooftop!

We did some traveling in Madrid, Lisbon, and Venice...

I went back to the States to do a little bit of work and to meet my new nephew Tyler, Carlota and LeRoy's baby boy, who was born on April 1...

Rob's been working hard planning an exercise that just got finished (actionshot below):

And while he was working I went and met him in Crete and in Taranto, Italy.

We did get some bad news a couple weeks ago... my stepmom Tina has breast cancer. She'll be having a mastectomy soon but the doctors say the cancer hasn't spread outside the breast, so that's good. Prayers and good wishes appreciated.

So... lots of action lately, sorry we haven't been in better touch with you all but it will be easier now!!! More frequent updates promised... and find us on Facebook too if you're on there!

Still homeless

So... we've decided that indeed that IS the house we want, but we're still working on the paperwork to get into it. It's an Italian bureaucracy wrapped in an American bureaucracy with a sprinkle of corruption mixed in... but we're trying to relax about the whole thing. Our stuff's not here yet anyway and won't be until mid February, so we might as well be patient I guess. Ugh. On the upside, our landlord and real estate agent over here are the opposite of the stereotypical "domani" (wait until tomorrow) Italians. They're totally on top of it and are taking great care of us... it's certainly not their fault that it's going to take so long.

So in the meantime between getting stuff done... we went skiing in Roccaraso over MLK weekend, which is a cute mountain town about 2 hours away from Naples.

We also went wine tasting on Mt. Vesuvius with some folks we met on a housing tour. It was through the USO, who organize a lot of really neat tours and day trips in the area.

We checked out downtown Naples, with some experts this time, and went to Gambrinus, this gorgeous coffee bar (the oldest in town) with the most beautiful pastries and gelato.

Last weekend we went to Pompeii and drove to Sorrento, which was about an hour away. It was rainy so we didn't get to do much, but we're looking forward to checking it out more and taking some pictures next time.

Next up... still working on getting all checked in. Trying to decide what to do for President's Day weekend (which includes Valentine's Day). I kinda want to go to Paris for the romance factor but it'll still be really cold... we're thinking about maybe Carnevale in Venice, which is a big deal too. Decisions, decisions.

I know I'm already being a blog slacker- I'll try to update this thing once a week.

Blog kickoff: Is this our house?

We went house hunting today... and we might have found it!!!

The view from the patio- the landlord's farm

The great room/kitchen
The back porch

The front of the house

OK, I know that's not a lot of detail. But the bedrooms are kinda plain- tiled - 2 of them open up with those same red shutters on the back porch to the farm view. The panoramic view is from the roof which has a spiral staircase from the back patio. The entire roof is one big patio- it's huge and really nice!!!

But the kicker is... if you look into the garage (the left side of the picture of the front of the house), you will see some crazy gray metal tank. That's a GEOTHERMAL water heater. The water and heat from this house come from underground where there is a natural hot spring that heats the water to 50 degrees celsius. Isn't that NUTS? Plus it has 2 BIDETS. All the houses here have bidets. Aren't we going to be fancy!!!

This house is located in the Baia/Bacoli area, which is west of the city of Naples but it's still on the metro line. The water you can see is a lake and then beyond that is the Med. You can see Mt. Vesuvius from there really well too. Rob (and probably I) will have to drive about 20-25 minutes to work at Capodichino. It's kinda out in the country- the farm it overlooks belongs to the landlord, who Rob connected with over the geothermal water heater stuff. I know as soon as they overcome the language barrier they'll be best pals.

We're not really done looking yet, we have to take at least 1 trip with the housing office, but this is definitely the front runner. We call it "The Geothermal."

That's been the most excitement we've had lately. We went househunting Friday and went to a really nice dinner that Rob's sponsor threw us at a wonderful restaurant called Old Friends (yeah, it's in English) which happens to be not far at all from our favorite house. Saturday we slept in, hung out in the room and went right outside base to get a coffee and a pizza (our first time off base alone, wow!). Then Sunday we went to downtown Naples via the Alibus, which was an adventure... Naples is kinda dirty and busy and was really closed down on Sunday. We'll have to try it again on a weekday. I would load more pictures of us but the internet is sucking tonight.

Love you all! PS I know our blog name is cheesy. Rob picked it I swear. :)

Angela & Rob