OCTOBER HOUSE CLEANING

We leave in less than a week for 17 days in the states, so I am cleaning up the last minute items to do. While I work on these things, I am also trying to keep up with the house cleaning, of which I have written about before (probably too much). And I have had certain revelations on this ever important task.
It seems to me one of the biggest reasons for keeping a spotlessly clean house here is to keep the vermin down. You may laugh at this, but in a place where the dry summer leads to a damp fall, where spiders, flying insects (fruit flies, wasps, mosquitoes, and huge beetles right now), ants, millipedes and their foot-challenged relatives, centipedes, are way too numerous anyway, it makes sense to keep things cleaned up so as not to attract more. And so it is a battle against nature at all times, ESPECIALLY since I am always bringing flowers and fruits and nuts into the house! In short, I clean up bugs all the time.
Out in nature, my very favorite insect is the leaf cutter ant. They just look so gay! They are very numerous here; they line up in rows coming and going, waving their cargo gaily over their heads, and I always imagine they are on a way to a party. I wasted quite a lot of time the other morning taking pictures of them and following them to their nest. Then I tried to get into that with a stick, but they have this nasty habit of finding me, climbing up on my body, and biting! So I usually just watch. I also took some great scenery pictures then too, while I was wasting time that I could have spent cleaning the house-you get the picture. And yes, here are the pictures, as well as some from rides this week.
One of the other important “housekeeping” tasks to take care of before we returned to the US was to vote. We changed our address and voting district to my brother’s house in Dunkirk when we were home in May, so we submitted our absentee ballot info and they sent us cards saying the ballots would be mailed in early October. I got my card a week before Steve got his. Then 2 weeks ago, Steve got his ballot. I did not get mine yet! So after calling embassies, etc., we made a special trip to Palermo today to pick up an emergency ballot, which I will Fed-Ex out tomorrow. The American consulate office in Palermo is small, but official looking (not one, but TWO pictures of George on the walls). We had to give the armed guards (Italian army, not US) our passports to register to let us in. Then we had to push open an extremely heavy locked door when they buzzed us through. They said on the phone the ballot would need to be sent by courier and I thought they would send it from there, but we have to send it ourselves and fork out the $25 for Fed-Ex. Lot’s of help they were-they could not, of course, fax me the ballot either.
Oh, well, in Palermo we got to see our friend Angelo, who had torn a ligament tripping down the street, and we got to give his dad some CDs of old US music Steve had copied for him. And since they own to print and frame shops, they insisted on giving us a Van Gogh reproduction for “our wall over the sofa” as Angelo directed. Apparently he did not like OUR taste in decorating. Bizarre.
And since this is the season for it, we also stopped at a pasticceria and bought some of the lovely “frutti del Morti”, the marzipan called “Martorana” in Palermo after the name of the church where the nuns made the stuff famous. It is made of almond paste, sugar, and flour, which is the “pasta reale” (or royal paste). It comes in all kinds of shapes and colors, including especially fruits and vegetables, but we also say sandwiches and shrimp made out of the paste. They are individual works of art with gorgeous colors and attempts to look real. The other pastries weren’t bad either (yes, we had a few), and the young worker could not wait to pose for the “Americani.” This treat, along with bigger marzipan statues and figures like those shown, is bought and given to young children who are good on All Soul’s Day (I Morti) on November 2nd. But we thought bringing some to the states was a good idea. It’s kind of pricey ($18 Euros a KG, or a little less than $9 US a pound), but it is all made in traditional ways by hands in individual pastry shops.
So my house cleaning and packing resumes, and I try not to think of the cold that will greet me there. Since it is still swimming weather (outside) here, I guess I better pack a few heavy clothes too (joke).