SPRING HAS SPRUNG-CANARY, FLOWERS, ELECTION

We went out and got a new bird! He is Limoncello 2 and when we remember he is not Lili, we call him Li two (Lee2) because his funny noises also sound like R2D2 in Star Wars. He eats way less than Lili but is a strong and frequent singer. So far he does NOT have the funny personality that Lili had.

Aside from two days of siroccos that we just finished, the weather has been lovely and I finished a lot of basic garden chores. So I started on the neighbor’s hedges and plants. Since he was kind enough to cut down all of his pine trees so I could grow some plants in our part of the side yard, I guess I can do that for him. Besides, it cuts down on the lumache (snails) and formiche (ants) in our yard. But my back is killing me after an afternoon of trimming and clean up. Thank goodness for a Jacuzzi tub soak.

Actually another good reason for expanding my gardening room into his yard is for more space to plant stuff. I started way too many seeds as usual, especially flowers, but this year, they may all survive! The two greenhouses have been great, especially with these last days of wind. The native pisotelli tomato seeds (that are also being grown by my high school friend Chris in Virginia) are coming up well too. The carrots, cantaloupe, and peas are way slower than the lumache. I guess they are not used to the long cool days of spring. It has been so dry that I have to water, and that is a pain.

The Italians are electing a new government on April 9^th, or re-electing their old one, headed by the conservative Silvio Berlusconi, President Bush’s super rich friend. Berlusconi looks younger now than he did when we first saw him due to a face lift and hair transplants. He is running behind and took the opportunity to call anyone thinking of voting for the left a very bad word in both Italian and English. You will see crowds in the news with many signs saying “Io sono un coglione” meaning that the person carrying the sign is voting left and they don’t care what Berlusconi thinks of them. If you want to know what “coglione” means and you don’t have an Italian dictionary, write and ask and I will tell you. Actually, there is mud slinging on both sides, theatrics over partisanship on the television (Berlusconi owns stations) and left vs. right accusations. Communists and Fascists change into parties with flower names (margarita) and civic-sounding euphemisms (social democrats). A last ditch tactic by Berlusconi was to promise to abolish the tax on first time home buyers, the “ICI.” From what I gather, localities get that tax and use it for social programs, so that is not really such a popular tax cut as he might have thought. One cartoon in the paper today showed the president talking to a friend about the cut and then musing on which of his many residences was actually his first home!

We will have a good bye meal with Mariana, Veronica, and Jack “the super cook” as they leave Sicily to return to Montreal. Then on Sunday my nieces Laura and Cory arrive for some new adventures in eastern Sicily and around and about.