Boots in the Oven

Are you ready for some FOOTBALL?! Or maybe just honeymoon pictures, 2nd installment?

So, it's about that time to be putting up some more honeymoon pictures, don't you think? I also spent some time today setting up a Flickr account and figuring out how to post multiple pictures from Flickr to a blog. How do you do this, you might ask? Answer - it's a huge pain in the butt, which may hopefully get easier after a few years or so.

So, when I last dropped this narrative, we were in Rome...

Well, we took a train to Naples, where we were only going to spend one night.

This is the view up the street from our hotel room.  (It didn't really rain the whole time we were in Italy.)

Since we were only going to be in Naples one night, we of course had to get ourselves some Neapolitan pizza! We had already been to Da Michele, when we were in Naples in 2001 (oh MAN.  We pretty much went to Naples that trip just to eat pizza.  While we were there, we met a couple of English guys who were staying in the same hotel as us and invited them out to dinner.  The lines at da Michele were so long that we had time to drink two bottles of wine between the six of us, and we didn't realize that the English guys weren't helping us finish the wine until after it was gone... though I do highly recommend da Michele's pizza when you've had a bit too much to drink).

Anyway, this is from Pizzeria Brandi, where the Pizza Margherita was invented in 1889.  The Neapolitans take their pizza extremely seriously -- check out this link.

We got two pizzas; Marinara (on the right - just marinara sauce, basil, and garlic) and margherita (left - marinara, basil, and mozarella).  Seriously, yum!  Here's a picture of our plates after we finished eating.
 

This was their antipasti table... we had such great antipasti all over Italy.  I'll put up more antipasti pics later on.  Here I see eggplant, zucchini, peas, peperonata, and small fish, maybe anchovies?

I took this picture at the Museo Archeologico; it's a mosaic (!) from Pompeii.  First of all, can you believe how well it's preserved?  The patience it must have taken to put this together.... totally shocking.  I mean, look at how tiny those tiles are!  We also saw the famous mosaic of Alexander.

Look at this church!

It's really not very attractive from the outside, is it? I think it looks like a warehouse, or maybe a parking garage... it's the Gesu Nuovo, and it was built as a palazzo in 1470. It didn't become a church until the 16th century. There's something kind of endearing about the unattractiveness of the building, though.

We only got to stay in Naples for a day and a half before we headed for Positano. After having been there twice (admittedly for ony a day or so each time) I'm still not really sure if I enjoy visiting there or not. It's a crazy, crazy place... dirtier than anywhere else I've been in Italy and very crowded. This is far from being an original observation, but the driving in Naples is ballsier than anywhere else... if you wait politely on the sidewalk to cross the street, you'll wait until everyone's gone home to bed. People drive their scooters on the sidewalk, in between the vendors ripping tourists off with fake electronics. On the other hand, though, the city's beautiful in a frenetic way. Big Italian nonnas sell cigarettes directly from their balconies using a basket attached to a long rope. Laundry is strung all the way across the street. Whole families and their shopping hang off of Vespas, shooting in and out of traffic. And the whole time, Vesuvius looms menacingly in the background. One day, that volcano's gonna blow, and who knows what will happen then? Until then, I recommend visiting Naples for at least a little while. I'll leave you with this picture of us on the ferry for Positano.

Girlie

People Aren’t Crazy

Wait. What did I say? No, no. I meant people are totally batshit crazy. 

Mme. Pants has the prime privilege of working in a downtown office at street level that always has unlocked doors. This offers the unique opportunity for her and her co-workers to interact with and be educated by any person who just happens to stroll in. Without this exceptional location she would have missed several beneficial lessons instructing her on how the world actually works.

A few weeks ago a man delivered an educational essay that has been one of my favorite. I re-post it here in the hopes that you too will find it insightful and enlightening:

Child kid-knapping per subsonic radio frequencies. It is the real threat children face now. It is conducted by law enforcement and their operatives against the families of people they have chosen for extortion. The campaign staffs of the GOP have sold an idea to police and federal agents that they can enhance their salaries if people are denied police protection. In short, they have opened the streets for confidence games. The most common of which is to demand money as ransom. I this scam, the children are not actually abducted, but rather harassed continuously so that they cannot perform. Many school districts teachers have adopted this tactic. It is known. CIA has the players identified, and most of that was to provide lawyers with information to sue the operators of this scam.

This is done in conjunction with a pyramid life insurance scam that brokers policies on people involved with this nation wide for leading a “high risk lifestyle.” The purpose of that seems to be to enhance commissions and dividends to pay off the blossoming national debt as well as to provide funds for arms procurement. It’s an ugly world now if you or your staff have been duped because it’s all in the hands of U.S. Attorneys who can hand off the cases to private lawyers like Baker and Botts. Covenants really suck these days so beware… the primary operatives in this are the Neo-Nazis of America per George Bush targeting apartment renters and mortgage holders who’ve nearly paid their mortgages off.

See. Now that that’s cleared up don’t you feel better? Remember, the more you read, the more you know.

L. Pants

Oh, the restaurant life is the life for (him)

So, Husbear's been working at Enoteca Vespaio for several weeks now, doing such glam things as hanging pictures and throwing around trash.  (Into proper receptacles, of course!)
The restaurant opened for business yesterday, 8/17; the opening had to be delayed a couple of days so that they could get everything ready to go.  They programmed scales, cleaned frantically, and finished getting the decor up.
I gather there were a couple of minor blips yesterday (i.e. forgetting to get any bread from the back with which to make sandwiches), but the Husbear reports that feedback is overwhelmingly positive.  The polpetti (pork meatballs with housemade breadcrumbs and fontina cheese) have been getting an enthusiastic response, probably because they break the pig down into its constituent parts right there in the back.  They also are making all of their charcuterie in-house, a very tall order, but one that is in my mind probably going to be well worth the extra time.
I'm sure Enoteca is going to do really well... since I work downtown, I'm well aware of the lack of local places to eat a really good lunch around here, especially on South Congress.  (I know, I know, but even Guero's gets old after a while, and while Zen's pretty good, the one on SoCo can be kinda spotty.)  It's a little expensive, with sandwiches in the $7-9 range, but the quality's really good, and Husbear says the sandwiches are ginormous.
I'm going to try to get him to bring the teeny camera into work with him so that we can get some pics up.  They don't have a website yet, which explains the people that have been visiting here after searching for "Enoteca Vespaio" on google.  (Hello, people!  Feel free to leave a comment!  welcome, etc.)
I'm totally going to have to go down there for lunch to see if it's actually any good.  Husbear's got good taste, so I bet it is - still have to see for myself, though.

girlie

Congratulations to the Husbear!

I just wanted to fire off a quick post to congratulate the Husbear (also known as Mr. Pants -- yes, we'll settle on a nickname one of these days, I promise) on his new job working at Vespaio/ Enoteca Vespaio!

Vespaio is a great restaurant here in Austin -- consistently one of the top 10.  They're opening up a new wine/snack bar, a more casual place, which is where the Husbear will be working.

He actually went and "worked the line" in the kitchens at Vespaio on Wednesday and Thursday of last week; according to him, this was an awesome experience, and he's truly excited.  He's already amassing a lovely complement of scars and burns on both of his hands.

Anyway, more updates as events warrant (tm - Calvin and Hobbes).  We're both just thrilled to pieces.

Honeymoon Photos: #1 of Sideways 8

Yeah, I don’t know how to do an infinity symbol either.

Well, I’m home alone tonight. The cats are here, yes, but they’re only good company if your idea of a nice night in is pooping in the corner (fatty!) or eating so fast you yarf (stinky!).

I thought now might actually be a good time to settle in with a glass of wine and begin to make good on a promise I made to Auntie way back when the Mr. and I first started talking about launching a blog (the fruits of which you see on your screen now).

Girlie, she said, why don’t you use the blog to post honeymoon pictures? That way, you don’t need to send them to everyone individually, and nobody will have to sit through a presentation entitled “Shots of the Wing, vols. 1-14” when they come to visit you!

This has the added benefit of making Mikey happy; he who asked me last week to be sure to put up some pictures that weren’t of my food. So, here goes!

We were lucky enough last summer to go on a three-week honeymoon to Italy and Greece. We had a great time, but were of course bitten even harder by the “travel bug”… which would be fine except we’re still covered with the welts the “poverty bug” left on us.

We flew to Rome two days after we were married.

Aren't we adorable? 

We were still totally exhausted when we arrived Wednesday morning, June 2. Lucky me, though; the newly minted Mr. made us reservations at a nice, but cute, hotel just a block from the Pantheon.

This was a much nicer place than the place we stayed in on our last time through Rome, when we got yelled at for taking a fan that was sitting in the hallway into our room. (They weren’t mad that we had taken the fan; they were mad that we hadn’t paid them $10 to borrow it.)

The lobby was beautiful:

And the elevators were hysterically tiny.

When I say that we were close to the Pantheon, I’m not lying, I promise.

Since we had already been to Rome on our backpacking trip in the summer of 2001, we felt a little more free to do some exploring, instead of having to rush from must-see ruin to must-see museum. We had already been to the Coliseum, which is amazing, so we didn’t go back; instead, we just spent the two days or so just traipsin' around town. We went back to the Forum the first night we were there, but it was closed. We asked a nice guy to take our picture anyway, and he obliged.

We went to the Spanish Steps, and wandered around the expensive design shops below, on the Via Veneto (I think). I think the salesfolks could tell that we weren’t about to buy anything, but they were really nice and up-pushy.

The next morning, we found an open – air market. Mr. Pants loves Italian markets – for good reason! We stopped at one stall where they were selling ostrich eggs (feeds 30). There were persimmons everywhere – later, we saw them all over the ground in Positano.

We also did some more windowshopping, mostly for food.  Yum!

We left Rome by train on Friday; the plan was to overnight in Naples on Friday night and leave the next morning by ferry for Positano, where we had to pick up the keys to our house-for-a-week by 4 PM. Pics from that next time!

Woot! I did it!

Girlie