I think what most fascinates me about the professional surfing world is not the glamorous side of it – great tans, fancy sponsors, chiseled physiques, screaming fans – but the lifestyle they have as professional athletes in a minor sport. If you take away some of the top earners, the […]
Yearly Archives: 2011
Fog is romantic at one precise moment … when walking across a bridge at twilight, hand in hand with your wife, the streetlights wearing halos and the moist air tingling your nose. The rest of the time, fog sucks. It is one of the primary reasons that we got the […]
My father, a born Doubting Thomas, has always been suspicious of the existence of wild boar (cinghiale in Italian) in Italy. After spending three weeks in Tuscany a few years ago, he calculated that based on the number of restaurants serving wild boar in various forms (stew, steak, sausage, jerky, […]
If you are receptive enough to all of the stimuli around you, and experienced or wise enough to filter out the white noise and focus on things of substance, you will frequently find yourself in contact with people of extraordinary personality or character. This morning, for example, I was visiting […]
Last week Tuesday, 8 days ago, just hours before the deluge that brought down an unbelievable amount of water and mud and suffering to the Cinque Terre, I went to take a look at the sea after dropping my daughter off at nursery school. It was a warm morning, the […]
For anyone interested in reading about how the deluge in Levanto went for us, here’s a link to my wife’s blog post about it in Italian and in English. The photo above should at least give an idea of what it was like on our property (though it was taken […]
My brother-in-law Marco was telling me the other day about his experience drilling through new tiles in his house. He was having a hell of a time getting through them, and given how much he and his girlfriend had spent on remodeling the house, he wasn’t interested in cracking any […]
After five weeks of straight sunshine, a cloud bank settled in over Levanto this morning, and we have had our first gray day in ages. No complaints, though – after all, the seasons and rhythms of the sun are as important for us as they are for any other animal, […]
A few weeks ago, my daughter Julia and I discovered our black cat Bagheera in one of her new hiding spots – a bare space between two thick bushes from which she had a great view of what was going on, but where she was practically invisible. As soon as […]
I just finished reading Balzac’s Lost Illusions, a classic weighing in at a relatively modest 682 pages. I don’t remember when I started it, though at best guess it was sometime around April or May. That’s a good 5 plus months, though I must subtract from those the six weeks […]