A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Okay, so that is not true.  It is actually a cold, wet, and miserable day in the neighborhood but I had a lovely outing with my neighbors.  Our parco, or street, or cul de sac (not sure what you would call it) has four townhouses.  Three are rented to military people and one is an Italian lady.  Right above us, our friends from TLA moved so we have several different friendly faces around.  Melissa, the veteran of the group who has lived her for six months took the two newbies, Gina and me to see some of the local gems near us.  We drove to Carney Park (a mini base that has all the park type things and will be super fun to go in the spring/summer), the JFC (Joint Force Command) base that has a post office and ATM that is much closer than the SS or Capodichino, the Metro which is more like a Sam’s, the ipercoop which is a grocery store, showed us several other markets, a trustworthy car repair man, a good veterinarian, and a good pasticceria with good canolis!  We also had a nice lunch at the Friends’ Café…and yes it is based off the TV show.  Of course when it comes time to go to any of these places, I will have to ask her for directions again but I feel slightly more aware of my surroundings.

When I got home, I was rocking the baby to sleep and I feel asleep in the glider before she did!!  I decided that meant I needed to not unpack the boxes and take a nap instead.  So I took a little nap with the dog and baby.  I just still felt a chill.  I was under the covers and I turned the heater on.  I turned it up a little bit.  I was just starting to feel the room warm up when the heater stopped making noises.  I hesitated because I didn’t want it to be true.  After two minutes, I had to admit the power was out and I needed to get out of the semi-warm bed to investigate.  This is not the first time the power has gone out so I knew how to check the box in the house.  I flipped the switches and nothing happened.  At this point, I decided I would call my neighbor since she could help me immediately.  She had her 14 year old son come and watch the baby, and walked me to the street to learn how to flip the switch at the street level.  Unfortunately all the power boxes had little blinking lights but ours.  We flipped the switch just to make sure.   So the walk back to the house (did I mention it was raining?), we discussed the situation.  Is it possible ENEL, the electricity company, turned our power off for some reason?  So we packed up the baby and I walked back down to her house.  Of course, the baby is hungry at this point.  So I try to call Matt and my phone has decided it will not make any phone calls.  Seriously?? I needed my phone for the first time and it didn’t want to work for me?? I guess this is karma for all the phone calls I didn’t answer in the States.  So I started to feed the baby and Melissa called Suzy our realtor (whose number I did not have until today).  She told her she would call the landlord and get back to us.  As we are waiting and enjoying the view even in the ugly weather, I finally was able to get my phone to call after restarting it.  I called Matt and he suggested I call NEX Residential Services.  The lady there told me that I must have used too much electricity and it shut down and would take 20 minutes before we could reset it.  Of course this is not true because I had one heater, the refrigerator, and the freezer on, but it had been twenty minutes so we would reset and see.  Leaving the baby with her 14 year old son (who did a very nice job of entertaining the baby!!), we started to walk back to our house and our local handyman, Vitale arrived.  He spent probably 5 minutes on the back porch, got the power back on, and told me there was a problem that he would fix tomorrow.  While this was going on, Rita (the Italian neighbor) and Melissa were walking to the street to check the box up there.  As the handyman was leaving, Rita yelled at him…I think because he wasn’t fixing it right now and was coming back tomorrow.  She even had some hand gestures.  I couldn’t help but laugh and smile!  So, I know have power and Melissa built me a fire while I was calling Matt to update him.  Although, there are many boxes to be unpacked, dinner to be made, things to be cleaned, or projects I want to start for my baby’s room or my friend’s new babies….I am sitting by the fire blogging and listening to my daughter chat with her bear blanket.  Quoting my husband: Life does not suck, (even with all the craziness)!!