The house and the car

I am very quickly running out of room on my SD card.  I only have room for about 40 more pictures on both 2.0 GB cards, and we’re going to travel some this weekend so I’m nervous.  I’ll either have to buy another SD card or put some of the pictures on this tiny computer and pray to God that those HUGE pictures the DSLR takes don’t bog this down too much.  We’ll see.

So here are the long awaited pictures!  First our little Lancia.  (I always pronounced these as Lan-C-uh, but here in Italia they pronounce them lahn-cha.  A “ci” or “ce” here, is pronouced “CH-ee” or “CH-eh” which completely throws me off.  There is a town near here that is Sacile, and we always said “sa-see-le” but it’s “sa-chee-lay”.  One of these days I’ll get it…) Anyway, here’s our little car.

I had an ‘89 Dodge Omni for my first car, and this car reminds me a LOT of that car.  Basically, it’s a little piece of junk, that couldn’t possibly have cost more than $8000 brand spanking new, but it’s the best thing that’s happened for us since we got here and we love it.  It’s a very bare bones car, as in ZERO frills, but it runs well and has like 62000 miles on it and it’s not missing anything, unlike other cars we looked at.  And Abbie’s car seat fits perfectly in the back seat and it has a radio and the hatchback truck actually stays open when you open it instead of slamming shut.  We’re very happy with our purchase.  We’re the 2nd owners of it.

I drove to the spouse’s coffee last night and it’s just amazing how driving in a place makes it feel more like home.  We’re actually getting around here okay despite not having a GPS and we’re learning to navigate these CRAZY Italian roads.  Luckily the signs around here are pretty good, so if you happen to know the name of the town you want to go to, you can get there fairly easily.

Next up, the house.  We stopped out and picked up the contract from our new landlords yesterday, and I snapped a quick shot of the outside of the house.  It’s a duplex – an old couple that are always sitting on their front porch live next door – and the other half is identical to our half.  (And that’s our car in the driveway too.)

  You can’t really see it in this picture but off to the right is the walkway up to the house.  The landlords are going to put a fence up for us since there is a rock wall along the walkway and the yard is higher than the walkway and we don’t want to worry about Abbie or the dogs fall off the wall.  It’s only 2-3 feet high, but still.  They’ve agreed to put up a fence for us.  It’s a cute little house and we like our landlords and Americans (and the landlords – another duplex) live right across the street so that’s nice.  And the view from the porch is amazing.  I’ll take pictures of that once we move it, but this will give you an idea of what our new place looks like on the outside.

I’m going to go lay down for a bit since Abbie finally fell asleep for her nap.  Luckily her temp is down to 100.5ish again.  I was freaked out when it got up to 103, but she’s doing okay.  I think I’m getting whatever she has, which doesn’t surprise me too much since she’s been covered in snot for a day now and I’m constantly wiping it off of her and me.  Good times in Italy!  =)