A few years ago we attended a wedding in Austin where Daniel bumped into an old friend he hadn't seen in years. This friend told him he was now living in Milan ever since he had claimed his birthright citizenship in Italy. If you are descended from an Italian citizen and can prove it, you can claim your jure sanguinis right to your own citizenship. Italian citizenship, of course, comes with full rights and privileges of a European Union citizenship allowing you to live or work anywhere in the EU.

It wasn't for a while after we got home that we really got curious and started looking into whether this was a viable option for Daniel or not. We knew for certain he was Italian by blood, but just weren't sure exactly what the rules were, if we could sufficiently prove it, etc. We finally decided to take action and looked up the consultancy that his friend had used and set up an appointment. The guy did some genealogical research on the fly with us watching. He did it so incredibly fast using a multitude of tools. And what I appreciated the most was fast and accurately he could type. He was just zooming around the internet, pulling down documents, loading them into a folder.

He told us we could proceed and gave a list of documents to procure. And it was a lot. Basically every birth, marriage, and death certificate for EVERY member of his lineage all the way back to his great-grandfather, Segundo. It was time consuming and bureaucratic, but not terribly difficult. For some of the old documents from Italy we had to hire somebody to physically go look them up. The rest we could pretty much order online for a nominal fee. Some of those were quick and easy, some required telephoning some lady in an office in upstate New York and asking what the dillyo. But after a couple of years we had compiled the full list.

That then had to be notarized and approved as legit by the US government before they could be translated and sent to the Italian government. Then we waited. Last December he was informed that he had won his elective court case in Turino, Italy and was now a citizen! There was still more waiting for this decision and the resulting paperwork to be officially filed and on record in Asti. But we got notified last week that his Italian birth certificate and our Italian marriage certificate are both on file and official!

For next steps, he has registered online as an "Italian Living Abroad" and we'll probably have to wait a few months for that to go through and get approved. Then he will have access to services from the Italian consulate in Houston including getting his passport.

All we have to figure out then is when and where we're moving to in the EU.... Stay tuned!

I have been keeping up with my DuoLingo lessons. The streaks and friend streaks and leaderboards do enough to make sure I never skip a day. That and the incessant notifications from the app. But ... I do have one distraction from my language lessons.

DuoLingo has chess lessons. I've always wanted to learn to play chess, but beyond learning how the pieces move and then getting destroyed repeatedly in online games, I never pursued it. But now I'm getting little tiny play by play lessons of different scenarios and how to respond and why. I am BY NO MEANS good at it. God damn, is it ever hard. When I do go on Chess.com and play strangers, I do NOT do well. I get so nervous and make so many bonehead mistakes.

I will say this though. I know very little about openings. And I'm completely lost in the midgame. But the endgame. Man do I seem to be good at the end game. After my opponent has decimated my ranks, I can dance around, gobble up their pieces, avoid checkmate, and usually in even the most dire circumstances end things in a stalemate draw. I'm sure a lot of that is due to me being matched with people with similar ranks who don't know how to close out a game and against anyone competent I would be dead in seconds. But it's still fun. I wish I could play someone I know regularly but I can't find anyone willing to play me. So if you have a Chess.com username and want to play with me leave a comment. I love saying leave a comment like anyone is reading.

Also, side note. I now know what a Queen's Gambit is and honestly it's not that cool. It's just an opening move/moves. It sounds like it's some kind of dramatic endgame sacrifice of your queen to win the game or something. But nope. Just the first move or two with your pawns.

I normally wouldn't admit to this, but I got stood up tonight. The only reason I'm sharing this with you is because none of you will ever believe that I just decided to stay home and sober of my own accord. I wanted to meet at 8 for dinner, but he had to work until 10. Okay, that's kind of late, but no worries. So I wait until 10. Then I wait until 11, when I call him. He said he would call me RIGHT back, so I wait until midnight and now I've been stood up and it's too late to make plans with somebody else. I have a few options at this point. I'm all dressed and the hair is did, so I can go out to the bars alone and hope to find somebody I know. I can stay home and clean like I desperately need to do. Or I can go to the gym and work off a little steam.

Yay for 24 hour gyms! I had the best time there having the entire facility to myself. There are just things you can do when you're alone that you won't do when a bunch of people are around. First, I took over the entire studio and put my yoga mat smack dab in the middle of the room and did yoga for about 45 minutes. It felt so good. I haven't taken the time to do it right in so, so long. I don't want to do that when a bunch of people are walking around and would be watching me.

Then I went and lifted a few weights. But I decided to see if I could do the bench press with free weights. This is something else you can't do when all the meat heads and gym bunnies are lumbering around. The last thing I want is someone to have to help me pick the empty bar up off of my neck. I am happy to report, dear viewers, that I benched the bar PLUS 20 lbs. Oh yeah. Feel these pecs.

The best part of the night was when I decided to go downstairs and play basketball. Oh yeah, I said basketball. I don't think I've touched a basketball in over a decade, but there was no one around. Hahaha, I was hilariously BAD at it. I probably played for about 30 minutes (until the girl came in to sweep and I got embarassed) and I think I made maybe 3 shots the entire time. This is no surprise to me, I've always sucked at basketball. When I was younger, my dad used to stand on the sidelines and point which direction I should be running, so I would appear to have some semblance of an idea what I was doing. I never made a basket during a game either. But I figured that I'm a lot taller now so maybe I'd be a little better, but that was not the case. I mean, granted I wasn't attempting layups or short shots, but I wasn't doing like Emmit Smith shit either.

It reminded me so much of other sports blunders I've had in my life. I am genetically pre-programmed to suck at sports, so I don't feel bad. I find it pretty amusing. One time my baseball coach got fed up with my batting skills being non-existant so he told me to hit the batting cages over the weekend. My mom paid for me to get 60 pitches. That's 60 balls. 60 individual chances to make contact with a ball thrown by an automated machine in the same spot at the same speed. And I completely whiffed 60 times in a row. Talk about demoralizing.

The night ended with me being brave enough to step onto the scale. I've gained 7 lbs since I started working and officially weigh the most I have ever weighed in my life. Okay, I'm still 8 lbs below my target weight, but I'm perrty sherr that this isn't muscle mass I've gained. Something will have to be done about this asap.

So there's my pathetic night. I hope everyone else drank twice as much to make up for me. Lastly, congrats to Steve the diver who just graduated from Mary Land University. He's talking to me right now and is gonna be home on Wednesday. So that should be fun. Laaaaaaaaaaaate!