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.

Any time anyone asks what superpower I would most like to have, I always answer that I would like to speak every language with native fluency. And yet, I've rarely if ever done anything to approach that goal. Daniel and I did take a semester of French at SMU one time. That was fun but without continued effort didn't really stick.

Then my best seven foot tall woman friend suggested I download DuoLingo. It's free and you can learn any number of languages. So I did, and I started taking French lessons. Then I decided to throw in German since I already know it pretty well and it would be fun and easy to refresh. Then we planned a trip to Portugal so I focused on learning was Portuguese I could in the months leading up to our departure.

THEN I got so sick of the advertisements that I paid for a subscription. They got me. I admit it. But now that I'm paying for it, I'm going all in. I am currently switching daily between: French, Germany, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Danish. What's weird is that while switching between them certainly slows my progress, learning seven sets of vocabulary at once hasn't really proven to be any more difficult than one.

I know that these little exercises and AI driven conversation and voice recognition are unlikely to make me fluent. They're unlikely to allow me to converse easily in a foreign country. But I don't really care. Because (A) it's fun, (B) it's better than doom scrolling, and (C) it really does teach you a LOT if not all you need to know. When we were in Portugal, I busted out a few phrases with our guides (which of course ended with hilarious failure as I spoke Brazilian Portuguese), but also just consumed words around me. I knew what the little Brazilian kid was talking about when he screamed, "Abacaxi! Aacaxi!" at the top of his lungs (he saw a pineapple laying on the ground).

And that was enough for me. I cannot explain how utterly maddening it is for me in a foreign country to see words all around me and not know what they mean. I don't CARE what they mean. It just bothers me not to know. This really helped with that mental fatigue. To see a sign in a store window and know that it says "Closed on Mondays." It allows me to move on and not fixate on wanting to stop and translate.

So anyway, that's my plug for DuoLingo. It's free if you can withstand the most obnoxious assault of ads for phone games deliberately designed to wear you down into signing up for a subscription. But if you've ever been even a little curious, this is a super low effort, low risk way to delve into it and feel like you're accomplishing something every day.

I like to think of myself as an aspirer. There's nothing I really excel at, but there are many, many things I am aspiring to be. Just one of those, as you may know, is a MythBuster. Although I do feel the need to recall my Brita water filter vodka experiment and mention that I did that before the MythBusters did.

Anywho, let me tell you about my latest experiment. This one is based on the episode where they test the absolutely retarded idea that burying beer in the sand, dousing it with gasoline, and lighting it on fire will cool the beer down ... as fire tends to do to things. They obviously busted this myth, but then set about finding out the fastest way to cool down a six pack. Keith can tell you that the fastest way to do so is in a cooler full of ice and salt water. You can bring the temperature of the salt water down to around 25 degrees Fahrenheit, envelop the can in the sub-freezing liquid, and a few minutes later, you've got a frosty cold beer. I've used this a few times in a pinch when the only available case of Kers Lat (or Miller when I'm at Lesbie's) is off the shelf. But it requires a sink, all the ice in the ice maker, and the remainder of salt in the house. Could this be improved?

Hypothesis: If I could get a saline solution with enough salt that it wouldn't freeze solid in the freezer, I could have instant beer cooling liquid on hand at all times. Plop a beer in for 30 seconds, rinse and drink. It should be fast enough that I don't mind doing it one beer at a time.

Research: Now, I do all of my research on the internet from uncertified websites, so if you see any flaws here, please let me know. What I read tells me that the average freezer is set at 0 degrees Fahrenheit ... well below water's freezing point. At first I thought it might be too cold at any salinity. But, another website suggested that when water reaches saturation of salt, the freezing point can be lowered to around -6 degrees Fahrenheit. So, it's probable that if I pour a shit ton of salt into a bowl of water and place it in the freezer, it will still be a liquid in the morning. A super chilled beer frosting liquid.

I was surprised how much salt the water could handle. You wouldn't expect me to be surprised since in the sixth grade I took second place in the science fair with, "Which Liquid Can Hold the Most Salt?" I received glowing comments like, "Why?" No reason, bitch, I was just fucking curious. g*d! Oh well, it was much better than my brother's, "Does Fertilizer Help Plants Grow?" Turns out it does. Anyway, it took about half a can of salt, but I wanted to make absolutely sure that it was saturated and had a few crystals left over that it couldn't absorb. And now, we wait.

I'll keep you all posted on my progress.

I know you were all expecting an immediate reaction to my Thanksgiving, since it is my favorite holy day of the year, so I apologize for keeping you in suspense. In all honesty, it wasn't wild and or crazy, just nice. I drove up to OKC to see my sister. Her daughter is about 8 months old now. It's totally an age you don't want to miss out on, but, c'mon ... babies don't do much. She can't talk yet, she can't walk yet, so while I wouldn't trade seeing her for anything, it was pretty low key.

Our turkey was pretty good. I don't know that it was 140 dollars good, but it was scrumptious. The best part of the Heritage Turkey is that it comes with a barcode. When you enter that barcode at their website, it brings up your turkey's personal history. Our hen was born in March of 2005 and raised on a farm in Kansas. She liked roosting in tall trees. It was kind of morbid, so we gave her a eugoogaly before we tore into her roasted butter basted carcass. Thanks be given. We shared the meal with my niece's other grandparents, the baptits preacher. The baptits preacher doesn't drink or dance or believe anyone but him is getting into the pearly gates. Well since there was a baptits at the table (you guys have noticed I'm spelling it 'baptits' on purpose by now right? good) that meant that I couldn't drink either. So annoying.

As soon as he left we busted out the beer and scotch and played poker and me and my dad robbed my brother-in-law blind. It was too funny. Unfortunately though, the next day my sister was feeling sick. Her daughter was already under the weather and kind of cranky (which is not her usual demeanor). So my parents and I opted to leave a bit earlier than planned and drop off at Winstar for some gambalaya. I didn't win anything but I did lose the 20 bucks I'd won from poker, so I came out even. That's pretty good for me since I have a gambling problem ... my problem is that I suck at it.

Thanksgiving plans? I'm going to host one in December when Owen is in town. It will be held at the Hamptons by my gracious host Miles. Not only will there be booze there, but I imagine it will be at least 8 of the 9 side dishes. Bourbon soup, here we come. Look forward to your invitation to that, even though most of you won't receive one.

Lastly, I am done with sleep medicine. No more CPAPs, no more machines, no more masks, no more pills, no more studies, no more labs, no more brain waves, no more oxygen monitors, no more REM, NO MORE NO MORE NO MORE. I went to the doctor today, returned everything they'd given me, shook their hands and left. Best of all? No more payments. I just need to work on getting back to where I was 7 months ago before I started all of this nonsense. I was tired, but I was functioning. That's the combo I'm trying to get back to. If it turns out that I can't do it on my own, I will accept the advice of the doctor and return for an unlimitedly refilled subscription to Provigil, but I'm hoping it won't come to that.

Miles bought me a prescription to Details! UH! Thanks Miles!

I went out last night. Nothing unexpected. Marshall didn't have anything better to do so he went with me. I decided it was a Jack on the rocks night. Yum. We stayed til almost 3 and then Marshall dropped me off at Raul's for an after party. Oh man, it was fun as always. All the usual suspects were there. Well, pardon me for yadda yadda-ing, but yadda yadda yadda I haven't been to bed yet. But, as I was getting a ride home from Nick this morning around 8, I had a voicemail from Leslie's phone. Her friend was desperately searching for his keys because he had to be in Houston or something. He didn't know what to do because everyone was passed out, he was keyless and upset, so he started goin down the call list. Apparently he had left his keys in a dark brown jacket, the very jacket I had happened to comment on on my way out of Raul's.

I was nice, and I called him back and left a message saying that the coat was there, no worries. And he called back as soon as I got home, got some meat 'n cheese in my belly and took a shower. He was pretty distraught about the whole situation and called his situation 'dire' so I rose to the occasion. Despite the fact that I was about to lay down to a much anticipated slumber, I got in my car and drove over to Leslie's to pick up a perfect stranger and drive him back from whence I'd come. When we got there, his jacket was sitting right where I'd seen it, complete with a set of keys. He was overjoyed; however, Raul was now distraught. Apparently, when I'd left this morning, I hadn't quite closed the door and Terysa's prized cat had escaped and was nowhere to be found. I felt pretty bad since I was the last person to leave so it obviously had to be my fault.

My passenger was not concerned in the least, having developed an unhealthy affinity for yours truly. "Just let him go look for 5 minutes and he'll find him," he boasted about me. I was like, no no no, I am definitely not looking for any cat right now, let's go. So, I opened the door, and out the corner of my eye, downstairs, I saw the fucking cat. I was overjoyed. "There's the cat," I stated matter-of-factly. It took zero effort to coax the cat to run full speed into the apartment, and I had two awestruck compatriots throwing their praise at me. Sometimes it ain't so bad playin' the nice guy. Now, it is WAY past due for me to go to sleep. Ciao bellas.