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.

Cider verdict: delicious. It's like a pear flavored apple wine. It's only mildly alcoholic but that works out alright because I like to drink lots and lots of it at a time. Bottling it was such a chore. The first day that it was freezing outside, I found myself sanitizing bottles in big tubs of water and rinsing them with a hose. I was wet and my hands were so cold that it was hard to work. We hooked it up to a big canister of compressed CO2 and attempted to force carbonation. It only worked slightly. Next time I'm going to give it like 4 days of carbonation instead of 20 minutes so it'll truly sparkle. But anyway, for a first try this is fantastic. I got three big crates of big bottles full, so I haven't rationed it at all. It's probably a third gone. Mmm, just talking about it is making me want a big glass of it.

Daniel and I got our first xristmas tree together the day after Thanksgiving. It's as tall as it could be in our apartment and flocked. Flocked, I learned, is what you call the trees that have been sprayed with white shit to make it look like snow. Then we wrapped it in blue LED lights and some color changing globes and a bunch of ornaments. I think it's really pretty. So pretty that I want to take a picture of it and post it on my website, but I'm too lazy. I'll do it later along with the pictures from Halloween.

Thanksgiving was good. We spent it at Daniel's parents' house. Grilled turkey and stuffing made with sausage and oysters. Delish. Then there was some tofu, natch, and a few other sides. I've never had a grilled turkey but it was fantastic. I want to try that some time. Grilling has never been my forte and I'm always intimidated to try it out in the courtyard, but maybe that should be a new years resolution for me.

Speaking of new years resolutions -- do me a favor and don't resolve to work out in the new year. If you haven't been doing it already, starting in January is the worst thing you can possibly do. Because every lard ass in the world starts going in January clogging up all the gym equipment for a good month or two before finally giving up like we all knew they were going to do from the beginning. So save yourself, and me, the trouble. You're welcome. This post sucked.

Oh, joy! It's my favorite holy day once again! The day our lord and saviour, the turkey, willingly gave his life so we might enjoy eternal dressings. "Take this drumstick and eat it, for this is my body, gobble, gobble." The day Christopher Columbus killed all the Native Americans. He killed them all, great and small, so he could put their heads up on his wall. It was the day Chris Columbus killed all the Indians.

Now that we're finished with the history of Thanksgiving, I want to take a moment to discuss with all of you, the meaning of Thanksgiving. It's like I always say, "Tis better to thanksgive than to thanksreceive." Let's all try to keep that in mind this year. And I know, I know, the food is a big part of it. Who doesn't like to sit down at a table with a 24 pound roasted bird carcass, mashed potatoes made with heavy cream and butter and garlic, green bean casserole made with soup from the can (because any attempt to gourmet that up and no one will eat it), mac n cheese made from scratch, cranberry sauce nobody will touch but it has to be on the table anyway, french bread to sop up the leftover gravy made from stock, candied yams and pumpkin pies and AHHHHH I'm overstimulated. But with all of this, I still must contest that Thanksgiving is not just about the food.

It's about the booze.

The red wines, the white wines, the boxed wines in between. The smooth burn of a single malt scotch as it gives your stomach a welcome hug. The brandy soaked peaches. The cases upon cases of beer in the fridge "just in case" even though you know no one's leaving til they're gone. And this year, I made red roosters, a thing I saw Emeril do. Cranberry juice and orange juice concentrate and a whole lot of vodka, into a large pan and into the freezer. I kicked it up a notch by using raspberry vodka. I hope everybody likes it. BAM!

I am going to have a very H■■■■■■ Thanksgiving this year by spending it with my dear friend Allison and her parents (Krazy K and Big D) and the rest of her family. Should be a riot. I'm so excited I can barely sit still. I hope all of you have the most wonderful holiday with friends and family (because they're a part of the day too). Take a moment to think about this: for what are you most grateful this year? I know mine -- Johnny Walker Black.

Happy Thanksgiving to all and to all a good buzz!

Today, I was riding the bus home from my morning class. This guy sitting across from me had left his uncapped bottle of milk sitting on the seat next to him. When we took a sharp left, the milk fell off of the seat and onto the floor where the contents exuded. There was a rather large puddle of white milk on the dark grey floor of the bus. And then we started turning, and long horizontal lines were painted. We stopped short, and then accelerated creating a grid. The more we traversed the route home, the more complex the milk painting got. By the time I got off the bus, I thought it was rather beautiful.

I wanted to find you all some kind of painting online that looked like the serendipitious modern art I was treated to, but instead I ended up looking at the Museum of Modern Art webpage for like an hour. You have got to see this exhibit called Tempo. I was very inspired. I especially liked the augmenter hammers and the chick laying on oranges. "Hold your breath and think of Spinoza." Wonderful. I think its about time for me to make a hair nest and start doing speed. (Name that allusion.)

I'm sorry you all couldn't have seen it. Maybe I'll make a painting. Probably not. I'm going to go have coffee with Topher.

Well, I finally figured out why no one was leaving comments. Not that any of you probably noticed, but the "Leave a comment" and "read the comments" links are not working. I screwed something up when I was messing around with Greymatter. I'm sure its a quick fix, but I've not had the time to date necessary to investigate and fix it. So for now, you're all off the hook on leaving comments.

Not a lots been goin on. I've been in lab a lot working on projects. I finally started on the final documentation on one project by making myself a template in word. I didn't actually write anything though. Maybe I'll do some of that tomorrow. I also need to map out and order some PCboards to mount our thermometer on. And I have a test in O■■■'s 349 class on Tuesday. I'm pretty damn prepared for it, but I like to make 100's on his tests, so I'm going to study balls tomorrow. Then Thanksgiving is just around the corner. I'm going home to Plano, so if anyone else is too, let me know, we'll meet up.

Sorry to cut this short, but my bed is calling to me. In a Spanish accent no less ... that's weird. I'm sleep deprived. Laaaaaate.