We had an awesome time in Italy visiting our very dearest friends, Andy and Sarah, and their new baby, Eva.

Photos (with captions!) have been up for awhile now, but here are a few video clips of special moments that just couldn’t be captured in still images.

First is in the backseat with little Evie, driving from the Venice airport back to Andy and Sarah’s home in Aviano. It was love at first sight.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Later in the week, during the four-hour drive to Florence, Rob and Andy were charged with trying to keep Eva awake, so she wouldn’t be up all night. You’ll be rewarded if you watch all the way through to the end, where, around 2:32, Rob starts rehearsing quietly to himself, lest he should disappoint Evie or his television audience with a flawed performance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In Florence, Sarah and I decided we wanted to get our palms read by a fortune-teller in the street. Andy can spot a tourist trap when he sees one and insisted that he could read our palms just fine. Not sure where he learned to have such utter confidence in his own BS, but it clearly is what makes him such a good litigator.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oh, how I miss our friends. It’s almost easier not to see them or talk to them at all, because it makes the time go by more quickly. Just thinking about them makes my heart hurt. Happily, Sarah and Eva are coming to stay with us for a few days in November, and they will all be living somewhere in the States within a year!

Speaking of crazy athletics, the Chicago Marathon is coming up. The time of year when tens of thousands of lunatics take to the street and spend the duration of the morning giving new, literal meaning to the phrase “pounding the pavement.”

My friend, who is an avid and talented runner, is totally bummed she can’t participate, despite her training, because she has a benign cyst on her hip joint (or something like that). (I mean benign in the non-cancerous way, not the this-doesn’t-cause-me-physical-and-emotional-anguish-on-a-daily-basis way. And damn, that adjective invention would make me happier if it wasn’t a double negative. But I’m not a talented writer, don’t you know, so I’m not going to bother fixing it. That’s right: apathy.)

I would like to take this opportunity to remind my poor, disappointed friend, and all the other crazy marathon aspirants, that the name “marathon” comes from the legend of Pheidippides, a Greek messenger that ran the entire distance of 26 miles from the town of Marathon to Athens yelling, “The Persians are coming! The Persians are coming!”

Wait. No. Wrong story.

He actually ran this great distance to announce that the Greeks had defeated the Persians.

Now, if you have half a brain at all, you realize that no one in their right mind would run that far just to announce good news.

But, alas, Pheidippides was indeed out of his mind. Upon arriving in Athens, he hollered, “”Νενικήκαμεν” (”We have won!”).

And collapsed. And died on the spot.

(That’s a true story, told to me by a real Greek and confirmed on Wikipedia, where anyone in the world can write about anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.)

So, my dear friend and other assorted crazy running-type persons, let the original marathon be a lesson to you. Running 26 miles, for any reason that is not absolutely urgent or life-threatening, is in and of itself life-threatening. And therefore utterly foolish. The human body is not meant to run 26 miles consecutively. Don’t do it.

This, mind you, coming from a girl who is sitting on a special cushion to relieve the lower back pain experienced from L4-L5 disc herniation, which has flared up about once a year for the past ten years and was undoubtedly developed during the constant pounding and compression of her joints and nerves and fascia of competitive gymnastics during all of her formative years.

So, take my opinion for what you will. Consider the source. Does this make me just a naysayer? Or does it make me AN EXPERT?

While you mull that, I’m heading off not to Greece but to another beautifully backwards place: bella Italia. We are visiting our dear friends Andy and Sarah, and their new baby Eva, at their home on the US Air Force Base in Aviano, before embarking with them on a road trip along the Mediterranean coast, hopefully to Nice and Monaco. (They boys want to see Monte Carlo.)

Italy, the US military, and a road trip with a 3-month old to the world’s fanciest casinos. Talk about backwards.

My goals for this trip include:

1) taking photographs to frame and display in our home, so the walls aren’t so bare and it looks like someone actually lives there, despite the fact that it is also permanently a construction zone;

2) losing weight, which oddly enough I usually do on vacations (because I’m not sitting in my kitchen and visiting the fridge every 10 minutes because I lack the humanity and stimulation of interpersonal interaction that an office setting provides), despite the fact that I will be subsisting entirely on a diet of wine, cheese, bread, and gelato; and

3) not falling in love with the baby, so I won’t want one and can continue to live the life of a Stay At Home Wife and Crazy Dog Lady, spending all my money on fancy clothes and vacations and random unnecessary crap for the dog, and letting my sister’s children take care of me in my old age, despite the fact that I have already fallen in love with this baby, from the just the photos alone, and that I have somehow always known, even before Andy and Sarah were even married, that the moment I held their baby in my arms, I would want one of my own, and it would be the one thing that could and would put me over the edge.

Rob’s goals for the trip include:

1) relaxing, despite the fact that he has not once in his life succeeded in doing so;

2)  learning to speak Italian, despite the fact that I just told him this morning that he does not in fact already know some Italian, and that Italian is not in fact simply Spanish spoken with that signature Italian lilt; and

3) teaching Evie to say “Rob,” despite the fact that I just told him this morning that no 3-month old human has ever intentionally spoken a recognizable word (even the children of those parents who think that their 10-month old is brilliant and can speak like 50 words when in reality no one can understand a thing the kid is trying to say).

It will be a special trip, no doubt. Ciao!

A few weekends ago, our friend Andy came home from his home in Italy, where he is stationed at the Aviano Air Force Base, to visit his family in Kaukauna, Wisconsin. Home of the spready cheese.

Sarah couldn’t travel because she is pregnant, so we took a few videos so she would feel like she had been there with us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

PS Liz, I tried to buy you authentic Kaukauna Port Wine cheese from Kaukauna itself, but alas, all spready cheeses must be refrigerated at all times. Dammit. They even had the reduced-fat kind, too.