Feb
26

Schizophrenic mouse

2005 | Filed Under Life in Italy | 1 Comment

Yes, that’s right, there is a schizophrenic mouse here in sunny Italy. The little fellow goes by the name of ‘Topo Gigio‘ and has his own show on TV earlyish on Saturday evenings here. He is quite cute, I suppose, as these characters go. But, he seems to have a bit of a personality crisis. The pressure of being a rodent TV star may be getting the better of him. You see, the little fellow will blather away in an almost normal sounding voice, for a mouse that is, and then, suddenly, his voice will jump two octaves as his alter ego manifests itself. After a few high pitched comments (one may expect high pitched comments from a mouse I suppose. Squeaking is rather high pitched, after all.) his voice returns to normal. However, it does sound as if the little chap could do with a visit to a psychiatrist, one who specialises in counseling mice with personality disorders, that is, if any such persons exist. Maybe there is a shrink out there who could help this poor mouse. If you happen to know of any such person, please tell him or her to get in touch and I’ll pass the info on to ‘Topo Gigio’, in the hope that one of his personalities may recognise the need for some assistance.

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Feb
25

A UFO!!……..not??!!

2005 | Filed Under Funny | Leave a Comment

Have you any idea what the strange object next to the famously lop-sided building might be?

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Feb
24

Baby and the hospital

2005 | Filed Under My son | Leave a Comment

Yesterday was a little traumatic. We spent the best part of the day at a large Italian hospital, which goes by the name of Niguarda. I had heard some bad things about the place and a friend of mine's wife gave birth to their child there and from his accounts the experience was not wonderful. I was fearing the worst, you know, bolshy uncaring staff and unending bureaucracy. Well, I am happy to report that the hospital did not live to my rather negative expectations. Indeed, it turned out to be a relatively painless experience. OK, so we did do a lot of waiting around and got conflicting reports with regard to the availability of the results of our sons CAT scan, but the staff were courteous and efficient.

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Feb
22

Metering out………..power cuts.

2005 | Filed Under Italy | Leave a Comment

The meter in question, m’lud, is the little box which sits in a cupboard recording how much electrical energy we have to pay for. The black box works very closely with its good friend, who goes by the name of ‘circuit breaker’, can’t remember the Italian and can’t be bothered to dig out the dictionary. I do apologise if you had an inexplicable desire to know how to say circuit breaker in Italian. OK, found it ’salvavita’, the dictionary was only at arms length, but I’m scribbling in gloom. Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, the two little boxes which connive to make life a little more challenging.

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Feb
21

Revolution: Britain

2005 | Filed Under Writing | Leave a Comment

Revolution: Britain is my first reall attempt at writing a novel. I started it some time ago and it is as yet unfinished, although I have written something like 16 chapters. I need an excuse to find some time to finish it, so I would like people to have a look and say how much it stinks or otherwise.

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Feb
21

Tanguy

2005 | Filed Under Films | Leave a Comment

This is just a quick entry about a French comedy called 'Tanguy'. It's about this guy who just will not leave home and how his parents try just about everything to get him out of their house.

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Feb
20

Vampires upstairs

2005 | Filed Under Milan - My Zone | 2 Comments

My other half has just shouted ‘basta’ from the bedroom, again. ‘Basta’ means ‘enough’ or in this case ‘cut it out’. Why did she shout this? Were you to blame? Don’t worry, I’ll be getting to the answers to these questions in a little while. First, dear reader, you need to know something about Italian appartments.

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Feb
20

Looking inwards and around

2005 | Filed Under My son | 2 Comments

OK, things do seem to be a little bleak at the moment for me, what with baby being ill often and this leading to not enough time to do as much as I would like, but it’s easy to be negative. There are lots of positive things going on in my life and living in Italy is one of them. Another good thing is that I have got my own, albeit very small, company and it is going well and would seem to have a bright future. I always wanted to work for myself and in doing so I have fulfilled an old ambition. Not only that, but I’d always wanted to learn another language and experience living in another country, and these are another Two fulfilled ambitions. I have a job which I like very much, which is more than could be said about my old work back in the UK.

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Feb
20

Marty

2005 | Filed Under My son | 1 Comment

Seeing as a reader of this blog, Christian Ventrello, has now become a dad and we had an agreement that if he posted a photo of his new addition, I would do the same, here are some photos of our little one Marty. They were all taken around Christmas 2004. He was having a 'swolleneye' episode around then too.

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Feb
19

Wi-Fi - not.

2005 | Filed Under Technology and Gadgets | 3 Comments

I have a rather neat wireless connection to the www. Well, correction, I did have a rather neat wireless connection until today. I switched on the PC, waited for a few hours while it booted up. Then I tried to check my mail. A no connection to the server message came up. Ah ha! The server is down. How about checking this from the web. Click on Firefox icon. This time the message blurts something about not being able to connect to Google. Try again, same message. There was a little message beside the network icon which had a nice little black exclamation mark on a yellow background. This was new. Anyway to cut what could well turn out to be a long story short, I messed around for a few hours while cursing the latest batch of MS updates.

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Feb
15

Future posts

2005 | Filed Under This blog | Leave a Comment

Once my baby crisis has been resolved. I shall move back onto the original purpose of this blog and readers can expect to read about what our neighbours seem to be getting up to, the fun that can be had with fragile Italian electrical systems and the Italian love affair with technology amongst other things……..

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Feb
15

Baby is ill, part 2.

2005 | Filed Under My son | 2 Comments

As I wrote the other day, baby has got his usual swollen eye problem. This means he is not at the nursery, so we have to take turns looking after him or get a babysitter in. At least we seem to be getting closer to finding out what exactly is causing his eye to swell up, it would appear to be something called ethmoiditis, which is something which is related to the sinuses. It is basically an infection which usually clears up with antibiotics, although it can worsen into something called orbital cellulitis (baby doc has written suspected orbital cellulitis on the slips that you need to get attention), and this can affect the brain area if not treated effectively. Orbital cellulitis seems to be an infection of the very thin bone tissue which separates the back of the eye from the brain cavity, by the way.

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