Growing up. Sort of.

Our three year old has now officially left his day nursery/creche and will start nursery school in September.  As I think I mentioned before, he used to attend a private and expensive creche before we were able to get him in to the local authority run equivalent.

There was no comparison between the two set-ups.  The local authority version was much better organised and much cheaper too.

Anyway, this move from one level of education to another is a sign that our little one is growing up ever so slightly.  Next stop, after the nursery, will be the primary school, once  he has done his 3 year stint in the ‘Scuola Materna’.  The primary school is right next door, so the next move should not be too traumatic.  Several of Marty’s companions from the creche are also going to the same school and the nursery school has even agreed to place them all together in the same class.  This is good news too, seeing as little ones seem to find change rather stressful, as was evidenced by his initial reluctance to go to the then new creche back last September.  Up to now he has just waltzed in without a second thought, saying bye and running off to play with his pals.

He has showed no signs of missing his old haunt, which is not a great surprise when you take into account his age, however he has been getting excited about going to the nursery school.  He knows a change is in the offing and, for the moment, seems to accept this.  He loves to insist that his is big – ‘Sono grande’, so if you tell him that something is done by other ‘big’ boys, he goes along with the idea.

Attempting to use a bit of child psychology to get him to do things has mixed results.  Sometimes he will do what he is told, other times he just won’t and no amount of sweet talking, sorry, psychology, will bend him to our will.  He does tend to challenge his mother’s authority more than mine and, we’ve observed, he is a good as gold when he’s with me, but becomes mischievous as soon as his mum appears on the scene.  Yes, he has a strong character and it has not escaped his attention that he can often get his own way, especially when his mum is involved.  I do make a point of saying ‘no’ to him sometimes, but I also explain why he cannot do what he wants.  This approach works quite often, but is not ‘toddler-proof’ by a long way.

Children certainly keep you on your toes!

That soap which is life.

Soaps or soap operas are the bread and butter of the TV industry the world over.  However, when I think about it I’ve known a good few ‘soap’ situations in my life.  Here are a few of the more memorable ones:

• Friend goes out with another friend.  Friend has an affair and is just about caught out.  The person with whom she is having an affair makes a sharp exit from a downstairs window.  Good comedy.
• Being told by a friend, that a close friend of good friend of mine is gay.  Causing me to swerve on the motorway.
• Finding out that two friends of mine have split up.  He has run off with a doctor’s wife and both were last seen heading into the sunset in an Austin Healey.
• Finding out that the girl I had, sort of, being going out with, was really deeply in love with a very good friend of mine.  I took it like a man.  Cried a bit, internally, and went to their fantastic wedding.  I still like them both very much.
• Finding out a friend had had a one night stand and discovered she was expecting.  Secret abortion takes place.

There are others which involve me, but I’m not going to tell you about these ‘soap’ situations! Sorry.

Truth is often stranger than fiction.  I know.

Italian complexity, again.

While I was at the hospital while I wrote this. Seeing a specialist can prove to be a time consuming process here.

First, you need a piece of paper upon which is written the time and date of the appointment, then on the day of the appointment you need to go through the ‘acceptance’ procedure. This often involves getting a ticket and waiting your turn – it is not impossible to find that there are upwards of 80 people in front of you. Once you are at the counter, they take your details and look up the info on a pc – our address always seems to be wrong, despite our having corrected it many times. Then you may have to pay something, after having declared that your income is above or below a certain level. If you pay, you get a nice little receipt which can set off against your tax liability. If you don’t pay you get a receipt anyway.

After the queue, there is the appointment (before which you’ll need to present the receipt you obtained) which is rarely on time. You really need to a)turn up at least an hour before your appointment or b)go with someone who can do the queuing for you. Option b) is preferable when you have a small child.

All in all you (or two of you) end up wasting more than half a day. Not great when you have to work. It is a proven fact that Italians waste an enormous amount of time dealing with bureaucracy and this not helped by the fact that many things that need sorting out require that you turn up in person.

For some reason doing things over the phone seems to be difficult, especially in the case of things related to health or local services.

While at the visit the doctor suggested that our wee one be tested for allergy, something I was going to request, incidentally. This meant yet another acceptance receipt, although luckily I was first in line and aside for having to complete yet another copy of a form which we had already filled in countless numbers of times I was in and out in a trice.

Even more recently I got a call from the hospital to tell me that the copies of our son’s scan were ready to be picked up. This is how things went:

1. Arrive at hospital, go to the office where the scans are held.

2. Charming, really, lady scribbles something on the form I show her and tells me that I now have to pay before I can have the copies.

3. Trot off to the room where you make payments. Take a ticket. Notice that there are more than 100 people in front of me.

4. Have a coffee. Drink some water. Kill time. Still 70 people in front of me.

5. Panic. I do not have my son’s health card.

5. Fly off on my bike in the blinding heat to my other half’s workplace. Collect card.

6. Arrive back at hospital to find that I have missed my turn in the queue by two places. Fail to stifle various curses.

7. But, I was ‘furbo’ – crafty in Italian. Before charging off on my bike, I just happened to take another ticket, just in case. I have 25 people in front me.

8. More coffee, more water.

9. It’s past 12:30, which means the office from which I need to pick up the copies will be closed. Damn.

10. Finally get to the counter. Correct our address, yet again. Hand over cash, get a nice receipt.

11. Head off to attempt to pick up what I came here for, in the vain hope that the office will still be open.

12. What luck! It is open. The nice lady seems rather surprised to see me. Display receipt.

13. Get the copies.

14. Finally leave the hospital. Three hours burned.

15. Remember that I’ll have to come back to pick up the clinical records.

What a palaver!

Lebanon

I feel sorry for this area and its inhabitants. It sounded as if it had just about got over the last episode of violence. Things were picking up, getting back to normal.

Many years ago, I can’t recall exactly when, but I may still have been at school at the time, I remember seeing some news footage of the troubles in Lebanon. One image has stuck in my mind to this day. What I saw was this fighter blasting away over the top of a wall. Nothing strange you may utter. Well there was. It was the way this guy was blasting away. He was not aiming at anything, in fact he was not using the sights on the assault rifle he was brandishing, but what got me most was that he seemed to be having a pretty damned good time. He was enjoying himself, like he was involved in some kiddie cowboys and Indians game. The fact that he was possibly hitting innocents never even seemed to cross his mind.

From this incident I concluded that while man gets a kick out of shooting and war the world will have no peace. Shooting as an act is fun, many men and some women know this. I know it too because I used to spend a lot of time shooting. I also know that it is quite easy to detach yourself from the killing aspect because you feel satisfied with having hit a target. Only your target, if it was living, no longer exists. Luckily not everyone of us is capable of such detachment, however more than enough of us are. This means that conflicts will continue, at least until we find something much less violent which gives us the same kick.

Pontification over. Until the next time.

CSS

Do you know what CSS stands for? Possibly, but if you don’t it stands for ‘cascading style sheets’.  What are these things? Well, they are a set of rules, almost like program code which you can use to style web sites – things like making characters bigger or changing the colour behind some area of text, right up to an including building entire web pages, thus avoiding the dreaded ‘tables’.  Don’t worry, anyone who knows a wee bit about the non-wooden variety of tables to which I am referring, but these tables are a bit like the tables you can build in Word and suchlike, only these are used for dividing web pages into a series of boxes into which you can pop images, text and other things.

Unfortunately my intermittent bouts of web design have not really allowed me to get a hang of CSS for much other than fairly basic stuff, even though I have two very good books on the subject.  I also have a rather neat style-sheet editing program which I invested in some time back.  It’s called, appropriately enough ‘Style Master‘.  I’ve only just started to see its real potential, and it does help simplify the task of creating style sheets and keeping track of all the little, and often interrelated, rules which you need to set up, or in my case, edit. I would recommend Style Master to anyone who wants to learn CSS and their support is excellent.

I have tried building entire pages with CSS, but have always had problems getting them to work in different browsers.  The problem seems to be that you need to use a number of so-called hacks to keep all of the browsers happyish most of the time.  Not being a full time web designer I just don’t have the time to get and keep myself familiar with all these hacks and modifications.  This is a shame because this technology, as it is known, is very powerful, and as any real web designer worth his salt will tell you, is the way web content is going to be shown to us all in the future.

I can see the day when web design will become modular but very flexible and browser compatibility problems will have become a relic from the dim and distant past.  Shame I don’t live in the hazy and obscure future really.

The weather blew its top.

The heat gets to everyone and everything, or so it would seem.  Even the weather had had enough and decided to let a few sparks fly over sizzling Milan.  The sparks came in the form of the usual, here, spectacular lightening show accompanied by the deep bass drums of resounding thunderclaps.  We had rain too.  It lashed down for about an hour and the result was most welcoming.

I’ve just returned from one of my almost nightly ambles around my area and it was great to be out.  The rain has cooled the roads and the buildings, and it cooled me too.

Our appartment is just unbearably hot and we are mulling over the idea of putting air conditioning in, despite worries about our little one’s potentially adverse reaction to the cool drafts of air.

I’m not sleeping at the moment (none of us seems to be getting much shuteye), or at least I don’t think so.  I get up (I’d like to say ‘wake up’, but seeing as I don’t sleep, I can’t, technically wake up….) in the morning feeling lousy.  Neither heading for bed early nor hitting the sack at 1 to 2 in the morning seems to make any difference.  It’s oppressive.  And also rather strange after having seen the same city under a think carpet of snow at the start of the year. An odd contrast.

At the weekend I shall be heading for the cool of the country with the little one and I’m looking forward to it.  My other half, bless her soul, has to continue working until the end of next week.  Hers is the only company in her street that seems to have any work on.  She works for an antiques dealer, by the way, but her boss, a great chap, is addicted to his work and whereas all the other antiques dealers have drifted off on holiday, this chap would keep going all August if had his way.  There always seems to be plenty to do.

I’m thinking of going out for another wander, to make the most of the cool while it lasts, which won’t be too long, the roads are already just about dry with only a few puddles managing to hang on in there.

It’s hot in the city.