Busy down time

On Wednesdays, we get a day off from the Institute, which is good because we still have a bunch of things to do to get set up around here. For example, the first sheer curtain looked good enough that we bought another set for a different window, so now we can have more light in our rooms. The living room got reorganized a bit to make a better place for the WiFi router and my laptop. We went to the mall and to Ikea, buying more stuff for the apartment and some exercise equipment: a floor mat, some hand weights, and a foam roller. We actually feel good enough to start trying to work out again! 

In the morning, I had a followup visit with the cardiologist, who gave me a clean bill of health. She did an echo-cardiogram and a stress test, and everything looked fine, which is what we expected but we'll all rest easier knowing for sure. Her final comment was something to the effect of "you didn't have a heart episode; you just fainted". Here is a picture of us in front of the equipment she used:

And here is a fairly typical parking job in Italy; that's our car outside the doctor's office:

I have now parallel parked a few times and got it right the first time. It's easy because the car is small. It's a Toyota hybrid, which seems to get great gas mileage.

We also went to a different cell carrier store to see if they would accept our US credit card for automatic payment. The guy was very helpful and said that they absolutely could, so we started the process of porting Dee's number over. However, when he asked for our codice fiscale (fiscal code, kinda like a tax ID number), which we won't get for several months, he said that he couldn't take our credit cards. Sigh. So we'll just have to go to the store every month to pay the bill.

Several other friends from church are coming to Rome later this month. One of them offered to bring an entire suitcase of stuff for us, which they will then fill with stuff they buy here to take home. Awesome! There are definitely some things we'd love to have, so we're making a list to give them, with an assist from our son Rich who is gathering things from around the house.

We also went to Metro, a club store kinda like Costco, but it turns out we didn't have our member card, so we couldn't go in. The office can issue us another one, so we'll get there in a few days. They apparently have a bunch of things not easily available here, like tortillas, hot dogs, and cheddar cheese, so it's useful for our cooking.

Tonight we're bushed after running around all day, but this place really feels like home.