Hi everyone! So, Happy Labor Day weekend! (And happy birthday to my sister Nancy!)
We found out where we are moving to next year: Zagreb, Croatia! We are very excited - this is a great place, right across the Adriatic from Italy (and where we went to the beach on our vacation). Of course the capital, Zagreb, is not on the beach and that is the only bad part about it. It's in the northern part of the country, but it does have five different thermal baths (heated springs) within driving distance. (Can you say "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday"?) I probably won't be able to work at the embassy there, it's pretty small and doesn't have that many family member jobs, so I'm starting to investigate working for myself while there. We will be just a five hour drive back over to northern Italy and the military base in Aviano (Yeay, I still have access to the PX!) and we can easily travel to Italy, Austria, Germany, Hungary, etc. It's going to be fun. It's definitely cheaper to live there than Rome. And maybe it doesn't sound as cool as Italy, but it will still be a very neat place for you to come visit!
That's the major news for the month. I went on a major scrapbooking rampage over Faragosto weekend (It's the Italian 3 day weekend for the summer, kindof like Memorial and Labor Day rolled into one.) and got 42 pages done. Then I ran out of pages, so I'm stuck until I get more. My goal is to get completely caught up before the end of the year. Kindof a monumental task. I'm half-way through the wedding album and got up until March of this year.
What does Joel do while I spend all this time scrapbooking? Playing Major League Baseball on the Playstation. I'm not sure I should have gotten him this game. He plays a general manager and not only plays the games, but trades and runs the stadium. It's great training for the day when he becomes General Manager of the New York Yankees (while I'm famous on Broadway). Please, whatever you do, don't buy him any playstation games for Christmas!
School starts next week here, which means I lose the teenager that works in my office. And we are drowning in event planning again - I've been enjoying my break from all that. My partner has to go back for training for two weeks in DC; we've got 2 major orientation events this month and the new Ambassador decided to throw a reception next week at the last minute; and we have Oktoberfest and Halloween coming up in October. Aah, my leasurely summer is over. I already miss it.
Joel and I are heading up to an agriturismo in Tuscany tomorrow. An agriturismo is a "tourist farm", kind of a B&B on a working farm. They're all different, some of them are on wineries or serve meals of their local crops (fresh olives, etc.) and it's very cool. The one we are going to has a pool and we can rent horses, and we're close to this town called San Gimingnano that makes THE MOST AMAZING WHITE WINE. I'm not kidding. It's the only white wine I've ever liked. And we are going to take our bikes so we can ride around in the hills of Tuscany. It just sounds cool.
So that's it for me. I've got to go pack and get us ready for the weekend!
Julie and Joel
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