I feel the healthiest I've felt in months. It's amazing how great your body can do when you go just one week where you work out every day, don't drink, and get a good 7-8 hours of sleep each night. Hopefully I can keep this up once we pull back in to Naples tomorrow.

And for those of you worried that the Navy hasn't been keeping me busy enough on this cruise ship, I actually did have some legitimate work to do this week. Even had to work over the weekend. So there.

I'm thinking of going to Paris over the Thanksgiving holiday. Anyone care to tag along? And if not, any recommendations for things to do/see?

Also going to Florence/Tuscany for the long weekend this weekend. Should be a good time.

So this is how the other half of the Navy lives. I'm currently at sea on a surface ship, living the life of a staff officer. Granted, I'm close to the lowest-ranking staff officer of the 90 or so of us on board, but it's still pretty cushy compared to being on a sub. This afternoon I took a nap before dinner so I could support my strenuous evening schedule of working out, showering, checking email, and watching a movie. Not to mention my stateroom here is about 3 times the size of the one I had on the boat, and I only share it with one other person instead of two. Oh, and a nice big deck full of fresh air I can go jogging around.

Some people post to their site from cell phones. I post to mine from a warship. Beat that.

One of my college friends was in town this weekend with some of his law school pals passing through on a post- bar exam European tour. I went up to Rome to hang out with them Friday night-Sunday, and then they stayed at my place Sunday and Monday nights. It was actually a really good time. From that, though, I now have some ground rules that I would like to lay down for when you come to visit. Like I have said before, you're all more than welcome to come visit whenever you want. However:

-If you come to go siteseeing, do not complain about walking. Unless you feel like going and getting tickets for the tourist pick-up/drop-off bus, you're going to walk. It's how siteseeing works. Me, I like to walk. I could walk around Rome all day. In fact, I HAVE walked around Rome all day. It's quite nice. And if you're with a group of people going sightseeing at a place where none of them have ever been, you may end up getting off a couple bus stops too soon and having to walk a mile or two farther than you expected. So deal with it.

-Service at the restaraunts (or anywhere, for that matter) will not be what you expect in the States. For one thing, they don't all speak English here. Imagine that. And yes, it may take awhile to get the check, even if you ask. In fact, it may take awhile to get anything done. And when it does get done, it may very well be done half-assed. That's Italy. Relax. Enjoy it. Stay awhile. And stop whining about it every single time it happens. It's part of the charm.

-Guess what? Italians eat Italian food. Yes, it's nice to get a break every once in awhile if you're here for a long time, and they do have some other ethnic restaraunts here and there, but if you're looking for a good population of Mexican, Chinese, Thai and Indian places, stay in New York. (However, I'm more than happy to throw some burgers on the grill for you if you get tired of the local cuisine.)

-Guess what else? It's hot in Italy in the summer! If you come sightseeing in the summertime, expect to sweat. Don't complain about being hot all the time. Either tour around the city in an air conditioned car, or plan the timing of your trip a little better. Or just enjoy soaking up the sun. Nobody cares that you're sweaty and smelly, because so is everybody else. And not just the tourists.

-You know how it's more expensive to get a meal and a drink in NYC than in, say, Schenectady? Or more expensive in Boston than in Deerfield? Well, turns out Rome is the same way. Imagine that. Just because you can stay in a decent motel or pensione in Tuscany for 30 Euro a night, or get a full meal and all the wine you can drink for 15 Euro, doesn't mean you can do it in Rome. It's a big city, folks. Things cost money in cities. Don't whine about it.

If I'm coming off a bit negative, it's for a purpose. I want you to come and visit, but to really experience Italy, you have to let yourself relax and actually enjoy these little annoyances. It's really a part of the whole culture, and whining about it (besides pissing me off) just focuses you on those little aspects of the trip that just really don't matter.

Did I mention that I can stand in my backyard and watch the sun set over the Mediterranean? I'm going to go home and do that now.

My body is so confused...I'm working nights last night and tonight, so I got home at like 5:30 this morning and managed to sleep most of the day and get nothing very useful accomplished. And now I'm showing back up at work again. And tomorrow I'll get off work, take a nap, and hop a train to Rome where one of my college friends is currently on his post-bar exam trip with some of his law school buddies.

The one thing I did manage to get done today was to do laundry for the first time in my new place. Draining the washing machine to the toilet worked like a charm. It's just like one continuous flush, so the toilet never fills up. Having to carry the clothes from the washer in one bathroom to the dryer in the other bathroom is sort of annoying, though.

In other good news, when I pull out of my driveway, the neighbors in the other buildings now wave to me when I drive down the street instead of staring at me suspiciously. I figure it's only a matter of time before they start introducing me to their lovely single daughters/nieces/whatever.

Speaking of getting domestic, I dropped some big bucks and special ordered some nice Italian furniture. Of course, it won't come in until October, so anybody who visits before then will be subjected to my standard green cloth couch and loveseat.

I also spent most of the afternoon yesterday doing yard work. I realized that this is the first time I've ever mowed my own lawn. Mostly because I've never lived in a place that had a lawn before. I think the house I shared in Saratoga is the only place I've lived that had a yard, but it was pretty much just mud in the summer and fall, and tundra (permafrost?) in the winter. Not a lot of mowing involved.

Did you know there's such an invention as an electric lawnmower? Yeah, neither did I, but that's what I borrowed from the landlord to cut the grass. It draws about as much power as an electric razor, and the blade is roughly the same size as one, too. So a lawn that should have taken me at most 10-15 minutes to mow took a good 45 minutes. Then I figured, why stop there? So I weeded most of the yard. All around the perimeter along the fence, I pulled or cut everything down to size. And I have all these fruit trees in my yard that somebody decided to put flower gardens around at some point, and of course the flowers were all being choked by weeds. So I went and dug out all those weeds and cleaned up the rocks and made them look generally presentable. And sunburned my back very badly in the process. It really impressed my landlord's mom and her friend, though. When I was done in the yard, they had me over for coffee in their backyard along with another American who lives in the neighborhood and we had almost an entire conversation in (sort of) Italian. The old ladies are very sweet, though; they've brought me pasta almost every day this week. So when I cooked up some ribs on the grill last night, I brought a couple over to return the favor. By their reactions, you would have thought I had just cured cancer. Wow, were they happy.

This weekend was a big step forward for me linguistically. I learned how to say "go." So now instead of telling my neighbors "I to the store today morning," I can tell them, "I GO to the store today morning."

What a waste of a perfectly good work day. Spent the entire time from 10-4 (excluding lunch) in training, learning which cover sheet to put on my TPS reports. Almost literally.

Also, my landlord's mom's friend does in fact have a daughter. And I am markedly unimpressed. Not to be shallow or anything (okay, so I am), but she's not at all representative of the general female population out here. I'm sure she's a very nice girl, but.... Besides, she doesn't speak a word of English, so we'll never know, will we?

Bought my guest bedroom today. By which I mean I purchased an air mattress.

Actually, I am shopping around for nice Italian furniture. The Navy Exchange actually has an Italian furniture store inside, with some great catalogs from which they'll order the furniture custom made for you and deliver it for $50. Not a bad deal. There's a really nice sleeper sofa and loveseat set that I think I may get, especially since it's all 30% off until the end of the month.

Ugh. Look at me getting all domestic. I need to watch Fight Club or something.

The communication gap is sort of becoming a pain. My landlord's mother yesterday afternoon scolded me for leaving my porch light on when I went to work. I think. They're very concerned about electricity over here; apparently it's pretty expensive. To add to that, I'm currently using my landlord's electricity. The base housing office won't let you move into your apartment until the electricity is turned on, and the electric company couldn't do mine until later this week. My landlord really wanted me to be able to move in on Monday, so he jury-rigged my house to his meter. So I have been trying to keep the electrical use to a minimum. Which is not hard since I don't have TV yet and since I don't have Internet access, I haven't really had to use the computer.

Also yesterday, I think my landlord's mother's old lady friend invited me to dinner. Or offered to cook for me. Or something. I think. It's really very hard to tell. I did figure out that she was asking me how old I was and whether I was married or had a girlfriend. So maybe she has a daughter she wants to set me up with.... Or maybe she just wants to know that nobody will be home during the day so she can hire someone to rob me. Either way.

I'm finally moved out of my hotel and into my apartment. Well, sort of. I still need to unpack some of my stuff. Well, all of my stuff. And I don't have TV yet. And I don't have a phone (and consequently internet access) (and won't until Sep 2). But at least all my stuff is there and I could take a nap on my couch this afternoon after the movers left.

Bought my first piece of Ikea furniture today. Not because I had any burning desire to buy something from Ikea, but because there are no shelves in my storage room, and I really needed shelves, and Ikea was the only place I knew of nearby where I might be able to get them. That's the first time I've been to an Ikea, and after going through, I fail to see what all the fuss is about. I'm not a big fan of their styles, and it didn't seem to be priced particularly well, either, even for Italy. But at least I have shelves.

My landlord's mother brought me lunch today, which I thought was very nice of her since the food I currently have in the house consists of bread and oatmeal. I'm buying some groceries as soon as I get done here to remedy that. But yeah, it was a really nice pasta dish (surprise) with tomato sauce and little pieces of beef. Quite tasty. She also brought the movers and me coffee during the morning. Seems like a very nice old lady; too bad I can't understand a word she says. And vice-versa.

The only bad news today is that the drain for the washer is too small for the washer drainage hose. Now, I have two bathrooms. For reasons completely beyond my mortal comprehension, when God designed my apartment, He decided that the washer connection should be in one bathroom, and the dryer connection should be in the other bathroom. Anyone with any theological background that could help explain this mystery, please let me know. The bright side is that because the washer is in a bathroom, I can just drain it to the toilet until I can find an adapter for the drain hose connection. This was of great concern to me this morning when I realized I was wearing the last clean pair of underwear that I had packed. This afternoon, though, I realized that the movers had just delivered to me several more pairs of clean underwear; I just need to figure out in which box. Of course, they've been sitting in a box for the last two-and-a-half months, so I may just want to wash them anyway. At least it'll give me a chance to test the toilet drainage scenario. Or flood my bathroom floor. Either way.

I went on a guided tour to the ruins of Pompei today. It was pretty spectacular. Got some great pictures. Normally I'm not a big fan of guided tours, but this guide was actually very good, and he went at exactly the right pace. We only saw about 1/4 of the place in a 2-1/2 hour time span, but that's really about all you can effectively take in at one time. And we got a lot more detail than if we had just run from spot to spot trying to cover the entire city. I got some really good pictures out of it. It'll be nice when I get DSL because then I'll actually be able to start throwing some pictures up here and make it all pretty. Of course, I can't get DSL until I get phone service. And I can't get phone service until September 2, because the entire country of Italy (really the entire continent of Europe) is on vacation until the end of August.

Went by my apartment this morning so the landlord could give me the keys and show me how to work the alarm. So imagine you're moving into a new (giant, three-bedroom, marble-floored) apartment. And let's say it has a very high-tech alarm system, where the front door, the security shutters on the windows, and general motion detectors constitute your three "alarm zones," any combination of which may or may not be activated from the main alarm panel. And let's say you're having this system explained to you by someone who doesn't speak a word of English, and you don't speak any useful words in his language. And let's say the system would take an advanced engineering degree to figure out even if the explanation were in English. So yeah, I have no idea how to work it. I just stick the little thing in the door to turn it off. Hopefully. But I'm sure I'll figure it out after setting it off four or five times. And the damn thing is loud.

So that's pretty much how the whole morning went. I did understand how to water the lawn and hook up and run the lawnmower (which is electric, by the way; I didn't know those existed). And I'm also responsible for my own gardening and yardwork, but it's not a very big yard, so hopefully it won't be too difficult. The fruit yield should be nice--I have lemon, orange, and clemintine trees. And I think I have an olive tree or bush or whatever the technical term is, but he may have said something else altogether. All I really got is that the suspected olive tree isn't in season until March/April.

There are like 18 keys on the key ring. The housekey itself is huge, like a skeleton key out of a cartoon. I guess that makes for a bigger lock, so it's harder to break in. Then there's the little electronic key to stick in the door to turn off the alarm. Then there's the clicker for the auto entrance gate, and for the walk-through entrance gate to the yard. Then there's the key for the manual lock to put on the the auto entrance gate at night. Then there's the key for when the electricity to the gate goes out, so you can disengage the electrical device and open the gate manually. And I have a covered carport with a bar that swings across behind the car, and of course there's a key for that. And a key for the electrical meter. And a key for the mailbox. And a key to get into the main entrance so I can go upstairs to the roof deck. And of course the landlord had to show me how to use all of these, and I'm pretty sure I got the gist of it.

I also came to understand that either he's going to be away on vacation next week with his family, or else his whole family will be visiting the apartment. In any case, next week "tutti" (everybody) will be somewhere for "nove giorno" (nine days).

At least his mother makes good coffee.

For those of you breathlessly waiting my report on Rome, I'm still writing it.

On the good news front, I finally signed the lease for my apartment today. I get the key tomorrow, but move-in day is Monday. All my stuff gets delivered that day, so as of Monday night, Cassa del Chris is open for business. Time to find the grape-stomping models. Anyone who wants to stop by for a visit is more than welcome; I'll have an extra bedroom (once I furnish it; probably with stuff from Ikea), and someone can sleep on the livingroom sofa, and I can always throw a sleeping bag on the floor in the office, too. If people don't mind sleeping on the floor, I could probably host like six or seven people at a time.

On the above topic, here's a question: Let's say you're single. Let's say you're moving into an apartment with two bathrooms. What do you do with the second bathroom?

From the NRDC:

On 7/26, a final energy bill (H.R. 6) was reported out of conference committee after a flurry of late night and weekend activity. The House and Senate passed the bill on 7/28 and 7/29, with votes of 275-156 and 74-26, respectively. The final bill includes more than $8.5 billion in tax breaks plus billions more in loan guarantees and other subsidies for the electricity, coal, nuclear, natural gas and oil industries. By contrast, the bill includes only about $1.3 billion for energy efficiency and conservation programs, and just $3 billion for renewable energy sources, primarily wind power. Though an improvement over previous versions of the bill, H.R. 6 includes a number of environmentally damaging provisions that ease Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act rules for oil and gas exploration, loosen restrictions on exploration on public landsand require an inventory of offshore oil and gas resources, including in areaslong protected by a federal moratorium. On the positive side, the final version of the bill does not include a liability waiver for manufacturers of the toxic gasoline additive MTBE, which has polluted drinking water in at least 29 states, although the legislation will not outlaw the use of MTBE and will move all MTBE lawsuits to federal courts.

Gee, you think the President will sign it?

We suck. Can you think of an industry LESS deserving of tax breaks than the oil industry?

Just got back from my lovely, relaxing, scalding hot weekend in Rome. (No, like literally sweat-dripping scalding hot, not like steamy Italian passion hot. Maybe next time.) I'll tell you all about it tomorrow when I have time to do the write-up. But for now I'm sure you'll love this:

My train rolls into Naples from Rome at 9 p.m. tonight. Being the suave world traveller I am, I grab my backpack, jump off the train, grab a subway ticket, and head down to the platform. As I'm waiting for the subway, I stick one hand in my pocket to show the world that, yes, I'm cool. I'm nonchalant. I'm generally bad-ass. And then I think to myself, hmm...this pocket is awfully empty. Wasn't there something in it when I got on the train? And then I realize that I had taken my Dell PDA out and that I must have left it on the seat. So I go sprinting up the stairs from the subway platform, race out to the track where the train is finishing boarding for the next station. I yell to the conductor to hold on a minute, and as I jump on the carriage, I hear the whistle blow for the "all aboard signal."

You may see where I'm going with this, and you're probably thinking, no, this doesn't really happen to people in real life. But yes, it was like something out of a Seinfeld episode. I get to the seat where I had been riding, grab my PDA, and just exactly as I turn around in triumph to go back out the door...all the doors shut. And won't open. No matter how many times I push the little button. And no matter in how many different varieties and in how many languages I use the word "sh*t." And then the train starts to move. And I'm leaving Naples on a train that I have no idea where it's going. So I go tearing through the cars trying to find a door that will open. None will. And I come upon a conductor who has no idea at all what I'm trying to tell him, as I'm frenetically explaining in English what happened, while throwing in the 3 or 4 useful Italian words that apply. Unfortunately, "I'm an idiot and left my PDA on the train and got trapped in here when the doors shut," has not yet made it into my Italian vocabulary. But I get the point across, and he tells me where the train will stop and that I can get back to Naples tonight.

So I take my seat and get off in Salerno, which is about a half-hour away. Not so bad. So I end up getting off in Salerno and taking the local train back to Naples. Unfortunately that train makes all the in-between stops, too, as opposed to the EuroStar I had been on from Rome, which only stops in the major cities (non-stop Napoli-Roma in an hour and 45 minutes). The local train was also packed in like a cattle car, unlike the posh first-class accomodations I had on the EuroStar. On the other hand, the conductor hooked me up and got me a free ride back to Naples, so the only real penalty for my stupidity was two hours of my time. And hey, now I know how to get to Salerno.