Wow! I just returned from Italy and it was an amazing adventure - Rome to Florence to Padova to Venice to Stresa in 10 days. Everything was so beautiful and went so well - and the wedding was nothing short of spectacular. I'll be posting daily because I have so many great pics and stories to tell, but you'll have to wait a few days for any wedding photos (there are hundreds of them- special thanks to Ellen). There were so many wondrous sites to behold on the trip (including Nat in her wedding dress) - suffice it to say that the Colosseum at night didn't even make my top 3 favorite spots!

Uh-oh. The weather is starting to get warm, and the rain is coming down (actually a bit of snow today) so I know that as soon as the sun comes back out the grass will start growing like crazy. Now ordinarily that's not a problem, but my house hasn't quite sold yet and I have quite a large lawn. Oh, and I don't have a lawn mower. I could cut it by hand with scissors but I estimate that would take about a week, and by then I'd have to start over anyway. As bad as that idea sounds, it woulnd't be my worst grass cutting experience. When I was in my early teens, my brother Steve and I agreed to cut the lawn of a friend of our father. We knew that this man had a fair amount of money, so we figured we'd be well paid. We showed up for the job and the grass was two feet tall! The yard wasn't overly large, but the mower kept conking out and we had to search for rocks and then haul off the grass as we cut it. It took us all day to finish that lawn, but we finally had it looking quite nice. At the end of the day we went inside to be paid, and we were rendered speechless when the man starting doling out quarters instead of bills. I don't quite remember how much we were paid, but it was about on par with what the tooth fairy brought when we were small. Needless to say, we never mowed his lawn again (or anyone else's, for that matter). And we learned two things - some wealthy people have money because they are not generous, and that compensation should be negotiated up front. So I guess we were paid in wisdom - maybe we should saved ourselves some time and watched an ABC after-school special instead.