Yesterday's rain that started in the
early evening has continued on through today. It did stop raining
last night before I went to bed but we woke up this morning with a steady
rain. It got heavy at some points today.
Hi , my name is Stephen. I woke up and got dress.Then I talk to Kristi. Then I set up the table for breakfast. Next I ate breakfast. Then I cleared the table. I just finish my picture frame today. Then I took pictures of them. Next I took pictures of toy's. Now I am making a movie.
Yesterday's rain that started in the
early evening has continued on through today. It did stop raining
last night before I went to bed but we woke up this morning with a steady
rain. It got heavy at some points today.
The
rain hasn't stopped today even though sometimes it is reduced to nothing
more than a light drizzle. Today was one of those days that was good
for the rainy day projects we have been putting off. If you remember,
a while back when it had rained we had spent some time making picture frames
out of a dough of flour, salt and water. We baked the frames and
the kids colored them with magic markers. A couple of days ago we
had stopped by a photo machine outside the police station and got enough
small photos of the kids to put in the frames. The kids cut out some
colored, thin cardboard sheets to use as backgrounds for their photos.
Then then glued everything together and the final 
framed pictures you can see in this one photo. A couple of the frames
are not in the picture as we had already packed those for their mother.
The rest of these you see here will be given away to some of the friends
they made. I am getting two of these.
The kids also wanted to work on the computer a bit, I can't blame them.
Not much to do in an apartment without a television set -grin. Stephen
then wrote the above forward for today's journal. Then we got into
taking pictures of some of their other past projects they had worked on. 
Stephen
had purchased a number of lego sets over the past few weeks here.
Kristie and him have had a great time putting them together and playing
with them. 
Stephen really enjoyed the lego sets but in the past few weeks he hasn't
wanted to buy any more of them. I think his interest in magic tricks
sort of swayed him away from lego. He discovered some boxes of magic
tricks on one of the shelves at the local magazzine. We had a bit
of a problem initially since all the instructions are in Italian but with
the dictionary we managed to figure out how to perform most of the tricks.
He is planning on holding a magic show for the guests to his birthday party
coming up on Wedsneday. 
It is interesting to see how it is all either an optical illusion or sleight
of hand. You need to have the proper equipment though to perform
the tricks (which come supplied in the box). 
Stephen had also glued together one of his McDonald happy meal setups. At first glance these happy meal boxes don't look so time consuming but they are complicated enough to take over an hour for the kids to put together. Some of them have been fairly detailed. Gotta give McDonalds credit, they certainly put together some very interesting projects for kids in what otherwise would've been refuse. I'd like to meet the lucky people that get to design these things.
Kristie didn't want to be left out of the picture making scene herself.
With Stephen's help she managed to throw together some Barbie dolls for
a photoshoot. 
Then she also had to put several of them in various poses. 
This little project only managed to consume about 30 minutes of time so
we've become pretty desperate trying to find things to do. The kids
have resorted to playing with their toys now.
I was digging around in the software for the camera and managed to find
a way to save the low resolution pix in even a smaller file size that brings
a low res pix into the 4-8k size! Significantly smaller than the
25-35k sizes I had before! In my own boredom I have gone back through
and reformatted all the low res pix into this new smaller file size.
It is going to significantly improve the download time of the web pages
and the main Trento97! page.
I do need to upload all the files up to the web server though. I
guess it'll give me something to do tonight. 
I do wish I had spent the time earlier now to go through the software that
came with the camera a little better. But in reality I didn't have
a lot of time up until these past couple of days. We've kept ourselves
pretty busy here.
I wonder what my phone bill is like? I haven't received anything
from the telecom company yet but then again I haven't had a full month
of service yet either. I did get something from the Electric company
so I have to see why the agent hasn't sent those papers in yet. That
should've happened weeks ago. I'm going to have Vincenzo call the
guy and make sure the papers are on their way. That is all I need
is to get back from my vacation and find my electricity cut off. 
The Columbians next door are playing their stereo pretty loudly.
They do this pretty often but it seems to happen more often when the older
daughter comes around and is home alone. 
They
do turn down the stereo at a reasonable hour. Although at the moment,
the music is considerably louder than they normally have it. I don't
think they want to start getting into a stereo war with me as I am pretty
sure I can afford a larger stereo than them -grin. It looks
like their dad just drove up and sure enough the volume has dropped considerably.
Thank goodness for PARENTS! -grin. Hm, it seems now an argument has
started over there. That happens pretty often over there too.
Although it doesn't sound like it comes to blows but the women over there
get pretty heated up sometimes. The two parents have 2 girls in their
early teens that live with them. Then there is a 3rd, considerably
older girl, that comes to spend the weekends sometimes. She must
be in her early to mid 20s. Then, every so often, there is this gigantic
gathering at their house of, somewhere, right around 12 girls. I'm
not sure if all of these girls are all their daughters or not. I
rarely see the father. I don't wonder that he doesn't have a miserable
life surrounded by all these women. They do occationally have visitors
with Bolzano license plates come down to visit.
Vincenzo and Rosa came around today at about 19h00. They are freshly back from Napoli themselves. They look like they had a good vacation. Vincenzo also helped explain some of the magic tricks that we couldn't figure out. They will also be coming to Stephens birthday party on Wedsneday. Stephen decided to make a nutella cake and he is going to decorate it himself on Wedsneday. Rosa also reiterated about being very careful in Napoli with our bags. Apparently the theivery in Napoli is rampant and it is a real threat. I guess I will wear my money belt there instead of carrying my fanny pack around. Apparently the kids are the worse criminals since there are no laws for theft concerning them. Vincenzo and Rosa were hoping to go out for a gelato with me and the kids but the rain was still coming down! They finally left about an hour later. The kids then started building little rooms of their own design from paper they had cut out to match the McDonald's happy meal boxes! It is amazing how creative they are. And their bathroom design sported a turkish toilet (a hole in the ground) -grin. We will have some pictures of those tomorrow. I sewed on the rest of the patches on the kids backpacks. They each have three of them now. Hopefully they won't come off on the return trip to the states.
Ironically, the rain has stopped now that it is past the kids bed time.
Oh well.
Copyright @ 1997, Alexandre
POLOZOFF. All Rights Reserved.