Two days ago, we woke up after a very poor night's sleep. Good sleep has been hard to come by the last two weeks. Max's girlfriend, our neighbor's dog Gioia, is in heat. Max howls at 11 in the evening, paces at 2, whines at 4, begs at 5, licks our faces at 5.10, whines again at 5.15.... you get the picture. By 6.30, keeping him in the house is an impossibility. Our neighbors let poor Gioia roam all night. The male dogs on the street are completely beside themselves.
What about sterilization of pets, you ask carefully? Oh. Another story for another day. If I had a dime for every time I thought about cutting my dog's jewels off, I would not need to have a B&B. Let's just say that to this point, it has not happened. And believe me, we are paying dearly for buying into this Italian Country Pet Philosophy. We feel like we have a baby keeping us up all night. Except that we are in our fifties. This hurts. Alot.
Well, we wake up and decide hastily that it was the only day we could get to IKEA in Genoa for the next two weeks. I also need to hit Castorama, Italy's slightly lame version of Home Depot (but thank God it exists, believe me, I am not complaining), which is in the same industrial park nightmare where IKEA is located.
I make my lists. Micha says, " We need to get the car washed. It's too embarrassing". I cannot tell you what running melt off of four feet of snow does to the sides and the undercarriage of a car. Especially a black car. The car looks like it had been through a mudslide.
We lock a crying and lovesick Max firmly in the house, and take off. It is later than we wanted. But then again, being totally sleep deprived, we do not rush out the door.
We first stop at the local car wash. Micha puts the "gettone" or tokens in the machine and pulls the wand out of its holder to spray down the car. Except there is no high pressure water coming out. Just a fine spray like a water saver shower head. We look around. All of the cabins had the same problem. But once the car was wet, we have to continue. So in goes token after token as the car got what amounted to a steam bath. We both start swearing.
It's a bad omen if you have started swearing BEFORE you get to IKEA. It means with great certainty that you will be a babbling, slobbering, pathetic idiot when you exit the store.
We start cruising down the SS456 on our way to Genoa. It takes about 30 seconds to get tailgated by a twenty five year old Fiat Panda, who clearly has no time to put up with our speed-limit-respecting driving. He passes on a curve. A blind one. Micha looks at me. "They're nuts," he hisses, referring either to all Panda drivers, all Fiat drivers, all Italian drivers, or all members of the human race. I do not want to ask, and he does not volunteer any more information.
Once at the industrial park from hell, Micha pulls over.
Ok, here is the situation. It is 11.45. We are starved, the kind of starved which sleep deprivation can cause. Here are our options:
Our favorite cafe in this industrial park is called La Pressa and serves a huge plate of Ligurian pasta with pesto, potatoes and string beans for 5 euros. We start craving the pasta like two Pavolvian dogs as soon as we even think about IKEA in Genoa. We do not go to the IKEA restaurant at the Genoa store because I have twice found hair in my meatballs there. Suffice it to say I will not step foot in that restaurant again. It's pesto or nothing.
Our favorite cafe opens at 12.15. We have a half hour to wait.
So it's either Castorama - Cafe - IKEA or IKEA - Cafe - Castorama. Micha warns me. If I want to do Castorama first, I only have a half hour to do the 22 things on my list (price checking, buying paint, looking at floor tiles, looking and pricing sanders, looking at toilets and bidets and shower partitions and light concrete and well, that kind of stuff) because he plans to be at La Pressa, sitting down, eating, at 12.15.
I make a B-line for the door of Castorama and feel like I am in one of those reality shows where you have to do forty things in three minutes. I look at my husband, who is being very patient and quiet - considering he is a big German guy having a low carb moment.
I manage to prioritize and get all the paint, pigments and brushes that I needed and had several price comparisons knocked off my list. I beam with pride as I get to the check out in 33 minutes.
My stomach feels like it's starting to digest itself. We head to La Pressa, salivating.
HA! Turns out they had changed the opening time to 11.30! We could have been eating our pasta for more than 45 minutes already! However, had that happened, I tell Micha, we would have gotten back into the car afterwards and passed out and I would have never been so efficient at Castorama.
After the pasta, IKEA feels like a mountain too big to climb. We steel ourselves and push the doors open.
Let me just say that we consider ourselves to be IKEA experts, for a number of reasons. We have worked at or been to IKEA stores in 12 countries and can tell you everything about how the store is run in a very quick walk thru.
And IKEA in Genoa is truly one of the worst IKEA stores in the chain, and has been so since the first time we visited. Disorganized, perpetually out of stock on items which should never be out of stock, terrible service levels, dirty. Meatballs with hair in them.
This does not keep us from going there, though, because the alternative for us is Torino, which, although it is a much better store, is poorly located for anyone living to the east of the city.
However, if we buy anything at the Genoa store which requires home delivery, they have to fax (yes, fax) our order to the Torino store because Acqui Terme is in Piemonte and not in Liguria. However, Acqui Terme is so far away from the Torino store that they only deliver to our area once every three weeks or so. This is IKEA -- Italian style.
Never mind. I digress. Back to our adventure.
We plough through our list at IKEA. Almost half of the things we are looking for are not in stock. I do not allow myself to freak out. My husband is a completely different matter. The carb fix has worn off already. Normally, at this point, he tries to take over one of the employee computers on the floor and find out what the hell is going on with the shelf/curtain rod/pillow which we want to buy but is of course out of stock. But I look at him and I only see dazed confusion.
We finally get to that gravitational black hole known as the As-Is department. He finds a chair which looks semi-safe to sit in. I decide to go back and get some funky fabric which had caught my eye. I wind my way back through the secret passage ways which the employees use so that they do not have to run the New York Marathon every day to get from one part of the store to the other.
I am in an IKEA frenzy at this point, a condition which is triggered by my 24 year love-hate relationship with all things IKEA. I start to remind myself of how Max feels with Gioia in heat. When I get into an IKEA frenzy, it's like I have lost all direction in my life and I roam aimlessly, from department to department, picking things up and looking a them. DIOD glasses. JORUD pillows. All things GRUNDAL. My eyes dilate. My blood sugar falls. I know I need to get out before it's too late, before I hit the post-IKEA-frenzy-point when I start spinning around like a top and crying because someone ankle-slapped me with their cart and did not apologize.
I make my way back to the As-Is department to collect my husband. His eyes are still open, to his credit. But he is clearly in a trance. I tap him gently on the shoulder. We proceed to the check out, load up the car, and try to get out of the industrial park from hell, which is full of crazy Panda drivers, or so it seems to us. We get everything done that we needed to do, including chowing down the mandatory plate of pasta, in 2 hours and 55 minutes. A new record.
Soon, we are back on the SS456 outside of peaceful, beautiful Acqui Terme. We pull into our driveway and Gioia is sitting outside of our house, waiting for Max to come play. Another sleepless night awaits us. We wonder how much sleep deprivation is needed before a person actually starts to hallucinate.
But we are home. Safe. And it's time for me to start sewing some things from that really cool fabric I bought in my IKEA frenzy.
Sweet little Gioia was killed by a falling tree. A farmer was cutting the tree down and did not see her. It crushed her to death. It was so like her to be under foot like that. She just always wanted to be near people.
I will have to ask your patience. This has been a week of weeks -- and I have not got one drop of energy left to blog. Suffice it to say that there is no experience that we have ever suffered through which can equate to having a female dog in heat parked outside of our house when you have a male dog inside. For days on end. I finally managed to doze off at six this morning. All in all we have maybe gotten three hours a night since Sunday. 
When asked what my favorite really cheap food is in Italy, two actually come to mind. Polenta is one -- with its endless possibilities to serve as a savory or sweet dish, how it changes when you fry it in oil, how good it is for you.
Last night, I made them in the very simplest way possible. Dredged in flour and fried in olive oil.
I squeezed one of last Ligurian lemons over the fried filets (the lemons were gifts from our guests Paula and Angelo last season) and sprinkled them with course sea salt. We ate them with a big tossed salad, lots of crusty Italian bread and a chardonnay from the Piemontese winery Noceto Michelotti.
The flavor of fresh sardines is sublime -- like the best white fish. There is very little overt "fishy" flavor. Sardines are subtle and modest. Absolutely one of my favorite antipasti, this one.
OHHHHHH! Boy, does it feel good to get back into the garden. We are not out of the woods, mind you. Monday we have 57% chance of snow coming our way (we have become snow statisticians) But for three hours today, we cut and cut and cleaned out the muck and damage which the show left behind. You can see the snow in the background on these photos, but it was warm enough to work without a coat. I trimmed the lower frans to give our palm plant more the look of a tree and cut back the juniper bushes which had taken over. Micha cut into pieces a large plum tree which had come down during the winter -- next year's firewood in the making. 
Next up will be raking, new top soil, new mulch in places, and then it will be time to tackle the back yard -- but because of the shade back there we still have over a foot of snow. We did a good amount of cutting, though, which yielded a large pile. 
Garden work is so meditative. It really does my soul good to get out there after all of these very intense winter months. I feel like we are starting to move forward, slowly. Only a few more weeks of cold weather and the snowy fields will give way to green shoots. Even the few hours of warm weather today brought out our neighbors' bees - it was so wonderful to hear them in there unison song, looking for a freshly blooming almond tree....
...and (for now) just one little off-the-beaten-path design shop which caught my eye...
The buds have started, but so slowly, as if reluctant to give up their winter sleep so easily...
...and Maxie is even more reluctant than the buds...
