A viola lesson and uh-oh...

This morning I had a nice long viola lesson with my teacher, Valentina Rebaudengo, who came to our apartment, while Nancy went out to try to address our problems with electrical plugs and adapters. The wall sockets appear to have  a) two fat prongs, b) two thinner prongs, or c) three thinner prongs, and they don't all work together well. Our hostess has quite a number of her own adapters just to deal with these differences; throw in our need to convert to US appliances, and sometimes the stack of adapters begins to stick out a long way from the wall. Nancy had a nice chat in Italian with a helpful clerk (learning lots of new terms for plugs, etc), but the issue is not resolved. Meanwhile, I have lots of new music to practice while relaxing my bow arm, following the markings for slurs, keeping my left-hand fingers appropriately curled and my left arm positioned properly, and well, a golf stroke was never quite this complicated. Some day it will feel natural, I trust.

The "uh-oh" part of this post is because Nancy started to feel sick after lunch and is now quite sick in bed and I believe that she is asleep now at 8:15 in the evening. I picked up some Covid tests for us at the local pharmacy; whatever the illness is, I probably will get it, too. We don't expect anything too serious, as we have had all of the shots we could possibly get before we left the US.

I wouldn't want to make this post too much of a downer, so I am including a photo of one of the many porticoes in Bologna. I plan to lobby for porticoes to be added to all US cities and towns when I get back to Massachusetts. They are great on rainy days, and must provide some nice shade when it is hot. They just make good sense! and they are beautiful.
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