Seventy Five Thousand Words about Fake Italy
One of the new features of the new blogger.com is the fact that it now tells you how much you’ve written and on which topics. Hard to believe it but, officially, Carol’s Little World is more than seventy five thousand words. Imagine being a kid, back in elementary school, having an English teacher instruct you to write a term paper that was seventy five thousand words long. Wouldn’t happen, would it? You would have like gone on strike, violently protested, or stuck a giant wad of gum under the desk. Perhaps you would have even complained to your folks. And yet, somehow, through the magic of the web, I’ve brought you a giant term paper from the learning institute of life. It’s Carol’s Little World in black and white and read all over. Well, it’s read in in certain parts of San Antonio, Texas at least. Sometimes, if the wind is blowing in the right direction and the auto parts store is slow.
Today I met a friend for lunch at Tuscany, which is, as she called it, a “pretentiously fake Italian restaurant and cafe,” located very close to where I work. It even has fake tiles painted on the walls. Nevertheless, we embarked upon this journey, to the oh so fake psuedo-Italian bistro for lunch, and found that the food was actually not all that bad. I do like Italian food, the place does get a bit crowded (Ok, maybe more than a bit,) and it was rather pretentious (even down to the really bad artwork on the walls) but it was a nice lunch despite any pretenses. The weather actually turned a little this afternoon and it was nice sitting there chatting up a storm, while the sun fought through and tried to win over the clouds. (Just for the record, it’s now quite sunny and warm outside.)
After lunch, I went to Thor’s Hammer, a gaming store also located near where I work, to purchase my very own copy of The Settlers of Catan which, in case you did not know, is an addicting board game. We’ve got a game session scheduled for sometime tomorrow, although we have been playing Monday’s at lunchtime and Thursday’s after work. It’s quite a fun game, actually and more than a bit addictive. It involves (I’m not making this up) trading of sheep, building of cities, and drawing of resources.
I drove over to Thor’s Hammer with a fellow from work who hadn’t eaten lunch yet so I offered to swing by, you guessed it, Tuscany again on the way back into work so that he could pickup some food and I could grab a fru-fru coffee drink. You see, it’s been several months since I’ve gone fru-fru, what with the Java pods right down the hallway and all, so I thought it timely. But, in hindsight, this makes two “drive bys” to the old “pretentious fake-Italy ’round the bend” and I don’t quite know what to think of it all. I mean, can I possibly take any more pretentiously bad artwork, fake tiles, or pseudo Venetian plaster? The mind boggles.
Perhaps, with airfares getting lower by the day, it’s almost time for me to start thinking about booking a trip to “the real deal.” I could do autumn in Venice quite easily, actually. I could almost see myself sitting in a gondola, sipping a fru-fru coffee drink of real espresso, enjoying the view, contemplating the gondolier’s nice tight buttocks as the vaporetto speed by, rocking my little world to and fro.
Even seventy five thousand words could not describe how happy I’d be.
Until next time…
