olives and holidays

Since I've been a little, umm, shall we say, umm, ABSENT let's do a little catch up. (Catch up is a blogger's trick employed when we really don't have anything witty or deep or interesting to say. Oh wait, in case you didn't realize, everything I post here is either deep, witty, or interesting.)

Catch up 1. Thanksgiving.

Great food and great company at pals Christine and Valerio's house.



We had all the proper thanksgiving foods which is not easy to do in this country. Cranberries just don't exist here. Sweet potatoes...forget about it. Christine brought all the necessary goods all the way from the States. Now that's a hostess with the mostess.

And, for the knitters reading this knitting blog (both of you)...if you've ever wondered what to do with all those little things you knit while watching movies in the evening, I've found just the thing! I mean, come on, how many hats and socks can one family wear?

White Elephant! (if you don't know what that is go here)

Just wrap those suckers up and voila! Instant party game with entertaining photo ops.





Catch up 2. The olive harvest.

Yeah. Whatever. We didn't harvest. I didn't pick one olive this year. Wait, not true. I did pick a few while we were up cleaning the land to throw at David. I don't think we can really call that an olive harvest. But don't fret! We will be getting oil from our own olives! Perhaps you're wondering how that can happen? Well, I'll tell you. Being the clever Tom Sawyer Americans we are, we "let" the neighbors pick them for us! Brilliant. I don't know why it took us 6 years to figure this out. The way it works: you give your olives to someone else, they pick them and give you half the oil. Half the oil from our olives is a whole lot more oil than we would have gotten had we had to pick them ourselves.

Here's a photo of the neighbors doing our work for us.



Yeah, I know, that photo sucks. I was trying to take photos without the neighbors seeing me hiding inside the house.

And speaking of taking time to learn things, check this out:



See that blue stick thing that looks like a broom handle? Well, it's NOT! It's a generator-powered olive picker! Those neighbors cleared all our trees in a morning! And it only took 2000 years for the Italians to invent that. I bet DaVinci had a drawing for one of those 500 years ago, he just never got around to making one.

Catch up 3. Tis the Season. David picked some olives this morning...in his usual way - with the saw. Now we have a Christmas tree!



So, if you'll excuse me now...that puppy needs some lights!

Caught up.