new feature on blog

A little over a week ago, we added the email feature of the blog...(bottom of the right column). If you would like to get emailed when a new blog post goes up, just add your email to the list, and VOILA!...you will! **You'll get an email from Google Groups that will ask you to click on a link to finalize your group confirmation. After this step, just close Google Groups and you'll never need to go back there again - it's just a place we have our online email database**

il postino - film magnifico!

Last week we watched the Italian film, Il Postino. It was first recommended to us by our friends, Dennis and Sandra (a couple we met while traveling in Italy last year, and visited this past April in their home in San Francisco). After waiting for about 6mths for it to come in on our "Blockbuster Online queue" we were excited to finally watch it! Highly recommended! It was a wonderful story with great relationship dynamics -
"The life of the fisherman, Mario, changes dramatically when the famous Chilean writer Pablo Neruda settles on his little Italian island. Living in exile becuase of his political beliefs, Neruda needs a postman to deliver the huge quantities of mail sent to him by his admirers and Mario takes the job since he hates fishing anyway. The two become friends and Neruda helps the shy and clumsy Mario to win the heart of Beatrice, the beautiful waitress at the village's inn, by showing him the beauty and power of poetry." - imdb.
Sounds sappy...but we both enjoyed it! It was great to try and understand a small amount of Italian as well.
-e

ps- The main actor, Massimo Troisi, died of a heart condition only 12 hrs after finishing the filming for the movie - he was only 41.
"Troisi literally gave his life to make Il Postino. He was aware of his heart condition and was told that he needed treatment, but he believed that the making of this film was more important. He died 12 hours after the camera stopped rolling..." -imdb.

interesting blog

If you want a fun read...check out Only Planet. I stumbled across this blog by accident last week, and have finally finished the entire thing! It's about a family from Portland who sold their house, cars, stuff (except for a 10x10 storage unit) and took a year off to travel around the world. Their tagline is "One Child, One Year, One Planet. A family of three traveling around the world..."! It is so fun to read about their adventures - and inspirational! Definitely more extreme than our planned year-off, but it was nice to relate a little to their story!

uganda events update

eric manning the rice&beans • flyers • chris hanging out at the little kids table
It was a busy week for the events around the screening of Invisible Children this past Thursday. On Monday night, two friends had set up a Rice&Beans dinner and Bike4Uganda bike ride downtown as a fundraiser for Invisible Children. It was so much fun and we had a decent turnout. There was music, food, and frisbees on Flagler's west lawn while we passed out dinners and flyers. We had a blast jamming the streets with about 20 or so bikes as we rode the streets around Flagler, over the Bridge of Lions and back!

rice & beans • biking for uganda
Thursday's screening of the film at Cafe 11 went well and we had a good number come out for support. Our friend, Diana, spoke about her experience at Uganda Lobby Day in D.C. last week. I prepared letters for our senators and representative that many people signed, and also collected a handful of donations. By Sunday I think we will have about $1000 to send Invisible Children from this week's events!
-e

parliamo italiano!

Well, last night was the closing of the Italian 1 class we've been taking for the last 6 weeks. It's a community night course offered once a week for 2hrs/night. We're the youngest of the diverse group of about 14 students. It's been really fun and we learned more than we expected. (Since the school we'll be taking in Italy is taught in Italian-only from day one, we thought it'd be good to get a head start!:)) Italian 2 starts in a couple more weeks and will take us to mid December.

For the final class last night, we all brought homemade Italian dishes to share and met at an outdoor pavillion with lanterns, Italian music, wine, and great food (we definitely filled up on molto pomodoro and formaggio!) We enjoyed sharing stories with the other students about travels to Italy and we all decided that we needed to hang out more outside of class to work on our conversational Italian!

So far: alphabet, numbers, days/months, many phrases/vocab, nouns/gender, singular vs plural, indefinite vs definite articles...
Great site that shows what we're currently working on: Italian Lessons

Vorremo parlare italiano molto bene!
-e

move-to-italy overview

**chris enjoying a gelato by the Duomo in Florence :: erin enjoying a gelato by the Pantheon in Rome**

ok, I thought we'd go over what we know so far about our planned move to Italy since people are asking and we haven't explained much of anything on this blog yet. We have been thinking of doing this for about 3 years now, and got to visit in '05 with this plan in the back of our minds; so while we were in Italy, we travelled to many areas to see where we liked best. Three years ago when we initally said that a move would be something we'd like to do, we flippantly said "in the next 5 yrs we'll do this" (since 5 years seems to always be a good general non-concrete timeline for us:)). Well...here we are 3 years later, and notice that we have 2 years to go.
.....soooo....a couple of months ago, we decided to get serious: put a solid date on the calendar, begin research, give a year to plan, and make this happen!

So far we've put Sept '07 as the tentative date (since we want to avoid high tourist season in the summer b/c of heat, and too many English-speakers) and August is the month that Italians go on holiday, so many things are closed. We are going to take an extensive language program while we're there (this way, we can also get a student visa to stay as long as we are). The course we're researching is 8mths, and if we can save up enough money, we'd like to stay for an additional 2mths to travel around Europe. The school we've mainly decided on, is headquartered in Florence, but offers optional transfers during the course to different satelite campuses - which we're considering moving to Rome for the last part of the course. We REALLY loved Rome, but may feel intimidated to begin here (Florence is more compact and has many American students, which should help the transition).

Quick answers to questions: 1) we have friends that will be renting our (furnished) house while we're gone, 2) we think we'll be taking the cats - still researching transports, 3) we are using this year to get our jobs in line to be able to continue working while in Italy (picking up steady freelance, and I'm even moving toward the "back-end" work of my real estate team so I will still handle administrative/marketing from abroad.)

in the coming months we'll be adding more specifics of where we are with school registration, visa regulations, etc.
....but this should do for now:)
-e

invisible children

After researching the horrific situation in Uganda and watching the film Invisible Children I gave a "world report" at our last BODYthatBREATHES gathering and have set up a screening of the film for next Thurs (Oct 19) at Cafe 11. At the BTB meeting, we GAVE out $5 during offering to each person, so that in a month each person could go and use that to raise money for the Invisible Children group. A friend of ours has organized a Rice&Beans fundraiser at Flagler's west lawn next Monday followed by a "Bike4Awareness" ride around downtown. I'm so excited to see people banding together to raise support and awareness for this MOST important cause (that many American's are unaware of). Also, another friend will be in D.C. for Uganda Lobby Day this week and will have a report for us at both the fundraiser and screening! ...I'll let you know how it all goes!

PLEASE visit www.invisiblechildren.com, www.ugandacan.org, and www.ugandalobbyday.com for more info...and spread the word!

big trunk show success

Last night was the premier of ROSA LOVES, including the launch of the website and the first showing of the shirts as a vendor at the first ever, "Big Trunk Show and Vintage Swap" local fashion shindig at Cafe 11. WOW!!! We were overwhelmed with the support and turnout. Several people from outside the area, locals, and strangers came to support and we were able to explain the company and stories to MANY! People brought friends over to our table and explained the company to other onlookers. We sold about 1/2 the inventory and gained a lot of exposure. This is just the beginning of a big task ahead of us - organizing this project on the business end! We've even got several online orders from the site!

Overall...what a night!!! So fun, but we are wiped out - and Chris and Fretto finally got a full night's sleep last night for the first night in 2.5 weeks!

everyone has a story

Well, only 2 more days until the premier of ROSA LOVES, the company that Chris and our friend, Mike Fretto have been working on for months. Besides the launch of   www.rosaloves.com, we are going to be at The Big Trunk Show & Vintage Swap    at Cafe 11 to show off the new line!

A super quick synopsis of ROSA: 1)find stories in communities of people in need, 2)design shirts for each story, 3)sell the shirts, 4)give the profits to fulfill the financial needs of the stories, 5)repeat. Of course on Oct 4, you can check out the full site and read all about it ...and BUY A SHIRT!

don't plan on seeing Chris for about 72hrs after the show b/c he'll be catching up on sleep (he and Fretto have only slept about 3-4hrs/night for the past 2wks - no joke.)
-e

and so it begins

Well, this is the first entry in the permanent "olive notes" blog. (1st was the temporary blog we kept while in Europe '05) euroblog.

I've never been the one to keep up with these things, but I'm excited about this one...and with 2 of us, I hope to better keep up with our news and happenings!

We are officially in the "under-a-year" countdown until our planned move to Italia! This gives us at least one big continuing story to keep you updated on, and this should be a nice way for us to record the journey...
...among many other events in our lives
-e