Valentine's Day!

Justin had so much fun in Rome that he turned right around and flew to Luxembourg when we got back. Enough of this "heart of the Renaissance" business. Give the man some banking!

Actually he had a Fulbright-Schumann conference to attend, and apparently it was pretty swanky. That is, they handed out free bottle openers and notebooks perfectly sized for grocery lists. He did get to sit next to the President of the European Court of Justice at lunch the first day, where they discovered that they both have large families dominated by many females. (Mr. President has six daughters.) Justin then flew to Brussels and engaged in varied activities that ranged from visiting NATO headquarters to meeting with the U.S. Ambassador to the EU. He was happy to get back, but the girls wouldn't let him in the door without showing some chocolate. More on that later.

Meanwhile, we tried to lay low. With Sister Appreciation Day (i.e. Valentine's Day) that Thursday, Abdiel and I did go shopping for some presents for his sisters--adorable shirts and chocolate croissants--and we did take a day trip to Pisa on V-day itself. The heavens rewarded our pluck with gorgeous weather and small crowds. The sun fairly sparkled off the marble cathedral, campanile, and baptistry, and the grass would have been lusciously tempting even without all the signs asking us to keep off it. We returned home in high spirits.

Friday it was back to the Math, Latin, Italian, History grindstone (though not with too much of a grind, since Justin was gone and we wanted to maintain our sanity), but Saturday we were back out again. This time not so far, only to our own Roman Amphitheater in Fiesole. We started out with a trip to our library, then enjoyed a picnic lunch next to some walls that date from the Etruscan era, and finally up the path we went to the archaeological museum and amphitheater. European zoos seem to allow closer access to the animals, and this museum seemed to allow closer access to our nightmares. Off to one side of this really rather small museum lay the Lombardian section in which they had spread four of the forty skeletons found near the spot. One was a six-year-old girl. An older child who shall remain unnamed made a reference to an ad we had seen a couple days before for that old movie Night at the Museum. I tried to turn that thought train right around before it went too far! And then we went down to the amphitheater. I intended to take a few pictures but had left my phone buried in the stroller at the top of the stairs.

Or so I thought. By that evening we had definitively verified that my phone was lost. This was more of a problem than usual since I had to retrieve Justin from the airport at 11 pm that night and the streets of Florence resemble a plate of spaghetti in its twists and turns, a plate of angel hair spaghetti if we take the narrowness of its streets into account.

All ended well: a student picked it up and we thanked him with the coffee chocolate that Justin had unwittingly purchased in Belgium. The end!