I'm back in town!

I'm back! I have been back in Sicily for a month, but frankly, I did not have a thing to write about because I didn't do anything. That was mostly because of the heat, which was in the 90s and even 100s almost every day, and work, which always gets in the way of fun.

The heat isn't the problem as much as the sun. I've developed a nasty sun allergy since I moved here and have to pretty much stay out of it between 10-2 and cover up or use extreme sunblock all the time. I wasn't very careful, so I did have some itchy blisters and re-learned my lesson. The heat itself is very dry, very low humidty, which was a nice change from the USA. It was dry as dust here . . . lots of dust, dust everywhere, grass all burnt out. It's very dehydrating . . . one could shrivel up and become a sun-dried tomato in no time at all. See Repeat above, trying to stay cool.

Finally it cooled off with a shocking, damaging hailstorm that dented my car and caused a swath of damage over the volcano and down to the sea. The hail was huge (see photo above)! The town of Pedara, neighbor to Nicolosi, seemed to get the worst of it--broken car windows, street lights, rooftiles. My friend Rose said that most Sicilians she knows do not have insurance for that kind of thing, either. That sounds very Sicilian. Luckily, she did, because the hail put some holes right through a fiberglass overhang on her house! Crazy weather but now it's cooled off.