Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Unfinished

Up till now I've been such a dutiful blogger, but in the last week I seem to have entered a state of collapse. And not only in regard to this blog.

To start with the headline, our kitchen remains incomplete and we have no idea when the missing backsplashes and kitchen counter will arrive. Ikea, normally machine-like in its efficiency, is apparently baffled by our problem and unable to provide even unsatisfying answers. Our best hope at this point is that they will deliver sometime after we leave; Pam and Romano have volunteered to come over here and receive delivery (and supervise installation) in our stead.

I could probably absorb this blow without feeling too tragic about it. We have heat, after all (not that we need it--temperatures have been in the low 80s the past few days), and a dishwasher, refrigerator, sink, and stove, all working and all in the same room. But in the meantime we are discovering ways the new kitchen is less than ideal.

The cabinets are too high, for one thing. The design lined them up to go over the refrigerator, but the result is that we have to climb up on a stool to see the top shelf or even the back of the middle shelf.
Danny illustrates cabinet height problem. Note tiptoes.
It may not be a coincidence that the Ikea designer who helped us put the plan together was a charming English-speaker but also about seven feet tall.

An even greater daily annoyance is the stove-sink-drainboard relationship. We were told we had to put the dishwasher to the right of the sink, and not the other way around, but the result is that there's no place to put things that come off the stove, or the spoon, spatula, or whisk you're using to cook.
This didn't seem like a bug when we were in the design stage.

We'll deal with these problems or find work-arounds. (Danny has already located a nice little kickstool for the kitchen.) What is more upsetting, or at least feels so at the moment, is the way our unfinished kitchen presents itself as a metaphor for so much else that hasn't been accomplished during our two months here.

My ability to speak Italian has not undergone the surge I fantasized about before arriving here. If anything, I'm having more trouble than ever choking out simple sentences. (And that's even though I have been getting a little more sleep.) And so many things I was sure we'd get to during this trip remain undone, from visiting the palatial bingo parlor down the road and checking out the public pool to eating at the restaurant that specializes in goose. We've never found our way to the big regional park a mile away; I've never gone into the clothing store across the street, alluringly named Pinko. (It is a local brand, Pam tells me.) We haven't done anything about getting the apartment painted or deciding what kind of furniture we want in the dining room, besides the table and chairs we already have.

This blog seems to have devolved into pointlessness, too. The adventure of our early pioneer days here has faded into a chronicle of meals, shopping, and other tedious bits of quotidiana. Really, why bother?

And anyway, who has the time? With our departure date looming (we fly back to the U.S. on Monday), I'm being forced to deal with paperwork that I've been avoiding till now. And no wonder. It takes literally hours for me to decipher the various bills and the web-site instructions, and even then I'm terrified I'm sending the wrong amount of money to the wrong place.

The biggest mystery surrounds the property tax we're supposed to pay. We've asked the realtor, the condo administrator, and our fellow condo neighbors, and none of them can tell us where to go or how to figure out what we'll owe. Yes, it does occur to me that maybe none of them actually pay this tax and that's why they're vague about how it's done. I have figured out where the relevant tax office is and plan to go there tomorrow.  I picture cobwebs and snoozing bureaucrats, resigned to being ignored but, I hope, eager to help out a new citizen intent on doing the right thing.

I can't go today because it's Liberation Day, a major national holiday here celebrating the end of Mussolini's fascist regime and the defeat of its Nazi German protector/occupiers at the hands of the Allied forces and the Italian Resistance. The main piazza was full of vintage American military vehicles this morning as part of the celebration. All that gratitude, decades later...perhaps this was what Bush and Cheney were dreaming of when they decided to "liberate" Iraq.
I have to find out where the people across the way got their flags.
Much, perhaps all, of my dark mood is no doubt due to the fact that I find it emotionally challenging to have to pack up and tidy up and go to a different place where I have different routines and responsibilities. In the weeks before I left California I was frantic, in despair at all the things I wasn't able to get done before our departure and worried about whether I'd manage in a new place. Now here I am in much the same state, because I'm going back. Back to that other long list of undone tasks!

Perhaps I've wandered into this whole Italian arrangement because I need to learn to find a better, less punishing way at looking at things. Evidently I am not there yet.

1 comment:

criticalfart said...

Anglo Protestant perfectionism meets southern European Catholic inertia. Let the latter win, they seem to be happier folks.

Arriverderci!

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