a book, a breakfast, and an actor

i'm re-reading anthony doerr's four seasons in rome. i find his writing whimsical and poignant . . and perceptive (and profound). living in rome for a year he chronicles his attempt to understand and speak the language, along with the adventures he and his wife have of navigating life with their six month old twins, in addition to writing a novel:

"i walk the boys to the vegetable stand on a saturday morning, my brain a miasma: a pesca is a peach, a pesce is a fish. peaches, plural, are pesche. pizza is pizza but a pezzo is a piece, a pozzo is a well, pezze are patches, and a pazzo is a nutcase. a puzza is a stench: shauna sings, puzza, puzza, to henry while she changes his diaper." (from page 181, scribner books, simon and schuster)

"in the forum archaeologists crouch in their pits with their buckets and trowels and brushes, tweezering away the clay. nearby, restorers clamp scaffolding to yet another church facade. try for a moment to understand how overwhelmingly many dimpled and cracking surfaces this city must try to keep clean: fonts, flower petals, pediments, railings, hieroglyphics on obelisks, the furrowed robes of ten thousand solemn madonnas, and the plump cheeks of a hundred thousand grinning cherubs. we all fight our daily battles with entropy--deadhead the tulips, pick up the fallen cheerios, carry out the used diapers--but rome has it the worst. it is a metropolitan museum of art the size of manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways." (page 157.)

(in the bowl is my oatmeal.)

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morgan ran into katy wicx! we really like her work as barbara on ted lasso.