Even as I sit here typing, thinking about food, drinking my fourth delicious "American caffe", I cannot help but nibble on the most beautiful bunch of kale leaves I have ever seen. Do they complement the coffee? No, of course not, they are simply within arm's reach and too gorgeous to resist.
Let me introduce you to some of my new pets, yes, they are yeast starters, they are also very temperamental as I have since learned. The feeding schedule of these things are like those Gia ? pets I had in elementary school. If you forget to stir them or feed them, or cover them up too much, or not enough they die on you! Rude things.
The big one on the left became my very first attempt at bread. So he is now only with us in spirit (and the small chuck of bread my overly-loving mother has decided we should keep forever-- it will one day be used as a paperweight by someone famous I am sure...) the smaller one is looking a bit sickly now, I accidently put the oven on a bit too high. Hopefully, with my TLC he will soon recover-- other wise I have wasted almost four cups of flour on him....
This is what they make....
And then my my Mum does this:
She loves bread! We stayed up until one in the morning waiting for the bread to come out of the oven, and then I (meanly) made her wait for twenty minutes before cutting into the bread. I need to work on my timing a little. But over all it was delicious. Sour and full of rosemary, best of all it was made by hand, so we would have eaten it even if it had been truly terrible! --Which my next attempt was, and which we did diligently eat, in its entirety.
On to our other pets.... When we take our actual pets out for their walkies, I love looking at the flora and fauna... of course there hasn't been much in the way of flora with all the rain and gray weather. So I have been faun-ing over the fauna! Cheesy, yes I am. We walk past this park which gets prettier every time we go by (until you actually go in, where there are so many weeds, so much litter, and poop at every step... looks better from a distance)
Then we walk a bit further, to another weed-y spot that we love:
Where I stop to pose for my photo :) Then off we go, up and up to the top where we get to:
Ta-da! Not a weed in sight, but infested with tourists and cigarette butts! This is our walk that we manage to do almost everyday. Oliver, manages quite well going up the hill and there are fewer people for Coco to try to knock down. Why we do this is not to see poor David, rusty and covered in bird poop, but for the lovely views on the way up and to collect my pets :)
Can you see them? Can you guess what I have been filling my pockets with? Here's my Mum greedily planning how she can get into the fountain without getting wet... 
Fortunetely I talked her out of it.... But still every time we go past she looks longingly at the maidenhair ferns.
While everyone else looks down into the beautiful city, here we are looking down, looking for things to sneak home and make our mini gardens!
Sadly, the poppy did not live through the night, but her memory lives on... The moss and ferns are doing quite well in their new environment, and are looking forward to their next spritzing. (Between these and the yeast starter we can barely do anything else, I am surprised I haven't sprinkled flour onto these and sprayed water onto the yeast!)
As for Florence, beyond our quirky little world, its doing just fine. Old cars came through the town, part of a much longer drive, but were fun to see.
And everyone hid from the rain. It seems the Italians wait out the rain under overhangs, while us tourists trudge through. The same police duo were still standing there 45 minutes later...
That's all from here. From the sublime to the riddiculous-- from cold days with pouring rain, it is now 80 degrees and sunny. Umbrellas away, sunglasses out! Today we will go to see if the Garden of the Irises is still open.
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