Have you ever bought something new to wear, and the weather will just not cooperate? I found some cute rain boots in Venice last weekend. I’m ready for the rain, and can now walk Brandon to school without getting soaking wet. So where did the rain go? I want to wear my cute new boots! I love these!

A self-portrait op presented itself, at the front door of our apartment building. Me and my Italian look, except I should be wearing black boots and not colorful rain boots. That’s just me. 🙂

But maybe when it rains buckets for a few days I’ll see more of the Italian rain boot fashion out and about. There are quite few rain boot choices for women here. Much better than in Oregon, where you would think you could find cute rain boots…

Yesterday my mom, sister Laurie and cousin Heather arrived from the US for a week long visit. They arrived at our house midday, and after they had showered and rested a bit we went to Bergamo for a few hours, to walk around and keep them awake. We came home for a nice dinner of Minestrone soup Patrick had made and drank a couple of bottles of wine while we talked and got caught up.

Today everyone slept in and we finally headed out of the house into Milan in the afternoon. We had at 3:45 reservation to view Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper, so we ate some lunch and then headed there. On the way back home we visited the duomo and then rode the Metro home. There is a whole story around a run-in with the officials on the Metro – I’ll let Patrick tell on his blog, since he has the pictures, so be sure to head over there to catch that little escapade. 🙂

We are having fun! It’s nice to have visitors here.

So Saturday I woke up with a bee in my bonnet to finish decorating our apartment. This included the kitchen pics in my last blog post, but a few other lingering projects that I wanted to get done. My mom and sister’s upcoming visit was a motivating factor, but also hitting the 6 month mark this week made me realize if I don’t get it done NOW, we won’t be able to enjoy it for the rest of our time here.

So, a trip (or two) to IKEA later, here is what we did…

We filled in the space between the living room and entry door with this shelf unit, some mirror frames and a vase. It was a big, blank white space before.

We had purchased the coat rack and “shoe bench” a while ago of necessity, we just needed a place to hang our jackets and put on our shoes. The “bench” is actually a shelf unit that can go horizontal or vertical, it works perfect for this wall. I finished the wall off with three photos I’ve taken on our travels here. They are all converted to black and white with a “touch of red” in them to match the theme.
And here’s a wider angle view of that area:
On the wall between Brandon’s bedroom door and our bedroom/bathroom entry, we have a small table that we use to put our keys on. We added a fourth photo to match the three above the shoe bench, and a red vase to tie it together. Everything except the vase/flower and the plant actually came with us from the US. I’ve had these frames forever – they just keep working!
Here’s the view of the living room shelving units, which are also full of books, TV and some decorative touches. We are really happy with it! It made it feel even more like home and now we can enjoy it for our next year and a half here. Come visit and see it in person!

My friend Becky in Corvallis has been giving me a hard time for not updating my blog, so you can all thank her for getting myself together to do an update. Things have been busy and it seems like Patrick keeps everyone updated, but I still have my things to tell you, don’t I?

Here are a few photos of our Sunday afternoon drive last week. We set out without a plan and just drove to see where we would end up. It was fun, until we found ourselves hungry and it was the break between lunch and dinner on a Sunday. Oh well! We’ll have it all figured out eventually, probably around the time we head home. 🙂