This post makes no sense because I wrote it with a gaggle of whining kids in the background.

Does two kids count as a gaggle?

Anyway. I’ve been feeling guilty about not writing for quite some time, but everything that comes into my head lately is either too depressing, too boring or would need fifty pages of explanatory preamble to make sense, so I haven’t been writing. But then today I decided to just stop feeling guilty and just write something already. Anything. Cause I like this blog and I don’t want to let it go off into inexistence quite yet, but each day that I ignore it, with a hundred and one supremely valid yet nonsensical excuses, makes it all the harder to go back to it.

I seem to always hit a certain degree of mal de vivre and of regret whenever I come back to Italy from a trip to Houston. I hate boohooing, I made a conscious choice to stay in Italy when I married the Husband and though we had always planned to move to the States I knew that there were no guarantees. And yet, all I’ve been doing since I’ve been back, nay, since before I even left Houston, is hating on Italy and letting all the little irritating things of everyday life become big, huge mountains that I have no will to face.

The truth though, if I really sit and look at it, is that there are just as many things that potentially would irritate me about living in the U.S., were I living there, because, no place is perfect and unfortunately the grass is always greener in the yard where I am not. (Did that sentence make any kind of sense outside my own head?)

Unfortunately, when I get myself into this funk, I tend to blame the Husband. He’s the one that’s making me stay here, it’s his fault, if only he hadn’t tricked me into marrying him… as if I had no free will…

So he’s been bravely, and somewhat resignedly, bearing the brunt of my bad behavior (I really intended to write mood here, but I simply cannot resist alliterating when I can), and I’m trying half-heartedly to return some semblance of sanity and reason back into my life. Because, despite what I would have me believe, Italy is not the antechamber of hell, it is a perfectly pleasant, though somewhat eccentric and often baffling country to live in. A country where logic and reason has no place (just look at the politics, or rather don’t, cause it’s depressing but that’s just an example) but that has many other qualities which I won’t enumerate here because I’m not there yet even though I’m now aware that there are good things, and I’ll soon start appreciating them again.

For now I’ll try to ignore the fact that both my kids managed to get sick after less than a day and a half back in school and the insanely cold temperatures and snow storms that hit just in time for our return home whilst diverting all of my attention to one of the regions main assets. The wine.