Rainy days here in Florence

I'm well aware that Tuscany desperately needed this rain, but my goodness all of these dreary days are starting to take a toll! The only saving grace is that constant rain is rare here, so two hours of downpour is typically followed by a half hour of sun.

While we might be a little depressed, our garden is loving the weather -- sprouts are popping up like crazy! Here's hoping it helps our our harvest be more than the single tomato from last year. This year we're trying for two types of tomatos, zucchini, cucumber and peppers. Fingers crossed!

Lucky Girl/Busy Girl

After staring at my computer and working in Photoshop for no less than 7 hours today, I turned around to see this cute combo. We've been super busy lately...busy in a "Wow, so many awesome projects at once!" kind of way and not the "OMG, I think I might cry" way. Because, trust me, we have done the latter and it ain't fun!

Hopefully in a month or two we can share some of our new client sites with you. They are AMAZING clients with fantastic offerings for those visiting Italy. Can't wait for you to see them.

More photos from around the city coming soon. April kickstarts a lot of the festivals, parades and other happenings around town that we so commonly stumbled upon last year. In fact, this Easter Sunday is Scoppio del Caro, which we blogged about last year.

Finally...I will be sharing a new recipe very soon. I am not ashamed to admit that I enjoy Olive Garden when in the US. I don't think anyone really goes there expecting authentic Italian fare, but they really do have some yummy Italian-American-ish dishes there...including Zuppa Toscana (which, sorry to report, resembles nothing of the sort here in actual Toscana). That beind said, it's a delicious soup. We concocted our own version last night -- a little lighter/healthier and less spicey -- and it was delish. Recipe coming shortly!

Big news from Italy...

There's a baby in there! That's right, come September there will be a new addition to our famiglia here in Florence. We're very excited!

So far, we've been very impressed with the maternal health care here in Florence/Tuscany. I'm sure eventually we'll write up a few blog posts about the process, but for now we're just enjoying things and getting our life prepared for a new little person. We hope you understand if we're slow to respond to emails (we get a lot) and a little sporadic with our posts.

Just checking in!

So that our readers don't think that we've fallen off the face of the earth, here's a quick post to update you on our lives here in Florence. Honestly, we've mostly been hibernating inside the apartment during this awful cold weather that's hit Florence. Will it ever end?! At least there is some sun today so it's taking the edge off things a bit.

I actually looked up last January/February's weather to make sure I wasn't exaggerating this cold snap and I found this ridiculous actual/averages calendar at Wunderground.com. Every day so far in February has been below the average temps -- and not just by a little either! Fingers crossed that we get an early Spring as repayment for this weather.

Believe it or not, in mid-January we celebrated our 1-year Italy anniversary! Time as really flown.

It's cold. It's January. We're boring.

Just a quick post to apologize for the lack of posts lately. If we're to be honest, it's been cold, we're renewing a bunch of our annual bureaucratic stuff, working a quite a bit and really not carrying around our camera a lot to snap photos. I promise we'll get better as soon as the weather breaks.

In the meantime, I'm going to dig through some of our unused food photos from the past year and share some of our favorite homemade recipes -- including our chicken tikka masala recipe that just might knock your socks off!