Last night, I was sitting in The Vine with a couple of the guys who work there, and the sun went down and it was beautiful. For a second I was sort of bummed there will probably be no more rain, because I remember lots of happy afternoons sitting in The Vine watching the rain fall. But then I remembered how sick of the rain I was getting.

Now it is beautiful here. The skies are deep blue, the Santa Ana winds are blowing all the palm trees around. At night I can still hear the waves crashing. It is the time in-between Winter and Spring.

In one month from Sunday I leave for Italy. My Rome crash-pad has dissolved, so now I am obsessed with finding a cool spot to stay for my three or four days there. My problem is, I keep thinking of those heady days when it was 2200 Lire to the dollar. 50 Euro was $40. Or something like that. And it seems to be high season already. So of course, me being me, I am like “why pay that much for a hotel when I can have a whole apartment?”

Right now I have got it down to a place in Testaccio right on the river and two places in Trastevere. I am waiting to hear back – I hope the place in Testaccio is available because it looks hella cool. When I make that final plan, I will report back.

Nothing going on here this weekend except housecleaning, garage sale-ing, cliff sitting, and wine bar hanging. Oh, and some preliminary packing. I can’t wait for four o’clock.

I have disabled the function that makes it so you have to register to comment here. No one could figure out the registering part. Except for one person, Southern France livin’, Scotch swillin’ Gulley Jimson. Or maybe no one like, uh, wanted to comment. Whatever. The only thing is I have to approve all comments now before they are posted so if you DO comment, give me some time (days, weeks) before you try to post the same comment again. In other words it is not instantaneous.

On the fuckU2 front, their fans are Really Pissed Off. I guess U2 management had some thingy where people paid $40 to join a fan club that would guarantee good tickets to their shows. So those poor fools were out $40 ON TOP OF the battering they took with the high ticket prices! Greed! It makes me want to like, totally vomit.

I watched “The Last Days of Pompeii” on the Discovery Channel tonight. Gotta love those Shakespearean accents of the Pompeiians. There was one dude, a slimy, moneygrubbing, slave-screwing guy who ran into his house yelling for his wife/slaves “FORTUNATA… RESTITUTIOUS…” were those really Roman names? Totally cracked me up. I did learn a little though, like how all those floating rocks came out of the sky. I didn’t know about the floating rocks before. But to be honest, there isn’t a whole lot I know about. Maybe I should watch the Discovery Channel more, then I can learn to imitate a Shakespearean-type British person. I am going to start practicing that one, right now.