Saturday April 16, 2022
Mike here. Six days since my last post. Doesn’t seem that long. I mentioned in an earlier post that last Tuesday the 12th was going to be our residency interviews and that did not happen as expected. Margaret will post more about that. We are re-scheduled for Wednesday the 20th.
US Tax day passed at our house as a non-issue since w filed our taxes before we left the States. Next year will be a different matter as we will have to pay both Italian and US taxes. The timing looks like we will push our 2023 US tax filing to June (special rule for expats) in order to pay the Italian taxes and then deduct them from our USA taxes. I assume I will be using TurboTax for US but we will need to find a local English speaking resource for the Italian side. Timing will be an issue since we want to avoid Italian penalties and keep our 7% Italian tax rate.
This past week was again focused on settling in, we have been to several hardware and houseware stores, in Vasto and Pescara. Finally got on the Autostrada (Tollway) for the trip to Pescara. Turns out Margaret really likes driving manual transmission in Italy. We split the driving on each trip to share the load. Driving on the Autostrada is slightly different from an Interstate in the US. The Italian drivers will sneak up on you and make an abrupt pass in the left lane, no defensive driving technique here. We check our mirrors and do a quick check in the blind spot before we move to pass slower traffic. I miss the blind spot detector in our Honda CRV.
We had a random guy with a truck of wood show up and after consulting with the neighborhood brain trust, Margaret and I are the proud owners of a pile of wood. Now I have a sense of urgency about emptying and organizing the wood shed to handle the windfall. But we are glad for the supply as the nights continue to be cool enough to justify a fire in the kitchen during dinner and post-dinner as we write our blogs tonight. In addition to my fireplace skills, I have been perfecting my laundry hanging skills to get the biggest billowing and quickest drying time.
I am a Science Fiction reader and most of what I have been reading on Kindle Unlimited are book series. But I stumbled on a new author to me, Colin Alexander, who only writes stand alone novels. I finished a bang-up story of his, Starman’s Saga. That’s one of the fun things about Kindle Unlimited always the possibility of finding a new voice. In the non-SF world, Margaret and I read the new C.J. Box book, Shadows Reel. It was more violent than she likes and she had to read it in chunks. I’ve read all of the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child except for his latest which was written with his son as his writing heir. It did not read like his normal style and plot flow and I gave up on it. I really liked the Amazon adaptation of the first Reacher book which caused me to re-read that first book. I liked the Amazon script better than the original book.
Out little group on the hill continues to make us welcome
and introduced us tonight to the couple and their daughter who have only made it back a couple of times this year from Germany to their house. We were chatting about our different home repair and improvement abilities and Margaret felt compelled to let the group know that I hung a towel rack today! To my mind that doesn’t compare to our neighbor Paul who is single-handedly gutting his house, fixing the neighborhood sewer and building a add-on concrete block shed for his lawn tractors.
Easter this weekend will extend into a Monday holiday so no errands or shopping for us. After this week maybe we can start scouting the local villages
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