last night it came to my attention, during a dramatic rereading of this blog entry by matt, that many people had interpreted the burning balcony story to be a situation where i was the helpless damsel and tommy was the savior of the day. one person even went so far as to praise tommy for being the one who came up with "the idea to put the fire out with water." at this point my head exploded, so i need to make it clear: i was the FIRST ONE to start putting the fire out with a glass of water, so that revolutionary solution to that particular problem was mine. i was not standing around, shrieking to the high heavens as tommy valiantly ran back and forth with his heroic bowl of water and saved us all from certain balcony death. let's just be clear here. catherine=brave, resolute putter outer of fires, tommy=catherine's sidekick in this venture.

thus ends my contribution to the promotion of women in the sexist blogosphere.

happy easter! as you may have figured out by now, i'm not a particularly religious person, but who doesn't love a holiday where you wake up to baskets of chocolate and jelly beans? and easter egg hunts. those are the bomb.

anyway, as far as i can figure it out, the italians are a culture who have figured out how to do easter right. lots of creepy, creepy religious symbolism, freaky ritualized ceremonies (check out the florentine explosion of the cart, or scoppio del carro), and food. check out these photos of an easter parade i saw when i was in naples two years ago. it was a bizarrely lovely thing. the lovesicily blog also has an interesting post on easter stuff in the town of ispica.

as for me, i'm going to clean up some of the remnants of last night's dinner party (ask tommy to tell you about his STUPID, STUPID theory regarding video gamers and the girls that desperately want to screw them sometime) and then am off to my family's house with tommy, where we will hopefully eat ham. lots and lots of ham.