Leggere. To read.

Ciao tutti!
Santa Patata (holy potato!) has it been a long day.
Despite any desire to sleep in today, I woke up around 9:30 this morning. I knew that I had molti compiti (a lot of homework) to do so I forced myself not to fall back asleep.
I went into the kitchen and had my usual breakfast and I had the treat of being able to have my breakfast with my brother Andrea. He usually is gone early in the morning for school so this was a rare occurrence.
After breakfast I reluctantly pulled out my school stuff and wrote out all of my assignments for the week. I had quite a long list of readings to do for Monday (excerpts from 4 different books) in addition to some analysis and a bit of background research on the authors. This afternoon around 1:30 my mother called me into the kitchen for lunch. First we had miniature gnocchi in a red cream sauce (I really should be learning the names for all of these) and then we had some Italian beef that was mixed in with some arugula. It was very good! After lunch my mother pulled out a chunk of chocolate and proceeded to explain that she got it at church that morning. Today is the feast day of Saint Blaise. Saint Blaise was a doctor and a bishop in his hometown and was known for his miraculous works of curing maladies of people that went to see him, and most notably for his curing of a mother's son who was choking to death on a fish bone. He has thus become the Patron Saint of illnesses of the throat. A common blessing being "Through the intercession of St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God free you from illness of the throat and from any other sort of ill. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."
So, in honor of St. Blaise's feast day, the priest blessed the chocolate, which people were then able to bring home. I ate a holy piece of chocolate! (Who would think you would be saying that one day?) Well either way, the chocolate was very good, and the minor congestion that I have been having for the past few days has gotten much better today. :)
After lunch, I continued to work on homework, which was starting to make me very fatigued both physically and mentally. A big thank you to my sister, Emily, for Skyping me with her camera pointed to her computer screen so I could watch an episode of Grey's Anatomy. It provided a much needed break from my studying. (And I was really in need of seeing a little bit of an American TV show that I knew and could understand.)
After my little break was over, I continued on with more reading! Around 8:30 my mother called me into the kitchen again, but this time for dinner! I was not expecting 3 meals in one day! This is just another reason I love my host family. :) For dinner we had some mini meat tortellini in a broth, which I love. After the pasta/soup we had pizza dough balls that were fried (my mother fried them on the stove). Basically you just tear off pieces of pizza dough and fry them up! They were about the size of golf balls. You could then choose what you wanted to put on them. We had asiago cheese, cream cheese, prosciutto crudo, and prosciutto cotto. (Crudo and cotto are just two different ways to cure the meat.) I should note that my brother Andrea dipped his in ketchup, but he was the only one who did so.  I tried my dough balls with a little bit of everything and they were absolutely delicious! This is definitely something I could make back in the U.S.

Well now that I have finished all of my homework for tomorrow, I can finally let myself go to sleep!

Pensa positivo, e agisci di conseguenza.
Think positive; act positive.