guest update from Sardinia

Yet another guest update from me, Alex, here:
Its tuesday nowand we are just off the mai square in he city of Bosa doing all our internet-related chores since our olive picking was rained out today. Which is a shame because I am really enjying it (I think Ursula is also, despite the sore neck from looking up all day). My unique method is actually climbing up inot the tree t rake th olive with out little plastic hand-rakes, since I think the highest concentrations of the biggest and best olives are uop at the top with all the open sky and light. Its tough work (on the ground as well!) but very satisfyiong whn we finish the raking/picking bit of the job and then haul all our ground nets together, piling the olives harvested in the middle....sometimes a good 20kg off one tree! The job has been made even easier by the arrival of Liz, from Ohio, on sunday and then June, from Santa Cruz, CA, on monday. Now there are fopur of us in the big tower-house, bu it is still plenty spacious enough.
Especialy since we've been going out a bit. Ursula and I walked the mile or so to the beach on sunday and swam in the absolutely crystal waters of the sea over lovely, sandy, bottom with little families of tiger-stripped fish darting around our heals. Good fun. Ursula hd siome bad memories of a particular stingra incident in Mexico, but stayed either swimming or else was only mildly suspiciously watching the bottom for undersea evils. It was so nice, however, nobody could stay wary and nervous for long. It was cold but tremendously fun.
We managed to get the whole house involved in a dinner last night that inally broke the semi-monotony of italan food (not that we dont like italian food, bt really, six weeks straight of pasta gets a little trying. We got Carl to drop us off ( in the pale yellow monster cab) at the market after work and we got some key ingridients--chief among them soy sauce--to make our rice, carrot, cabbage and egg stir fry seem a little less European. It was a shadow of the version we enjoyed in San Gineso when Gretchen made it, but it was good enough to fill our work-depleted bellies.
But yeah, rained out today. Real bummer. We got to go to Carey's studio for lunch hoever, and got a real spread there, only slightly less impressive than the one we enjoyed yesterday. Cheese, bread, tomatospread, sweat potatos, tomates, wine, cider, cucumbers, eggplant, green tomato slsa...it was endless and delicious!" hopefully the rain abates tomorrow so we can get some good harvesting done and then take the olives to the press either tomorrow or the next day. We're all excited to see that process. We'll have more to tell of it after we see the whole business go down. Till then, Ciao.
-Alex (and Ursula)