This picture is not blurry. You are just drunk.

Happy Birthday F/ Tanti Auguri
Oh man did T and I have fun with this birthday.  We made our kinda shy guy F have a manly man gathering at the enoteca downstairs, Corte dei vini, with his F3 club (or as we sometimes call it: F cubed) including both Fergal (from Ireland originally, if you were wondering) and Fabio and also S for Stefano.  They came upstairs for a yummy chocolate sacher cake filled with apricot jam afterwards and some manly nighttime espresso, man how do they do that? I'm gonna be up all night from the sugar alone. The main point is this is proof that F has made real friends in Italy and as a group the F3S are all super cute. Judge for yourselves.

Conversation included a long discussion of golf which none of the 3FS play.  Stefano was very very sweet and slowed down his speech for the first 20 minutes before the other guys showed up so that F, for the first time ever, knew what the heck he was saying. F averted a friendship crisis right off the bat by making sure that Fergal's name was spelled correctly in his cell phone so that when Fergal borrowed it to call home to the girls he didn't see its prior spelling (yikes!).

I am F2.

Vivid description of Eurodisney.

The topics of the evening were in no particular order: everyone's daughters, genetically modified seeds, the cardboard tasting tomatoes of the USA, the lack of communication between the guardia di finanzia and the traffic cops next door, the wines of Lucca and the dependence of restaurants and bars on various state offices of which our F understood nulla.  Yeah sure it sounds kinda un-festive and lackluster to us but remember that everything is funner in Italian and also there was quite a bit of drinking involved. Then there was a lively discussion of how to survive Eurodisney and a week of French coffee .

It is cute when he talks with hand gestures.

But what the heck am I doing?