Seven Asses

There are now seven donkeys in my village. They are all together in one small pasture, I think owned by the person who has the goats and llamas I can see when I pass by in my car. They may have been there for a while, since I haven’t been using the car much. It makes me happy, though. Donkeys are wonderful little people. I sometimes kind of wish that Foro was a donkey, but to be fair, my very first stuffed animal was. I still have him.

Last week we went to Italy to climb and our B&B host, after some discussion, admitted to having been an anarcho-communist when he was younger (I asked him what sorts of traveling he’d done, and it was all to places like Cuba and Vietnam.) Now he’s interested in a Luigi Ferrajoli who proposes a world constitution. Unfortunately, the only place I can learn about Mr. Ferrajoli is on a YouTube video-conference, and I don’t understand Italian. I may ask one of my colleagues, if she has the time. I’m just curious what he proposes. I’m guessing it would be a constitution with no teeth in it; we know what we need to do but there’s no carrot/stick to make it possible to change for the better.

Otherwise things are well, even if it is a weird, warm winter. It’s February, and we climbed instead of skiing. It would have been possible to ski, but the weather wasn’t super wonderful. We could have forced the issue, but I’m always afraid with my partner that he will insist on doing things in a certain way even if it’s better to be flexible. Like he always thinks that we should get up early to ski or climb. It often is, but sometimes we get up early in order to spend the morning in the clouds or wind, and then when we’re finishing, the sun comes out and the wind dies, and it was totally predicted by the weather report. Anywho, the climbing option was wonderful. We did some longer climbs and I’m a bit achy now, but it’s also good to go full on with things sometimes.

I’ve been avoiding politics and most news, looking in at the newspapers (online) daily but refusing to watch the saddest things. Some things are so awful that I just don’t want to go there. At the moment there are things that are wrong, and then things that are very, very wrong, and I don’t have any hope of seeing them righted anytime soon.

So I write my Monday blog and try to talk about nice things, like the seven cute little donkeys who’ve moved into my village. No photos yet, but I’ll go try that on Wednesday. For the moment, there’s just Foro. And he’s pretty cute, too.