Kim and I were joined this week by our good friends Jim and Linda Needham. For those of you who don't know them, in addition to being our friends Jim is my colleague in TCOM at Ball State, and Linda is the realtor who sold us our house in Muncie. It's spring break at BSU, so Jim and Linda went to Rome for a couple of days, then drove here. I was able to spend some time with them in Macerata, but Kim took them on day trips. They arrived late afternoon Monday and went to Treija on Tuesday, San Marino on Wednesday and Tolentino on Thursday. As I am writing this, they are on their way to Florence. Kim will return via train and Jim and Linda will
drive on to Rome to return to the U.S.

It's not because I didn't want to travel around with them. You see, I'm teaching this class. It's getting to be crunch time on our project. Students have left things until the last minute, and now with due dates hitting them in the face, all of them need camera time and editing time. Back at BSU, they all arrange that themselves. They have card swipe access and can get into the editing rooms 24/7. Here, we decided to put the "editing station" (the Mac laptop, plus an external hard drive Clark brought) in our apartment, so students have been here at all
hours. I trust them enough to leave them alone in the apt., and often do once I know all is well, but I have to be there to let them in. Since this is the first time doing this for most of the students, I hang around as long as necessary to be sure everything is up and running OK. For some, that's a few minutes. For others I stay just about the whole time.

One thing we do is eat. We take all our guests to Trattoria da Ezio, where Mirella (shown here) hand makes the pasta every day. Note the bottle of olive oil on the table: it's made from the olives from their grove of 500 trees. I think I've provided this link to a demo of her cooking before. We also saw to it that they got some "walking pizza" (as opposed to the type in a plate that you sit to eat), as well as gelato.

I'll close with a brief portion of a flute performance. The gentleman is Prof. Antonio Zampa. He teaches "Modern Italy" to our students. Each semester he and a few friends get together and give a concert for our students. Since I know Diane is a regular reader, I decided to provide this flute duet out of the 20 or so numbers I could have chosen.