"Nothing is certain except death and taxes" B Franklin

Well, it seems that the jig is up.

After a bumpy start to Italian bureaucracy trying to get our permesso di soggiorno, rent an apartment, buy a car, enroll the kids in school, get gas and electricity and get a carte d'identita', I was starting to feel pretty good about things. I even thought I could navigate my way through which taxes I 'needed' to pay and which ones I didn't. We weren't even that floored by our first Winter heating bill in January. I was starting to wonder why everyone talked about basic service costs being so high.

NOT ANYMORE!!

I just opened up our second Winter gas bill...

OUCH.

We have been home a lot during the day, yes, and have had the heating on at 20 degrees which we thought was reasonable. We turned it down at night to 15...surely not too extravagant when temperatures outside were below zero. And yet, we have a $1000 gas bill for two months. Now I get it.

When we moved in to our apartment we were told that we needed to go to the environmental section of the council to pay to have our rubbish removed. Renters need to pay about 600 euro a year to get their rubbish collected. The bins were downstairs and we put them out and most of the time the garbologists would collect the yellow bag for plastic on Saturday, the brown box for general rubbish on Monday and Thursday, the yellow box for paper on Wednesday and the green box for organic waste on Monday and Wednesday. Until now. I got a letter in the mail today that requires my presence at the environmental offices as soon as possible.
You might think you can hide in the red tape over here, but one way or another, they get you. There is no escaping the bureaucracy. No matter what I think of the system, the fact that they can figure out I haven't paid the bill for rubbish collection is pretty impressive. I just wish it wasn't so expensive!

My year without a vacuum cleaner

I've generally been considered an organized person, and this sense of organization most of the time, extends to our home. When the boys were born, Shane asked me on a number of occasions to 'lower my standards' because I was slowly becoming obsessed with cleanliness and order in an attempt to have control over just one part of my life. I'm sure new mums will empathize that having a new baby throws your world order out the window and it's hard to get it back, so I took to mastering Bill Granger recipes and spending unhealthily long amounts of time in the cleaning aisles of supermarkets.

Fastforward a few years and here we are on the 6 month anniversary of our time in Biella and I am proud to say I have officially lowered my standards. Renting a house that was furnished, it didn't really occur to me that we would need to stock the house with things like a vacuum cleaner, so I've been getting reacquainted with the old broom and mop duo. Every time I sweep the floors (it has become more frequent lately, need to stop that), I think of my nonna who is the world's best sweeper. It's a nice tradition that I'm carrying on, and sweeping is a really nice way to be in the moment. Don't get me wrong, I still covet the vacuum cleaner robot, but I feel like I've made some progress this year with my cleanliness hangup and that's got to be a good thing.

I will say this though, when we were living the IDEA of living away from Melbourne, I wasn't really thinking about any of the mundane things I would need to do. Everything was idealized, cooking, washing, making beds, all had a glossy sheen and I imagined myself taking pleasure in these daily tasks, hanging pillows in the sun on the washing line in a stylized version of our apartment, with direct sunlight on the washing line all day, everything white, glowing, beautiful. I can tell anyone who is reading this that making the bed and cleaning the toilet is just the same over here as it is in Australia, and going to the post office is 10 x worse. It's been a good lesson for me. You can't escape mundane tasks just by changing location...your own perception of how much time you have is the difference between doing the dishes with a frown and doing the dishes with a smile (alright, maybe not a total smile!)