...what's your real name, Stone?

This blog is taking a hiatus from inactivity and from apple pie, ice cream, football, the stars and stripes, and God Bless America land of the Free. In an effort to trim down to my fighting weight slash in the interest of laying the foundation for the negligibly-lucrative "career" that I have been studiously avoiding and cultivating for the last four years, I will be on a strict diet of pesto, ham, il calcio, and fourteenth-century notarial hand. My crash diet begins Thursday/Friday.

In the place of half-hearted and minimally invasive movie reviews posted semiannually, I hope to provide in this space frequent, nutritionally-balanced, yet portion-controlled servings of insight into my sojourn in a land where don't know a soul, and where I barely speak the language. The rock on which this blog foundered originally, after scraping along on the shoals of laziness, was, frankly, not really enjoying writing about myself. I can't really claim to have fixed this problem. So, yeah. I guess that's just a bridge we'll have to cross and burn when we come to it.

As if this weren't challenge enough, while not writing about myself I actually have to function highly enough to find a place to live, to start my research (not so hard since my books won't talk), and talk with actual Italian scholars to try and save myself a lot of time in doing research.

How hard can it really be? It depends on who you ask - if you ask my head I'm only days away from taking the world of medieval history by storm in one of the best adventures of my life to date. If you ask my stomach, well, you'll have to wait until the invisible Iron Fist of Doom (TM) releases its death grip on my insides.