Today I finally had a breakthrough!!!! I found a replacement toilet-paper holder for the bathroom!!!!!!!!


Now, for those of you gentle readers who may find this perplexing, I must explain that in general, shops in Italy are very specific as to product inventory. This is great if you're looking for bread, meat, computer supplies, pet supplies, furniture (though you have to go to about 20 different stores to find what you're looking for). However, when it comes to something as seemingly trivial as a toilet-paper holder, what kind of store do you go to??? I tried a hardware store and they carried one *very* ugly model that glued on to the wall. Sharing the bathroom with two boys, I don't know how long a plastic box tacked on to the wall with double-sided tape is liable to survive, so I passed. Next came three different stores specializing in shower stalls, bathtubs, sinks, etc (this because I was looking for a replacement part for one of the showers, and ended up having to buy a whole new shower kit because according to the "specialist": Replacement parts are not available anywhere, just whole sets. More on this later.) Here again, they had a limited selection, better than what I had seen in the hardware store, but still nothing worthwhile.

I feel obliged to explain at this point that the main problem with our *original* toilet-paper holder was that there are two sizes of toilet-paper rolls here in Italy: small and jumbo. The small size consists of approximately 4 feet of tissue paper, while the jumbo model is about 1000 times that. In general, seeing as how I seem to be the only person in the house who actually changes the roll when it's empty, we go for the jumbo roll. Here enters the problem: our holder only accepts the small size roll, so we never have any idea where to put the jumbo sized one until it's worked itself down to about 4 feet of tissue, at which point it survives all of about 25 minutes in the toilet-paper holder before it's ready to be changed out again! You can see where the frustration kicks in.

Now, it seems that most of the toilet-paper holders I had seen up to this point (except for the plastic box that glued onto the wall) accepted only the smaller sized rolls, so they were of course automatically out. My question to the "specialist" was: if they *sell* jumbo size rolls of toilet-paper in Italy, why doesn't someone manufacture a toilet-paper holder that *holds* a jumbo size roll of toilet-paper in Italy????? It seems like an obvious supply/demand issue to me.

Anyway, long story long, I finally found the italian equivalent of Home-Depot today, about 40 minutes from our house, and it was like the moment in "The Wizard of Oz" when Dorothy opens the door and steps from her grey, storm-swept house into the land of Technicolor. Not only did they have toilet-paper holders, they had about 20 different types of toilet-paper holders! They had gardening supplies (got more irrigator heads for my veggie garden irrigation project *and* a new hedge/border trimmer!), I found a battery-powered screwdriver (only 9.95!), silicone to *FINALLY* fix all the baseboard trimming in the house that keeps coming loose and is impossible to nail in place (humidity and plaster.... not the greatest combination, and yet Italy seems to live on in the hopes that one day the two will finally evolve into compatible elements).... AND THEY HAD THE REPLACEMENT PART I'D BEEN LOOKING FOR FOR THE SHOWER!!!!!
(Italian Lesson #1`: Never believe the "specialist".)

I was in heaven!


So, while I know it it highly unorthodox for this to appear on an opera-singer's website, I hope you will humor my great pride in my latest italian conquest:











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