I need to pee like a....hamster

No photos today - I have yet to download them from the camera. I was in Italy last week for a few days for what turned out to be an interesting meditation on us not having cell phones yet (and really being better of with getting some), pasta and gelato, and finding the perfect Hiroshige Japanese woodblock print exhibit in Rome. I have a whole 4 pages of handwritten "blog" from that trip because not only did I not bring a cell phone, I didn't bring a computer, and didn't have an alarm clock. I'm even still waiting to get a new watch battery, so going to the vending machine three floors down for a midnight juice also provided me with the only sense of what time it was. Luckily, a few people were gracious enough to agree to use all of their advanced technologies to wake themselves up and then knock on my door to help me get up.

The point of all this is, of course, that I don't miss breakfast nowadays. First talk, first talk session, coffee break...I can miss some of those for a nap (and did). But breakfast is a completely different matter. It may only have been white bread, yoghurt and coffee, but the coffee and steamed milk came in their own pitchers, so I actually got to have my 2 tablespoons of coffee with lots of milk each morning. Glorious.

The other point of this, which comes back to the title of this post is that while a hamster's bladder may not be anywhere near the capacity (and thus literary heft when used in that sentence) as a racehorse's, I expect that if a hamster were to drink a lot of liquid in one sitting, he or she would really have to pee at some point. Even if the volume wasn't a lot, boy would it still call for some action. I have the bladder of a hamster now.

I also, after the trip to Italy (for conference and then day out in Rome), have a new pair of sandals, some Japanese woodblock print postcards, a Wallpaper Rome guide and a new alarm clock from the airport. The clock is robin egg blue and really happy-looking. Now if only I knew where to buy batteries....