May 12th, 2022

It's hard to believe but it's now been a little more than two years since the pandemic started. And around a year since it really started to die down. I was just thinking about that today as I made my way up the hill to our vineyard and saw our Grape Guy wearing what looked exactly like a good old FFP2 mask and thought to myself "I haven't seen one of those out in the wild in months!". I asked him what was up (we're an organic winery, naturally) and he said that since he had a box of the masks lying around -- it was literally an old FFP2 mask -- he thought it might help with his springtime allergies. Fair enough.

I think it's fair to say that almost no one predicted how quickly and enormously the rideshare industry would not only rebound post-Covid but take off beyond any of even the most extreme optimistic projections leading to a drop in car ownership across the Western World of near 40% (led, surprisingly enough, by the United States which was clearly helped by President Harris's executive order banning all gasoline cars from the road after January 1st 2022) and literally not a single person anywhere could have foreseen the implosion of Uber and subsequent world domination of their kinder, gentler, fairer, and all-around better competitor Lyft. The fact that Lyft's stock increased in value roughly 100x in under six months was really quite nice for us and you might think that led to me being incredibly wealthy but unfortunately it was only enough to make us rich and allow me to quit my job to buy a vineyard in Piemonte.

The kids are still liking Italian / French / German school and Heinrich seems quite at home in the Italian language. Helga still prefers German but now that she's in the first grade she got to choose an elective and she's making a lot of progress in Greek (especially useful for our upcoming sailing trip around the Greek islands).

Joelle wasn't sure about becoming a winemaker at first but she's really taken to it and was just awarded the Gold Medal at the OIV 2020 gathering in Argentina for "Most Promising New Vintner or Vigneron" (unfortunately she just missed out on the "top 40 under 40 in the wine industry" list but she's hoping for next's year "top 50 under 50").

For now I'm just enjoying living in Italy with a little less stress than what we were subjected to during those tumultuous days of 2020 and I'm slowly figuring out what to do next with my life. I'm pretty busy helping with the cultivation and wine making, taking the kids to football practice, reading Goethe's Faust in the original "old German", selling my fresh bread products at the farmer's market on Sundays, entering coffee making competitions, training for the amateur Giro d'Italia, building a functional replica of the famous Rolex Triple Calendar Moonphase Reference 6062, and binge watching the latest season of Lupin: dans l'ombre d'Arsène on Netflix. Hopefully I'll have a plan for what to do professionally by the end of the 2020's.