Behind the scenes of the Italian quest

Some of those who read the last post are asking "Why Italian?"  Yes, we know that Spanish would make a lot more sense living in Texas.  I've always liked Italian, and I've had enough of not making much progress learning Spanish.  I can read Spanish and sound pretty good but not really understand what I am reading.  Andy is able to comprehend Spanish much more.  So, imagine our surprise when we met some Italians in the Bahamas and I was the one who understood some of what they were saying while Andy was clueless.  Neither of us has ever learned any Italian, but you would think that Andy's ability in Spanish being much better than mine would help him to catch little bits of their conversations in Italian.  As you would expect, I was thrilled and shared/reminded/gloated about this.  So, I have hope that I might fare better with Italian than I did with Spanish.  I expect that Andy will progress faster than I will, but we look forward to the time when we know enough to actually have real conversations in Italian.  As I said before, hopefully, one day we might achieve a great grasp of the language; whether we do or not, I'm sure that we'll visit Italy one day, and anything we learn will be helpful.