Feeling better!

I'm not quite at 100%, but I'm very close to it.  It must have been a 24 hour bug of some sort.  I've taken my renewed lease on activity to do a lot of spring cleaning, especially getting rid of the accumulated debris of my life and my changing tastes ("I would never be caught dead in these shoes...to Goodwill they go!").  The big impetus, of course, is packing for my upcoming European tour, and I'm pretty much ready to go.  Ten days early...

So now I'm doing research on some of the Italian cities I'm hoping to visit, specifically on how their legal codes view street performers.  Since one of my big goals for this trip is to find a good, legal pitch in Tuscany (since Florence, Siena, Lucca, and Viareggio have all involved some dimension of onerous bureaucratic wrangling), I've been thrilled to find Pistoia looking good.  Not only do they hold a street performer festival every summer (which presaged my good fortune in Ferrara), but their legal code explicitly exempts street performers from otherwise applicable permit requirements.  Go team!

I've also found that, as I had suspected from things I've heard, the cop who dislodged me in Turin was acting without legal basis.  The bastard.