Big choir

Today was a fairly easy day. Our newly delivered Amazon Echo Dot is now working great here in our living room. In the morning I went to Conad to buy a few food items for us and for Taco Tuesday. On the way home I stopped at the local pharmacy to get some ibuprofen, since our small bottle is running low. This also gave me the opportunity to test my newly activated mission credit card, which worked fine. It is very different here: you cannot buy any OTC meds like ibuprofen except at a pharmacy; they aren't available at grocery or department stores. Further, even in the pharmacy you can't just pick up a container of ibuprofen -- you have to talk with the pharmacist, who will select a box from behind the counter and give it to you. And they apparently have no concept of large containers -- I was only able to buy 12 pills in a blister pack, which was quite expensive compared to buying them by the hundreds at Target. I suspect that Italians would think our pharmacy system is strange too.

My wife's toe is doing much better than we feared. She is still limping a bit but isn't taking any pain meds. It appears to have just been a sprain, not a break, and she was able to sleep well last night.

There were about half a dozen kids who showed up for Taco Tuesday, more or less what we expect, including some new people we hadn't seen before. We ran out of homemade tortillas at the end after everyone had seconds, so we had to use chips to make nachos. Tomorrow we will go to Metro and buy a bunch of tortillas, among other things. 

 

In the afternoon my wife helped a couple of the GANS with their family history, and I finished setting up her new online account for Andrews Federal. We then called the bank to order our new credit cards with chip-and-PIN as the default. We were able to set it up with an Italian mailing address (the mission office) so that it can be used for more things, such as amazon.it which doesn't accept cards with US addresses.

At 6pm we had our choir class, with about a dozen people this time. We're learning "What Child Is This" in four-part harmony, with words translated into Italian by our teacher Lorenzo. We actually sounded reasonably good all together. Our non-member artist friend, MarcusD, also joined us and seemed to have a good time; the bass section was four strong!

Tonight there were English classes and Ugo's online Institute class, which were both over by just after 8:30pm, so we got home a bit early. We just plugged in our back fridge, which was unplugged since yesterday morning. Hopefully it will be very cold in there tomorrow morning. It has been getting a little chilly in the evenings, down into the low fifties overnight, so I will be breaking out a light jacket.

Sunday in my class I used my favorite Brigham Young quote: "Other religions tell their people, 'Prepare to die!'  We tell our people, 'Prepare to live forever.'"