Monday in Italy

Monday started with one of those Italian surprises. We love Italy, and there are so many wonderful things here, but a few things tend to drive Americans crazy. In the morning I went down to get a haircut at the barber Elder Thacker used. The place was closed at 9am, so I went for a little walk. When I came back, it was still closed, so I asked the store next door when it opened. They looked at me with that "stupid American!" look -- of course everyone knows that barbershops and hair salons are closed on Mondays! Almost every kind of store has one day that it is closed, often by law, and the Italians just know it, but we don't. By Murphy's law, whichever day you want to go to a particular store will be the day of the week it's closed. Someday maybe it will become second nature to us, but for now it's always funny/frustrating.

It's so good to be feeling healthy again. In the morning I climbed all seven floors of our building four times, which is a very good workout! By the time I get to the top, I'm pretty winded, so I take the elevator back down to give me a couple of minutes to catch my breath. I'm also doing some reps with our new weights and stretching on the nice floor mats. The marble floors here are so hard that the mat is quite necessary.

The kids are really busy with classes right now, so not much traffic until evening at the Institute. My wife prepared some lemon bars for FHE treats, but the recipe didn't turn out at all as she expected:

Fortunately, after a bit of initial panic (when we were about to head out to the store to buy something for dessert), it came out of the oven and tasted really good anyway. The kids loved it. It was my wife's turn to give the FHE lesson, and she did a really nice job, giving some biographical background on an apostle who will be visiting here next week, as well as reviewing some of his talks. After the lesson, we played the card game Uno with the kids while they devoured dessert. They love playing games, and it's a good way to bond with them.

During the day, I went to the Vodafone store to resolve an issue with the SIM card on my wife's phone. I also tried to reconfigure the WiFi network but found out that we don't know the admin password, so I'll figure out a plan B.

We got home about 9:30pm and got our daily Amazon delivery from the Balzottis, who are very helpful and bit surprised at all the stuff we are buying. This time the boxes included a paper shredder, some Ethernet cables for home and the Institute, and my wife's new Moto G5 Plus phone. We already had that model at home, but it turns out that the US version doesn't work here in Europe -- they apparently disabled one of the key GSM frequency bands. So far we've been using our 3-year old Samsung Galaxy S5s , which are a bit long in the tooth, so we ordered her a European G5 Plus to see how it works. If it goes well, we'll get me one too.

We finished setting up appointments for our first apartment inspections. Every six weeks we are assigned to go to five different apartments for young missionaries in the Rome area and check things out. Because this is our first time and the clock is running out before transfers, we will do all five on the same day. Wednesday has been a down day so far, but not this time!