New cabinets. Phone found!

This morning started off with a 10:30am district meeting at our Roma 3 chapel, which is a 25 minute drive from here. Anziano Wright is our new district leader (DL), and he did a very nice job of directing the meeting and leading the discussion. It's amazing to see these young kids taking on leadership roles and thriving.  I guess we did that 40+ years ago, but somehow these kids seem way younger! 😉There are four young elders and two sisters in our district, and everyone shared something about how the Lord has blessed them and how we can do a better job of sharing the gospel with everyone around us.

We then got to drive to the Institute from a completely different direction, arriving just in time for our 12:30pm Institute council meeting, where we discussed issues and brought the new Ganziani up to speed. Claudia is the council president, and she did a great job. 

Two big pieces of news today. The first is that we got some metal cabinets (and a new couch) delivered from the Roma 3 chapel. The kitchen has been very crowded, and these cabinets allowed us to unload a bunch of stuff there: cooking supplies/food, paper goods, etc., to free up a lot of space in the kitchen cabinets. It also allows us to see more easily what we have a lot of (plastic forks!) and what we are running low on. My wife spent a bunch of time reorganizing the kitchen to take advantage of all the newly freed space.

Lots of paper goods

Food stuffs and our stuff (to be kept  locked)

New couch, decorated for Halloween

The cabinets also have locks, only one of which we will use for our own things and for food we don't want to get "grazed" by the kids. We needed to switch the only working lock from one cabinet to the other, and Oscar was amazing at doing that. He actually figured out how the lock pins work and adjusted the locks so that both cabinets now lock using the same key. He's a EE student at the Sapienza University nearby and obviously very talented with mechanical and electronic things. Here he is working on one of the locks:

Oscar's English is amazing, and he always likes to learn new words and phrases. When I mentioned the kids "grazing" for food, he asked what that meant and really loved the imagery! Unfortunately, we have only one key. When I took it to the hardware store around the corner to get copied, they said it is a very unusual key blank which they don't have. The proprietor took a photo and said he'll contact his supplier to see if he can get one.

Our second big piece of news happened in the early afternoon. There was a flurry of activity on the Whatsapp group for the Institute, asking if someone had lost a phone. Someone in the message group who lives up in northern Italy had received a call from a woman who works at Metro, saying that she had found a cell phone. Apparently this employee looked through the Whatsapp history and pulled a phone number from the very long message thread and called it. She said that the phone had a purple case (bingo!) and asked that the owner contact her. I called the gal from the Institute group who had received the original call and got the number of the Metro employee. When I called her, she asked for some identifying info  on the phone, and when I said it was a Moto brand phone (not very common here), she said "yes, that's it". We will go pick it up Friday morning on our way to the Institute; it's considerably out of the way, but we are delighted! This woman said that normally they just throw phones away, but she felt somebody would care about this one and took the time to track us down. Awesome!

I also helped Kristen Hall setting up her first online Zoom session from home for the English BofM class, which all went smoothly. After the English classes finished at the Institute, we got to come home by 9pm, earlier than usual.

I am looking forward to doing some gospel teaching Friday evening and spent some time reading the scriptures and preparing both of my lessons. That process always benefits me perhaps more than the students, and I love the spirit that comes with it.