Relaxed Sunday

Today we went to church and enjoyed all three hours. Joyce Hernandez gave her mission homecoming talk in Sacrament meeting, which was very touching and had some great stories. She spoke about how hard it had been many times and how much she learned from it. Next week I'll teach Sunday School again; Fabbrizio took his turn today. It was a fifth Sunday, so Bishop Perego taught the third hour combined lesson on tithing. He is such a great teacher, as well as standup comedian (that's my wife's description :-).

His parents, our close friends Alberto and Raffaela, were in town to watch all five grandkids while Ugo and Jenna were in Albania for the last few days. We were going to try to go see them Saturday, but both they and we had too much going on, so we just had a nice visit at church.

They headed back up to Milano this afternoon on the fast train, but we'll certainly see them again sometime. They were laughing about having to be formal with us as missionaries; e.g., using the formal Lei form instead of the familiar Tu and having to use only handshakes. We quickly disabused them of that notion with big hugs and using Tu, as always -- at this point they are almost family. It's good to be senior missionaries, with more flexible rules!

We spent the afternoon at home, catching up on mission paperwork and working on my Family Home Evening lesson for tomorrow night. It's good to have a nice wireless printer and scanner here; I use them regularly for lots of things. Tomorrow afternoon I head downtown to try to renew our ZTL pass, which allows us to drive downtown and expires in less than two weeks. I had to fill out and print a bunch of forms I downloaded. Elder Thacker left me some good documentation on what to do, but I need the mission president's signature on both forms, which I'll get in the morning at the mission home.  It would be great if it can all be done in one trip, but I wouldn't be surprised if they require some other document and thus a second visit, which is why I am starting early.

I also did a write-up on how to get a codice fiscale in one day and shared it via email with some senior missionaries from the office who have been here longer than us but still don't have theirs. They will also let other senior couples around the mission know about it.

We did some calendaring together for the fairly busy week coming up. There is always shopping to do, particularly for food for the Institute, and we figured out when we can do that for the next few days. It's pretty chilly today, and we actually turned on a space heater in our apartment. We think that the built-in radiators will come on soon, which will be nice. The system is controlled by the management, not the tenants, so we have to wait until it's on to use it, hopefully before it gets too much colder.