Cinnamon rolls for FHE
It was cool outside today, with some drizzling later in the day after a partly cloudy morning. I put together my new Ikea office chair in the morning, which works great for me, and my wife seems delighted with my old one. I am getting quite good at cutting down cardboard boxes with my trusty box cutter to carry the pieces down to the (huge) recycling bins outside our apartment complex.
We went shopping at Lidl on the way to Institute, buying food for tonight, Taco Tuesday, and dinner Friday, as well as a few things for us. It took three trips from the car up the elevator to get everything inside the Institute -- that's a record. The loads included two heavy cases of bottled water, which is what the locals drink and is quite cheap, but the tap water here is actually very good.
In the afternoon my wife made a trial batch of cinnamon rolls from scratch, in preparation for FHE treats tonight. They came out pretty well, but she wanted to improve a few things on her second batch. The production items came out very nice and disappeared quickly. She is spending many hours in the kitchen; she says that she is enjoying it, and everyone loves the results of her efforts.
The network at the Institute has been pretty flaky recently, ever since I reset the modem/router and installed the two WiFi access points. The problems have been sporadic and not repeatable, with things failing on different computers, operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac), wired/WiFi, plus a USB ethernet adapter. Things would work for a while, but then stop. Finally the desktop PC today just refused to connect at all. I kept trying different experiments to hone in on the problem, but the results were always puzzling and not repeatable. I was going back and forth between blaming the somewhat-dated router and the PC itself. Finally, after a few very unproductive and frustrating hours of debugging, I discovered that I had inadvertently left DHCP enabled in one of the new access points, which led to IP address conflicts. The crazy symptoms more or less fit what you'd expect from that kind of mistake, and so far everything has been working great after I fixed it!
My wife gave a nice FHE lesson, drawing some points from Marilyn Faulkner's book, The User Friendly Book of Mormon. The group was quite a bit larger than the past few weeks.
Afterwards we all went to the kitchen and summarily polished off the cinnamon rolls and an apple pie made by Trevor:
We were all visiting so much that we never got around to playing any games. I think that's a good thing! When the food was gone, most of us ended up in the classroom with the piano, singing hymns. MatteoS played the piano, and we had all four parts well represented. It was really fun.
Before we left, yours truly got to do his usual job, washing the dishes:
It was a long but very good day. We love serving here.
