Tuesday was a pretty busy day. My wife left early to go to the open market and look for extra blankets for the sisters who will be sleeping here Thursday. It has been cold! Our overhead heaters work ok, but it's still good to have blankets. She didn't have luck finding any, but did find some pizza bianca and amaretti sardi, which are both awesome -- if you can't find what you need, you can at least eat (old Mouri proverb)! She also got us an ice scraper for the car (it's below freezing at night, so we might need it) and a level at the Chinese store. The level would have been nice, since I stayed home and mounted the mirror on her inside bathroom door without it. It took a while to understand the fairly simple Ikea directions, but it looks level enough and will be nice for her. On her way home, she saw an Italian bagpiper and stopped them to get a picture. It's part of the Christmas tradition here.
We left a bit early for Institute because it was Taco Tuesday. Good thing, because traffic was fairly heavy. I'm thinking it is due to holiday shoppers, but who knows. Anyway, we had a good turnout today, with kids coming in all afternoon.
Maria
Jose was talking with us mid-afternoon and asked why I was wearing
Sorella Whiting's name tag. Sure enough, I had put it on in the morning
while getting dressed; my wife had left it on my side of the bed and I
didn't even look at it. We all got a chuckle out of that.
In the evening we had choir, with all four parts finally represented. We are still working on Tu Scendi Dalle Stelle, and I was paired with two basses, Alessio and Rhenald, who don't really know how to carry a tune -- we roped them into choir a bit. However, by the end of the hour, they were actually fairly close to the bass part much of the time and seemed to enjoy themselves.
Today we bought a lamp that Rhenald carved out of coconuts. He is a refugee from Nigeria and is in our ward. He doesn't speak English or Italian very well, but he's really a nice kid who has a very hard life. He showed some of his work at the talent show Saturday night; we were quite impressed by it and wanted to help him out as well. It's not much money for us, but it is a lot for him. We may also buy one of his very attractive vases.
Once English and Institute classes started in the evening, there wasn't much for us to do there, so we headed home before 8pm. I don't think we'll try that again -- the traffic was awful on our usual route! It took well over an hour, much of it bumper-to-bumper. We're very blessed that our usual schedule avoids traffic almost all the time.
Wednesday is our zone conference across town, and we have to leave here by 7:30am, so it's nice to be home and in bed earlier than usual.