Chocolate cookies with peanut butter
Monday is P-day for the young missionaries, and Sister Bryant was having trouble emailing her parents, so I offered some tech support in the morning. Turns out she had tried to attach about 20 photos, so the email simply got discarded somewhere along the way for being too large. Now she knows not to do more than a few photos at a time. I also helped both sisters set up email forwarding from their church missionary email account to their personal email account. The church account disappears about two months after they finish their mission, so it's not good for long-term storage. I then helped them get Google Photos working and shared with their parents, so that there is an offsite backup. Seems to me the missionary department should document all this somewhere for them to do before they arrive here, where they aren't allowed to access their personal email, but it does take some technical know-how and isn't obvious.
We then ran to Ikea (dropping the sisters off at the mall) to get a full-length mirror for my wife's bathroom. They have a very nice one for about $20. Several other things we looked at there didn't work out, or weren't in stock, so we got just the mirror and dropped it off at home on the way to the Institute.
The afternoon was fairly slow, which allowed me to catch up on a few things. My wife spent most of the time in the kitchen, working on some amazing cookies for FHE: chocolate, with a small ball of sweetened peanut butter (which is very expensive here), and then drizzled with melted chocolate. The kids smiled and gobbled them up after the lesson!
The Ganziani gave a very nice FHE lesson, reading the Christmas story in Luke 2 and having everyone share some thoughts about Christ. The kids then played a card game called Bang!, which has kind of an Old West theme, using a special deck for the game, originally designed and released in Italy. The young people loved it! I had never seen it before; there's lots of strategy involved, but it's waaay too long! We got home a bit late.
At home, I spent a bit of time posting photos from the day on WhatsApp and on the Institute Facebook page. I then spoke with Andrews customer support about our new credit cards, whose PIN never works anymore. Toll-free US numbers are free to call on Skype, btw, which is nice. Finally I got somebody on the phone who understood the issues, so I didn't have to slowly explain things like on previous calls. Since the system here is so different from in the US, it's understandable that most folks don't get it -- we are unusual in being US customers living abroad. Anyway, instead of saying that they'd have to send us brand new cards and disable the account in the meantime, she said that they could just reset the PIN and have it function immediately -- very nice! We'll see if it works.
