The temperature got down to freezing overnight, but fortunately no ice on our windshield this time. My wife was up late finishing the prep for her talk in Sacrament meeting. The topic of her talk was Sabbath day observance, and it lasted just under 15 minutes. The talk was wonderful (I'm completely unbiased here :), particularly when she was just talking or telling a personal story, not reading quotes. She had one very good line, which she thought of herself, that the Lord asks for 1/7th of our time (the Sabbath day) but 1/10 of our income (tithing), so our time seems more valuable to him than our money! Several people told her how wonderful her talk was and liked that part in particular. She took a well-deserved nap in the afternoon.
While we're on the topic of my wonderful and beautiful wife, you should know of a couple of recent experiences that reinforce that fact. She was out shopping somewhere, and a woman came up and started commenting on my wife's gorgeous curly silver hair. The woman then asked her if she could touch my wife's hair! Dee let her do it. She gets comments on her hair all the time -- I love it too! I call her my silver fox. Then this past week, Sorella Worth, a young missionary from Australia, came by the Institute to drop off her luggage while doing street contacting; she was here on exchange for a day and would take the train home that evening from the main station nearby. As they were leaving, Sister Worth looked at my wife for a minute and said, "Sorella Whiting, you have such a pretty face!" My sentiments exactly!
On Saturday I did retrieve my wool coat from the dry cleaners, and in fact it is less itchy now for me -- still a bit so, but much better. I really like it: lots of pockets, very warm, can be closed with button or zipper, and a nice place to attach a missionary nametag. I'm glad my wife spotted it at Auchan and talked me into it.
The internet at our ward building is pretty bad: poor WiFi coverage in the chapel (and non-existent in over half of the building), and very slow speeds. So I took my laptop to church to try to understand what was going on. Turns out there's only one WiFi access point, in the clerk's office, which is in a corner of the building. Fortunately, there's a live ethernet cable inside the pulpit in the chapel, which is fairly centrally located, where we can put another access point. After the meetings, I ran a wired speed test there: 3.5 Mbit/sec download, but only 0.35 Mbit/sec upload. The former isn't great -- at least good enough to stream one video at a time as long as nobody else is doing much -- but the upload speed is atrociously slow. However, it's about the same as what we have in our apartment and seems to be standard for DSL here -- livable (barely) for two people, but awful for a group setting like church. I'll buy an inexpensive new WiFi router and install it in the chapel to help solve one of the problems. We now have keys to the church building, allowing us to go there without needing anyone else to let us in. That'll be useful over our Christmas "break".
When we got home from church, the heat wasn't on, which puzzled us. I texted our portiniere (doorman), Paolo, who said that the hot water heater for the radiators was out of order and they had workmen there fixing it. By mid-afternoon it was working again, which was good because it was cold, although sunny all day. We will be using our bedroom heater again, which hasn't been the case recently.
We spent the entire rest of the day and evening at home, catching up on some things and planning for our very busy week coming up. In the evening I also spent some time helping our daughter Wendy with a couple of things on her laptop, via WhatsApp and TeamViewer. For many years I have called my mom and my sister Marilyn every Saturday, but neither one was available when I could call them then. Sunday night I finally reached each of them and we had the chance to chat. This is so different from our first mission, when it took weeks to hear anything via snail mail. It's nice to be senior missionaries, because we can call or email whenever we want to, while the young missionaries get to email once per week and call twice per year. Age has its privileges!
Zone conferences are coming up this week in Rome, so the ZLs called to ask if we could host a pair of young sister missionaries from Terni on Thursday night for their Friday conference. We are happy to do it, but we'll be out very late that night, meeting with some refugee kids, making dinner for them and giving them our backpack gifts, so we probably won't see much of the sisters this time.