Potatoes

On Thursdays we have district meeting, which means that we leave our place about 9:15am to drive over to the chapel. It's a much earlier day for us than normal, particularly given how late we are usually up. There was a bunch of traffic on the freeway, but we made it there barely on time. My wife drove, and she is getting more comfortable with the routes and the overall flow of things here. Our new district leader, Anziano Bentley, has his own style, and we enjoyed the meeting very much. We talked about some things we'd like to see in district meetings, and we planned for a skit at the upcoming ward talent show/Christmas dinner. We set some district goals, then had a nice group discussion about the light of Christ, and he shared a parable from James Talmage that I had never heard before.

After that we got to the Institute a bit early. It took two trips to get all the stuff we bought on Wednesday upstairs, including a large bag of potatoes (over 20 pounds for only 3 euros!).  Turns out that the potatoes were still quite dirty, so I got dirt all over my pants and my coat, but it seems to come out pretty easily. 

I bought a ream of 100 gram/square meter printing paper at the copy store downstairs. Typical paper is only 80 gr weight, but I like the heavier stuff. It also gave me a chance to try Dee's new credit card, which worked with the old PIN. Good enough -- it works, so it will now become her main card.

In the afternoon I worked on my upcoming lessons, while Dee did a trial run of a potato casserole for Friday evening, which took her until the evening. She wasn't terribly pleased with the result, so she may do something different, though I thought it was quite good.

A few kids came to the Institute today, but there are no planned classes or meetings, so Thursdays are generally light. Tomorrow is a big national holiday, so we'll see how many kids show up for the lesson and dinner.

I spoke on the phone with my wife's cousin Sergio down in Calabria, who is slowly recovering from some surgery. We plan to go visit him over the Christmas break while the Institute is closed, and we got that set up, including train, hotel, and rental car reservations. Having joined the train loyalty club, CartaFreccia, we got a great discount on tickets for senior citizens (60+). If it weren't winter and Sergio were well, we might stay at his house like we have in the past, but our visit with him will be brief this time. We also hope to visit some of the young missionaries in the area and maybe take them out to lunch or dinner.

Tonight my laptop LCD screen started acting up, flashing like crazy. It still worked with my external monitor well enough here at home, but it would be difficult to use it standalone. So I took the back bottom cover off and re-seated the display connectors; it seems be working ok for now. It if reoccurs, I'll probably need to get it serviced by Lenovo; it would be interesting to see how that works here in Europe. My experience with them has been great in the past.