Busy day at the Institute

We went down a bit early to prepare for Taco Tuesday, which makes things more relaxed for us. My wife also made a bunch of Spanish rice to add to the mix, and it was popular. Turnout was very good, with kids in and out all afternoon. Until recently we have been going through only 1.6 kg of beef each Tuesday afternoon, but now we are using more than 2kg regularly. Nice! The lunch room was full of kids -- no real place for us old folks to sit, which is a good thing. I had to shred extra cheese a couple of times as more people showed up.

 

 

 

 

A bunch of the kids then hung around to play Bang! after lunch. It was a loud and raucous game😀

Choir started at 6pm, with eight of us singing. We started to learn the Italian version of "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing", one of my favorite hymns. Some of us are still upset that it got taken out of the LDS hymnal in 1985! It was a fun class.

In the evening, Ugo was out of town, so he had asked me to moderate the Institute class via Zoom. Three different kids each taught part of a chapter, and I just got to sit there and enjoy the spirit of the group. The internet was a bit flaky for us, but we were still able to communicate pretty well. There were at least 23 different locations around Italy participating online -- awesome!

Family History at home

Monday was an unusual day for us. Anziani Bellucci and Empey came to our apartment from Ostia, over an hour on the train and subway, to work on their family history here on their P-day. We figured this was the easiest place for them to get to, and our new fast internet also helped sway the decision over where to meet. They arrived at the Jonio subway stop around 10:30am, where we picked them up and drove them here. Anziano Bellucci just had ingrown toenail surgery and was wearing a boot on one foot, so he couldn't walk much. We spent a great hour or so. They were both very sharp and caught on very fast. Dee worked with Anziano Bellucci; she had done a bunch of Italian work on his side and shared it with him, teaching him how to extend what she had started. I worked with Anziano Empey. I was able to help Anziano Empey get back a couple of generations on his maternal great-grandfather's line, attaching a bunch of sources to his people and teaching him a good trick or two along the way.

They needed to get back home, and we needed to go to the Institute, so we had to end just one hour, albeit a very one. Dee had cooked some tuna pasta casserole, which they loved. We had them take a bunch of it home, which was a bit hit with them!

 

 

It had taken most of the morning to prepare all the food, plus some time the night before for the chocolate crackers Dee made. I had to make an early run to Conad to get some ingredients, and there was no line at all at 8:30am! I helped out as much as I could, including stirring, washing dishes, and shredding.

We then all drove down to the Institute, which they had never seen before. Along the way we pointed out a few landmarks, such as the catacombs and the Quattro Fontane statues that Dee loves. After they saw our "office", I drove them a few blocks over to the train station to save Anziano Bellucci from having to walk too much. On the way back, I may have ended up in a bus lane, which could give me a moving violation ticket -- we'll see. The lanes are so faintly marked that it's hard to tell.

In the afternoon I worked on my FHE lesson, plus did some reading and printed out materials for my Friday lessons. Dee made Rice Krispie treats and more chocolate crackers for FHE. 

 

 

 

By the time 7pm rolled around, we only had one GANS present for home evening and we were starting to worry. But then the intercom started buzzing, and we ended up with a full table.

My lesson was on "unspoken" cultural and doctrinal assumptions in the scriptures. For example, in John chapter 9, where Christ heals the man born blind from birth, his disciples first asked who had sinned to make him be born blind: him or his parents. If there were no pre-mortal existence, the question would make no sense at all; instead Christ just answered the question, showing that they all probably assumed there was a pre-existence, as in LDS doctrine. I gave a number of examples from 1 Nephi where cultural assumptions behind certain details in the story line are middle eastern, certainly not from Joseph Smith's milieu. Most seemed to really enjoy it, though the three non-members may have been a bit puzzled by some of it. At one point, talking about Lehi in the desert (hat tip to Hugh Nibley), I asked whether Italy had any deserts at all. Sheyla looked around the room and observed, "we don't have any Italians here; how would we know?", which got a big laugh. Indeed, no one at the table was a native Italian; there were people from the USA, Philippines, South America, Central America, and Africa. 

Afterwards everyone enjoyed my wife's treats in the kitchen. These deserts are not standard Italian fare, so everyone had questions about what they were as they munched.

 

 

 

 

Seven of us then played a couple of games of Cover Your Assets, which was a lot of fun. Three non-members were playing; they caught on real fast and were appropriately aggressive. It's a fun game, with good strategy involved. By the time we got home, we were tired but pleased with the good we had done this day.

Battuta

Sunday was a very good day at church, a bit chilly in the morning when we left home, but then warming up to the mid-60s and sunny by the middle of the day. One of the Sacrament meeting talks was by Sandra, a recently divorced mother of two young kids. She had been asked to speak on temple marriage, a challenging topic for someone in her situation. However, she did a wonderful job, talking about the importance of marriage and family in society and in the church, about how blessed she was to have her beautiful children, and how much she wanted to raise them well. She said that she would hope to be able to be married in the temple some day. Instead of being bitter, she chose to be positive. I gave her warm praise for her talk afterwards, as I assume many others did. We are getting to know and love all these members better, with all their challenges and strengths. It's one of the things we enjoy about being in small wards in the church -- how we become like a family. 

There were a few English-speaking visitors in our ward today. The young missionaries provide live, simultaneous translation via wireless headphones during Sacrament meeting. Anziano McConkie, who has only been out about eight months, was doing it today, and it was challenging. The high council speaker used an extended business example as an analogy, talking about finding the "collo di bottiglia" in a process, which left the poor Anziano flummoxed as to what was being said, unable to translate for several long sentences. He was sitting right in front of us, so after a bit I leaned over and said "that means 'bottleneck'"; he replied "Oh!!" and was able to continue. Translation is difficult stuff -- one missed word or phrase can throw you for a loop! During the third hour I got to translate live for a Brother Terry from Australia in our High Priest group, which was fun but exhausting.

Dee's lesson in Relief Society on the Sabbath day was a real hit. She started with the same fake news that she used in last Monday's FHE lesson, that President Nelson had asked us all to observe the Sabbath day on both Saturday and Sunday. This time, however, she did it via a (fake) letter from the First Presidency that she read out loud. There was nobody from Monday's lesson to know the gig, and her letter sounded quite convincing. The whole room was deathly silent, and the bishop's wife (Jenna Perego) whispered "I hadn't heard about this!" Finally, after milking it for quite a few seconds while the sisters contemplated the purported change, my wife said "è una battuta!" (i.e.,d "it's a joke!"), which brought the house down 😀. Then she said, "Now that I have your attention, let's talk about the Sabbath day". She got good participation and excellent reviews; everyone loved it. My wife rocks! It's interesting that, in Italian, the word for Sabbath (sabato) is the same as the word for Saturday, which means that you have to say la domenica (Sunday) instead.

Ugo said that he had something to give to us, so after the meetings we walked out to his car. In his trunk were two 12-packs of Diet Dr. Pepper, which is a favorite of mine. Not sure where he found it here in Italy, but I'm not complaining! 

In the afternoon I turned the Balzottis' HP laptop back over to them, not having found any problem, which isn't necessarily good news. It possibly points to a serious and intermittent hardware issue. Apparently a recent house guest had dropped the laptop, and the hard marble floors here are quite unforgiving. There's a loose part jiggling inside -- never a good sign for electronics! Anziano Balzotti later removed the loose parts, including a metal screw, which might have been the problem. We'll see how long it lasts.

In the afternoon we had time for a brief walk around the block, plus a bunch of catching up on paperwork. We also did some planning and calendaring for the upcoming week, including trying to set up four apartment inspections for Wednesday. My wife spoke with her dad who is suffering from a bad cold and is perhaps finally feeling his age (having turned 90 a week ago), and I finally connected with my sister Marilyn. In the evening I walked across the piazza to the Knieses' apartment to try to resolve their ongoing WiFi issues. Since both of their Mac laptops have the problem of losing the connection occasionally (though of course it all worked fine while I was there!), it would seem to be a router problem. I found some updated firmware online and installed it on their D-link modem/router, which immediately resolved a problem with their wireless printer, so perhaps it will fix their other WiFi issues as well. Stay tuned to see what happens.

In the evening, Dee was looking at some records on FamilySearch in preparation for helping Anziano Bellucci with his family history on Monday. These are mostly unindexed records, so there's a page view where it displays thumbnail photos of each of the images in the record set, often hundreds of them. She literally gasped at how fast it loaded with our new fiber internet, compared to the old DSL connection! Life is good.

Relaxed Saturday

We got to sleep in a little bit Saturday, and it was nice to have a day off. I went to the Chinese store twice, spending a total of maybe 10 euros, and I went to the mall for a couple of quick things. First, I needed to make sure that our old internet provider, Infostrada, got the memo that we no longer had an account and that they wouldn't be charging me for internet anymore. No problem: they were on it and said I'd get a final bill and be done. They didn't want their DSL modem/router back, so I chucked it -- it was old, slow, and never worked very well.

Next, I went to Leroy Merlin (think Home Depot) to get try to get some PVC pipe to finish building the U-shaped shower curtain rod for the Roma 1 Sorelle. Turns out they don't really have what I needed. They had some white PVC pipe, but it wasn't very straight, and they didn't have plastic joints at all. They did have some green pipe which looked good, with the T-joints I wanted, but unfortunately it needs to heated/soldered together. When I asked about white PVC pipe and joints, they looked very puzzled. In the garden department, they had PVC pipe, but it was coiled and flexible. Different worlds! So instead I bought another extensible shower curtain rod at the Chinese store for my final piece of the puzzle instead. When we install it all next week, I'll show you how it goes together, but I built a trial version of it today in my bathroom here to make sure it all works well.

While out, I rinsed the car and vacuumed the insides, which was definitely needed. It cost only 2.5 euro at the self-serve car wash place. I also bought a 2 euro T-shirt to use in applying rubbing compound to scratches on the passenger side doors of car. Not that anything happened, but it's theoretically possible that one of us might have cut the corner a bit too tight going into the narrow Institute driveway last week. I won't say which one of us did it, but it wasn't me 😀. Fortunately my wife knows how to apply rubbing compound to cars; she has had some experience over the years!

Other than that, we were here all day. Dee worked on her Relief Society lesson for Sunday, while I don't have any lessons for a few days. Although I love teaching, it's nice to have a little break sometimes. I bought some bread downstairs at the little market. We have become regular customers of the bread shop there. It's good Italian bread, meaning that it takes some effort to chew. Mmmm!

 

In the evening the Balzottis dropped in to see my shower curtain rod contraption, and we had fun visiting, as always. Anziano Balzotti really likes our new fridge and now hopes that their old one will die soon! They also left their laptop for me to diagnose, as it has been shutting down occasionally for some reason. I started running my usual suite of hardware and software diagnostics to see if I can figure anything out.

We had ordered the Italian version of "Fiddler on the Roof" on DVD from amazon.it, thinking we could make a movie night of it with the GANS kids at the Institute. It arrived Friday, and we were very disappointed to learn that, although the dialog is in Italian, the song lyrics are still in English, and, even worse, there are no Italian subtitles available at all. Bummer -- I don't think that counts as an Italian version, at least not in my book! By contrast, the French version has both French song lyrics and French subtitles. We have seen an online version of a live performance with Italian song lyrics, so it's not clear why the DVD doesn't have them, but we're out 7 euros with not much to show for it 😦.

Things we see around us

Dee writes:
At the grocery store today, there was a display of costumes for sale.

You may be wondering why they would sell costumes in January. It's Carnevale! Here's a nice little article about it.
https://www.amoretravelguides.com/blog/carnevale-in-italy.php

Right in front of the door to our apartment tower, there's a grate in the pavement, over a hole that's about 5 feet deep. Yep, right where we need to stand and get out our keys. We've even a seen a dropped key inside. Needless to say, we're verrry careful.

Up the street from us, someone took the turn too fast and lost control of their car, which ended up plowing through the fence and dropping down several feet, to land on its side. It's been this way for a week. I don't know what happened to the driver and any passengers. It looks pretty bad to me.

Artichokes are much loved here. Isn't this a beautiful way to sell them?

Santa made from plastic cups, with a missionary name tag!

Outdoor ice skating at our local mall Porta di Roma. Look at the orange scooter-style support for beginners. So clever!

These are like the cookies that Grandma Martorano used to make. She pronounced it "doldidi", which sounds about right in Calabrese dialect. Sergio had the same cookies, made by his sister. I sure hope she will share her recipe with me.

Look at the fancy presentation of salame, created by Alessio.

The Befana is a part of Epiphany here, bringing gifts or coal to the children. She is an old crone or witch-type figure. So, you see her on Christmas stockings and as a figurine

Alma, Amulek, and Sloppy Joes

Friday morning when I woke up, Dee was very upset because Microsoft had done an update on her laptop and wiped out the icons on her desktop and taskbar, all of her Roboform password manager info, and lots of settings. She was frustrated and worried. She had already been googling the issue and found lots of people with similar problems, and she was doggedly trying to restore things to their proper state. It sounded very bad. Finally I asked if I could help, and she happily said yes and went into the kitchen to eat some breakfast. Within two minutes I had diagnosed and fixed the problem: after rebooting to finish the updates, she had inadvertently logged into the "extra" admin account we keep on that laptop in case something goes wrong with her main account. She had made the password for that account identical to her own account, so it was an easy mistake to make -- just click the wrong login icon. I logged her out of the extra account, back into her account, and boom: everything was back to normal. She was thrilled, to say the least. Microsoft is off the hook on this one! I then did my regular bi-weekly backup of her laptop, of which she was very appreciative.

Since arriving here, we have been buying lots of little things (many of them tech related) to make our life a little easier. For example, I like to keep a stash of extra tech (cables, a mouse, a USB hub, etc.) here at home and at the Institute, because they always seem to come in handy. Sometimes my wife chides me (very lovingly, of course :) a bit for buying all these things, but then inevitably some circumstance will arise where she needs them -- 'nuff said. Anyway, there have now been about half a dozen defective items received here, evenly split between being from eBay.it and amazon.it, which I have had to return or get reimbursed for (for some reason, most vendors don't want to bother to pay me return postage for a 5 euro item!). I have never had that level of defective items in such a short period -- not sure what's going on. Perhaps it's a Europe thing, or maybe the quality of electronics is going down all over. In any case, both Amazon and eBay vendors have been very good about refunding me for the items, but of course I'd far prefer that they just worked.

With two lessons looming for me Friday, Dee offered to go to Lidl for grocery shopping in the morning without me, so that I could study a bit more. It was much appreciated. I was able to go over my lessons one more time each, and also translate some stories and quotes. My wife has taught me to use Google Translate online as the starting point for such things; the translations aren't always perfect and do require some tweaking, but they are pretty darn good as a starting point. As Dee left the market, she called me, so I went downstairs to the street in about five minutes and met her there just as she drove up. That way she didn't have to park and try to bring our portion of the supermarket loot upstairs. Instead we left some of our stuff in the trunk for the day -- with temps in the 40s it was almost like a fridge anyway -- and headed straight down to the Institute. She drove without GPS and without much input at all from me, except a couple of times when I reminded her which lane to be in.

Once at the Institute, we ate a bit of lunch and started on our prep for the afternoon/evening to come: I finished reviewing my lessons, and she started cooking.

 

 

 

 

At 4pm I taught my Seminary Doctrinal Mastery class, with three kids present: Valentina, Donatella (on crutches), and Franz (who has only been there one other time). We had a very good discussion on marriage and family, including how changing trends are affecting society and the church. They had questions about gay marriage, adultery, pornography, etc., and we ended up with some very good conversation about what the church teaches and why. I had thought that it would be just me with the two teenage girls on those topics, so I invited Dee to sit in on the lesson and participate, which she did, adding some nice perspectives. Even with Franz there, I was still very glad to have her involved. At the end of class, it was time to frost the carrot cake she had made, which was a huge hit with the kids and anyone else who walked in during the next couple of hours!

 

Around 6pm kids started trickling in for the evening Institute class. Ugo was in Florence for some teacher training on Saturday, so the class is really mine now. Turnout was decent, including a couple of investigators, but certainly not the highest we've had. 

Several of the younger kids (e.g., 17 to 19 years old), sitting on the back row in the photo above, don't seem to know how to not talk during the lesson -- that seems to be a bit of a thing here in church in general -- but I have learned to roll with it. We discussed the story of Alma and Amulek in Alma 8-16, and there are lots of great topics in there to apply to our lives. We had some meaningful exchanges of thoughts and experiences, including a couple of stories I told from my life. I also like to throw in some interesting tidbits sometimes, not necessarily spiritual, but which give a bit more color to the story. For example, the main lawyer's name, Zeezrom, may be a play on words, a nickname indicating "the money guy", because an ezrom was one of the values in the Nephite monetary system; that nickname would fit his personality quite well! The kids seemed to really like the lesson.

We have a few investigators who meet with the missionaries at the institute. One is a young man who showed up last week, asking about English classes. He has been reading the Book of Mormon and even taking notes in class, and is coming to most of our activities. I hope he can continue to feel the growth and joy of the gospel. It's wonderful to see his delight.

Afterwards, my wife served sloppy joes, using the former couple's recipe. Elder Thacker called it Untidy Josephs, which fits his cute humor style. This dish is a long-time favorite with the kids. We bought slider-style small hamburger buns this time, and the kids went through 54 buns and 2 crockpots worth fairly quickly, in addition to fries, chips and cookies! They come back for fifths and sixths, smiling happily at the warm tastiness. How do they stay so skinny??

 

 

 

 

All evening there was a flurry of messages on WhatsApp from the Institute council group about the St. Valentine's day dance rescheduling. We went through a bunch of options, but finally realized that we could just delay it a week to Feb 17 (there was a potential conflict we resolved to make that date work), and everything would work out well. Nice solution, and it's all reserved and ready. 

The kids took a nice photo of the two of us together, delighted both to be hanging with them and to have a busy day/week behind us😀

It was a tad late when we finally got all the kids out of there, but it's always wonderful to see them enjoying being together so much.

Winter again

All of a sudden it got cold again, as we had assumed would happen at some point. We had been comfortable with light jackets and even shirtsleeves for a while, but Thursday the high was in the 40s, so back to sweaters and heavier jackets. In the morning I ran down to the Chinese store and bought a mouse pad with a fun design of a 200 euro bill (I've never seen one, not even sure if that's a thing!):

My mouse had started having some trouble on my solid-white desktop, and the mouse pad seems to help. In addition I bought a triple plug adapter. Here in Italy they have three different kinds/sizes of AC plugs, and there is no rhyme or reason (as far as I can tell) as to which wall outlet will have which type. In one of the rooms at the Institute, we just found that our outlet strips wouldn't plug into the walls. This adapter fixes that. It's only 1.5 euros, but it's a pain to have to keep so many types of adapters.

We had district meeting in the morning, which was our first with Anziano Ferrara (he's American, with Italian ancestry) as our new district leader. He's very good, and we enjoyed the meeting quite a bit. After a lengthy review of how things were going, we discussed goals and plans, and he had each pair of missionaries set some goals, which we did. He did some good teaching and challenging, which we enjoyed very much.

Then we drove downtown to Institute, where we spent some time preparing for our lessons. At 3:30pm we had a campus council meeting, with four of the six GANS leaders present in person, plus one on the phone. It was the largest such gathering in some time. Ugo was also there. The meeting was quite productive, discussing the upcoming schedule of events, plus reviewing how things are going and making some assignments. These are great kids to be around! We had a St. Valentine's dance planned next month, but the bishop of the building where it was to happen had inadvertently double booked it, and so we lost our slot. Still trying to figure out what to do on that one.

One of our GANS, Dario, is going through a real tough time, in addition to being sick for a few days. His dad is no longer in the picture at all. His mom is going through chemotherapy, and things aren't looking good. This is an only child, just out of high school -- hard to imagine how tough that is. He is a convert of slightly over a year, and his ward has been very helpful to him and his mom. We're trying to be supportive in every way we can think of. I've been messaging with him all week to see how he is feeling, giving him a few tips on OTC meds to take, and fortunately he seems to be doing much better physically.

In the evening my wife gave her family history class, with the Magnantis (who had us over to lunch yesterday) joining in the online festivities. I was only present for the first 15 minutes, but Dee seemed to have everything well in hand. Getting used to presenting using Zoom takes a while, and we did a dry run for her to set up all the tech again.  I left her class to make myself available to teach English if the Ganziani needed to break the class into two groups. Turned out they didn't need me, and their class had a great time -- the laughter was almost continuous as they went through different language scenarios. Anziani Osmond and Waddell seem to be born entertainers! So I had an hour to work on my lessons for Friday, which was needed. By the time we got home I was exhausted, after a long day.