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.
