By the way, I have
been meaning to mention a great (free) app called Google Keep, which my wife recently found and is
available for Android and Apple. She has tried a bunch of
to-do apps and systems over the years, and she likes this one best. It's very simple. You
make named lists, and you can display checkboxes for the items in each list. Each list gets synced across devices, and you can also access them in your
computer browser. You can share a Keep list with someone else, which Dee and I often do
for shopping. What we like best is how checkboxes work: when you check an item as done, it doesn't get deleted; it just moves to the bottom
of the list, grays itself out, and changes to a strikethrough font. But then if/when you later uncheck it, it moves right back up into the regular list and font. It's perfect for
recurring shopping lists, such as groceries. We just uncheck the items that we need to buy as we get close to running out, so they move to the top of the list, and then we check
them again as we put the item into our shopping cart at the store. We have different
lists for each store or kind of item. Try it!
Saturday was an all-day Seminary and Institute faculty training at the Rome 1 chapel across town. Not much of a P-day, but it was worth it. We brought the sandwich fixings purchased Friday morning, which were used as a snack at morning break.
Ugo was supposed to be there to conduct the opening at 9:30am, but his colleague from Bari, Fratello Valentini, and his boss from Paris, Christian Euvrard, had to start things because Ugo's car hit a pothole and blew out a tire on his way into town. His car is a fairly new one, but he learned to his dismay that it doesn't come with a spare tire unless you pay extra! Thus he had to have it towed, and his wife Jenna picked him up and brought him in. Suffice it to say he missed much of the morning.
Both stake presidents were there and led excellent discussions, and a number of local bishops attended to learn how to support their teachers. For pre-lunch entertainment, while waiting for the pizza to arrive, one of the bishops played his guitar and sang an apparently well-known Italian song, "Vidi che un cavallo" by Gianni Morandi. It was awesome!
The training was all excellent, on how to show love for the kids we teach, as well as how to connect better with them in terms of teaching and technology. As is to be expected in Italy, things went a bit long, and with the extra trip downtown (see below) we didn't get home until 7:30pm. So it was a long day for us. Dee did quite well: she's not 100%, but getting there! The only real complaint about the day is that it was positively freezing in a couple of the rooms. Nobody knew how to override the thermostat timers to turn on the heaters; the rooms seemed far colder than outside, as if the AC were on full blast! The tile floors do tend to make things cold compared to carpeted floors (which most Italian think are unclean and unhealthy). I never took my heavy coat off all day inside there. It was really nice to get the car afterwards and turn on the heat!
At the end of the day, we took the unopened packages of our sandwich fixings (about half of what we had brought) to the Institute, plus a bunch of extra pizza, fried rice balls (fritti),
soft drinks, and paper goods. There was so much stuff -- including a
couple of big boxes of manuals, projectors, speakers, and cables for Ugo
-- that it barely fit in our car. We had to make the unscheduled stop to drop it all off at
the Institute, both because
it would be have been a lot of work to carry it all up here and then carry it down on Monday, plus we really don't have room in our apartment fridge. We also stopped at Conad for some fresh fruit and bread, and we filled up the car which was getting low, so we're ready for Sunday. In the evening I had time to finalize my Sunday School lesson, on Abraham 3 and pre-ordination. I also made my weekly calls to my mom and my sister Marilyn. We are looking forward to a more normal week!