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.