Dee's driving!
My wife has taken over the driving duties for a while. After her illness, we both realized that it would be good for her to be comfortable driving on her own to the Institute and to church, in case I ever need to stay home sick (may it never happen!). So she has been driving, and she is doing quite well. It will still take a while before she can do it without needing a bit of help with directions, but she's getting there.
In the morning we received a couple of packages delivered to our doorman, Paolo. We also got three (!) cards from our daughter Wendy, who loves to send cards and letters. There's something wonderful about receiving stuff in the mail. But please don't try to send us packages from the US!
Taco Tuesday started pretty slow, but business picked up. We ended up with a rather small group, possibly because of all the rain, but it was a nice afternoon.
Everyone pitched in to help clean up. It is soooo nice to have running hot water! We had gotten used to the old inefficient system, but now doing dishes is much easier.
At 5pm we watched the broadcast from Salt Lake announcing the new First Presidency. Happily, it was translated live into Italian. At 6pm we had our choir class with Lorenzo: one soprano, two altos, three tenors, and me holding down the bass section. We had a lot of fun.
The English class at 7pm had a couple more people than has been typical recently, so the Ganziani split it up into beginning and advanced groups, asking my wife and me to teach the latter. We had two students: Saidou (from Burkino Fasa) and Arsene (from Burundi). They each speak French as their second language, after their local native African tongues, and they are learning both Italian and English. Arsene is the Catholic priest studying at the Vatican. They are both really intelligent, and we had a lot of fun together. We gave them a few examples of words in Italian which sound like cognates to English words, but are not -- usually that works, but not always, leading to confusion for us. Some of these are ones we only recently figured out, after decades of speaking the language. For example, in Italian, the word attuale does not mean "actual", as you would expect; it means "current", as in current events. So the adverb form attualmente doesn't mean "actually" as we always thought, it means "right now". Similarly, eventuale doesn't mean "eventual"; it means "possible". Arsene and Saidou were both surprised and excited to learn these kinds of things, and they took notes! Anyway, we spent a delightful half hour; hopefully we can do it again sometime.
