Game night

Wednesday was our P-day for the week, because Saturday we will be at an all-day Seminary and Institute teacher training meeting. My wife is starting to show some signs of life, staying awake for several hours on end, but she still hasn't left the apartment since Saturday. In the early afternoon, I went to Lidl to buy a bunch of food for us, as it had been a while since we stocked up. I ended up with six large shopping bags, of which two had stuff for the Institute and were left in the trunk of our car. The other four I barely managed to carry up on my own in one trip, fortunately finding a good parking spot right by the entrance. It is definitely nicer when there are two of us to carry things! The deal around Rome is that you don't leave anything visible inside your car or it might get broken into; thus, in the parking lot at Lidl I rearranged the shopping bag contents into those for home and those for the Institute, leaving the latter in our trunk and putting the former in the back seat to carry in once I got back to the apartment. We're just used to it by now, though it is odd.

The Spragues cover for us on Wednesday afternoons at the Institute, and so far we haven't gone in at all that day, with the campus being closed Wednesday evenings. Recently, at my wife's suggestion, the council decided to try some special activities on Wednesday evenings, rotating between game night, missionary splits, movie night, and indexing. It was our first game night, and I went without my wife who still wasn't up to it. The final bag of stuff from our apartment also went down with me, so, after several trips, our hall is at last empty of bags to take there. If Dee were well, we could have done it all in one trip.

Festivities were to start at 6pm so I left the apartment at 4:30pm, not knowing how bad traffic would be at that time of day. We have always driven there mid-day, and I planned on using any extra time on lesson prep if I got there early. Well, I arrived in almost record time -- all the traffic was leaving the city. Very nice, and it augurs well for future Wednesday evening activities for us.

The turnout for game night was pretty good, although nobody arrived until about 5:55pm, so I was starting to wonder. For once, we had more girls than guys, which was a nice change. We all hung out for a bit and were about to start our Monopoli game (that's Italian for Monopoly), when the intercom rang. I asked who it was, and a man said (in Italian) "we just want to see the Institute". Turns out it was a guy and his girlfriend from Singapore. She is a member and he isn't. He's from Florence, working on his doctorate there in medical research, and she's from Singapore, with English as her first language. They are here on vacation. Anyway, it was fun having some fresh faces and showing them around, and they joined right in the game with us.

 

 

Claudia (who took the selfie) didn't play because she kept saying she had to go, but then she stayed until 8:30pm or so. The pair from Singapore played for a while but then needed to head out right as Jomar showed up, so he happily took their place in the game.

Anyway, it's odd playing Monopoly in Italian. Unsurprisingly, all the property names are famous sites in Italian cities; for example, Park Place is the Colosseum. Chance and Community Chest have very different names, and I was having a hard time getting oriented to the new terminology; for example, I didn't know how to say "roll the dice", "doubles", "get out of jail", etc. We all had a fun time. Right around the time all the properties had finally been purchased and we started to wheel and deal, Federico said he wanted to something to eat, so we all took a "short" break to go into the kitchen. With good sandwich fixings and the sandwich heater/press, the Monopoly game never restarted!

 

The Ganziani showed up for a few minutes so that Anziano Misa  (in the back center of the photo above) could say goodbye. It's always sad to see someone leave, particularly when they have worked hard and really fit in with the community. Several of the kids asked where my wife was, and I used the line that she had been transferred; after a brief second of puzzled silence, everybody burst into laughter.

Federico definitely didn't mind the fact that there were more women than men present!

 

After we ate for a while, Claudia departed, and the remainder of the kids hung around to play the card game Bang!

 

I left them there at 9pm, with Sheyla and Joyce as council members having keys and thus the responsibility to lock up. Overall, it was a very successful evening!

When I arrived home, my wife was still awake, looking fairly energetic, by recent standards at least. Hopefully she will continue to get better quickly. It is both strange and lonely doing all this stuff without her.