New Ganziano

Thursday the weather turned a bit chilly, with some light rain. My wife woke up feeling pretty good, but that didn't last very long: soon she was back to bed for a morning nap. Reluctantly she cancelled the initial meeting of her Institute class on Family History in the evening. One of her students said "Darn -- this is one of the few times when a student is unhappy that his teacher can't make it!" So she stayed home yet again, going stir crazy after five days inside, but by afternoon she was starting to feel a bit better. She actually left the apartment and took a short walk around the piazza, which felt really good, and she didn't nap again after the morning. While I was still at the Institute, Anziani Knies and Balzotti came by in the evening and gave her a Priesthood blessing.

Her plan is to go with me to the Institute Friday -- woo hoo! It will a big night with me teaching the Book of Mormon class and a bunch of important visitors (you'll see in Friday's blog entry). Normally she would cook a big dinner for everyone. Unfortunately, there's another transit strike that will probably make it impossible for most of our kids to show up, so it's totally unclear how many to plan on for food 😧. It's a frustrating fact of life in Italy that strikes occur far too regularly. 

In the afternoon it was fairly quiet at the Institute, giving me more time to work on my lessons. At 5pm we had our council meeting. It was quite productive, with Claudia there, plus me, Ugo, Ugo's boss from Paris, and the two Ganziani. Our new missionary is Anziano Osmond -- and yes, that's Donny's son! He has been out on his mission about one year and seems like a real nice kid.

My wife and Joyce were on the Zoom connection, but neither one could hear or participate well, due to poor microphone pickup on our end and internet problems on their end. We planned several months of activities, as well as each of us taking some action items to follow up on.

At 7:30pm, I got on the Zoom conference call of the English Institute class for a few minutes to give a plug for our invited teacher/speaker next Thursday, Marilyn Faulkner from our home stake in San Diego. She is an awesome teacher. We'll see how that goes; if it's successful, maybe we'll have other guest speakers in the future, in person or by video.

After that I was able to come home early. Traffic was light, and it was good to see my wife still up and about. Hopefully the blessing and some rest will get her back to normal soon.