Our first dinner appointment

Wednesday is not quite as relaxed now that we have activities at the Institute in the evening, but it was still a fairly easy day. In the morning we tried to level the fridge, but it turns out that the floor itself is somewhat unlevel. Dee says it doesn't bother her, but the sidewise tilt is a bit too much for my taste, so I went to the Chinese store and bought some adhesive felt pads to put underneath the feet of the fridge and see if we can make it level enough. There hasn't been enough free time to try it yet, and thus the new fridge still sits cold and empty. Hopefully soon!

Looking across the piazza in the morning, we saw a truck set up shop from down in a ramp that goes underground, with a huge ladder attached to the balcony of a second floor apartment. Apparently somebody new was moving in there, and rather than try to carry everything up the stairs inside, they move it up to the outside balcony in a big box that slides up and down the ladder. It was fascinating! We had never seen such a thing, but apparently it is common here, as the elevators inside are often too small to hold much of any size. They can go up many floors. The lighting contrast made photos a bit difficult to see, but below are a couple, and you can watch a short video here.

 

 

At 1pm we had lunch at the home of Stefano and Elia Magnanti, a couple in our ward about our age: very wonderful folks, quite sharp, converts of just over nine years. They live down past our ward chapel, so the drive was about half an hour. We spent a couple of delightful hours with them in their home (second floor in a condo palazzo), eating delicious homemade pasta al pesto and saltimbocca, plus some nice fruit and dessert. Parking was a problem, as it is in most places in Rome, but we found a place only a couple of blocks away. The Magnantis are retired and have lots of skills and interests, and we hit it off quite well. Dee started to help Sister Magnanti with family history, but then we had to leave to get back for our evening downtown. We stopped at Metro on the way home to stock up on tortillas, but they were completely out again. Yikes -- Taco Tuesday is at risk! Fortunately, the Ganziani told us of a small, local supermarket chain, Todis, which has a very good price on the Italian equivalent of tortillas, called piadine, so we dropped in at a store near home later in the evening and bought a bunch to try next week.

We were home just a few minutes in the afternoon before heading down to the Institute for an evening activity of family history indexing. As we left the apartment, Dee helped me back out across the street. It's really hard to see oncoming traffic, so sometimes you just start edging out until you can see or until you hear a honk. We are counseled to have our companion stand well behind the car and direct the driver, which we now do most of the time, and it's great. This time, when I was all ready, I started looking at her across the street through the side mirror. She was just standing there, without signalling me to go or to stop. After a bit, I rolled down my window and called to her. She had started thinking about her upcoming family history lesson and completely forgot why she was standing there! She then directed me to back out. We both chuckled a bit about that.

The indexing activity was part of our new initiative of trying different Wednesday night events, which has seen some success so far. This time only Claudia showed up to participate for a while, so we may not do this one again. It was still good in that we got to take a lot of food down to keep in the fridge there, and it's always fun to hang with Claudia, who is very sharp and together. I did one batch of Italian death records, which I still need to review before submitting.

We got home fairly early, so Dee had a bit of time to prepare for her lesson Thursday night. I still have a bunch to do for my Friday lessons, but fortunately there will be some time Thursday and Friday afternoon to do that.