Baptism, with a new fashion statement

Saturday was quite a day, rainy for the most part. We slept in a bit, after a long week. In the morning I gave our extra outside door key to the new pair of Sorelle living below us, then ran down to the hardware store to make us another copy. I spent time updating Facebook with photos of Friday's activity, balancing my checking accounts, writing the blog, scanning sign-in sheets, arranging a few upcoming things via WhatsApp, backing up my laptops, and generally catching up. 

Dee writes:
I stayed home, working on my lesson and organizing stuff at the house. It's amazing how our small house and minimal supplies can still need attention! I was teaching on the Sabbath for the second month in a row, and felt impressed to use a couple of talks by Marvin J. Ashton. He was a great man, one of my favorite apostles. He had down-to-earth stories with a useful message, sort of like Elder Holland. He died in 1994, so his talks were all given before the Church started posting translations of General Conference, so I had to translate his talks myself. Google Translate gives a pretty good first pass, and then I edit and refine it. 

In the afternoon I went to Lidl to get food for home and the Institute, plus some drinks and paper goods for the pizza after baptism. I also upgraded my new Dell laptop from 120GB to 500GB, with an SSD that I bought on amazon.it when the price fell. That amount of disk space gives me some room to maneuver.

The baptism was very nice. There were a bunch of young missionaries from around Rome, plus about 15 of our GANS kids and 5 GANS-age non-members. The Sorelle asked me to be one of the witnesses for the baptism, which had to be performed twice because Heilin's (awesome) hair didn't quite get submerged the first time. The non-members were understandably a bit perplexed about the do-over, but it was a good chance to answer some questions. They also had me down on the printed program (see it here) to give a testimony after the baptism, which I happily did, but I would have been happier to have a bit more time to think it over. The spirit was very nice during the entire evening.

Dee writes:
Jhamil, a young man who is a member of our ward but hadn't been coming for a long time also came to the baptism. I got to visit with him, and he sounds excited about coming to the Institute activities. It's so great we have this location here for the young people. More and more have been coming.

 

 

Afterwards Dee and I drove over the to the pizzeria to get our ten pizzas and bring them back. We thought that we had it all set up to just pay and pick them up, but instead we had to start the order from scratch and wait for 15+ minutes while they made the pizzas. These were individual pizzas, and unfortunately we didn't think to ask them to slice them for us. When we got back to church, a bit later than we had hoped, we realized that there was only one knife in the whole place, and not a sharp one at that. Somehow we managed to cut and eat all the pizzas anyway, which were very tasty. Alessio (at work below with the black scarf on his head) helped select some unusual flavors. including one with honey and another with lots of parmigiano (Parmesan) cheese.

The pizza made a mess in the trunk of our car, with some white sauce of some kind leaking from one of them, but we were able to clean it up. Some of the missionaries and the GANS had brought desserts, as well as some pasta (which must apparently by law be served at any event :-), and with our sodas and water we had quite a nice spread.

 

 

We had about twenty kids of GANS age there for quite a while eating and visiting. One of the non-members, Christian (a friend of Margie, of course), is from San Francisco, living here while teaching English and trying to learn Italian. Dee told him all about the Institute and invited him to our activities, which seemed to interest him.

I inadvertently tried to start a new fashion trend. For the baptism I wore a suit, but on the way out the door I grabbed the wrong suit coat for my pants. The top was blue and the bottom was dark gray. Nobody seemed to notice (or everyone was too kind to say anything) until I happened to see it midway through the meeting. I am slightly color challenged, but it was more the darkness in the hall closet that bit me. Anyway, I took off the coat and just wore my gray sweater the rest of the evening.

We got home late, with Dee still needing some time to polish up her lesson for Relief Society on Sunday. I have learned not to ask how long she stayed up. As is typical, it was a busy week, but always lots of fun and lots of spiritual times.