Lost lens

Friday morning, after shaving and putting on my contact lenses, I walked out of the bathroom and realized that the right lens wasn't on my iris. I use hard lenses with monovision, meaning that my left eye is corrected for distance viewing and my right eye is corrected for reading. The brain does an amazing job of compensating, and most of the time I am largely unaware of the difference between eyes, although for driving I do have prescription (sun)glasses to make both eyes good for distance vision. Anyway, it usually takes 5-15 seconds after inserting my lenses for the brain to catch on and adjust, so it's not unusual for me to sense a large difference between the eyes. However, after a bit this morning it became clear that my right eye's vision wasn't being corrected at all. So I went back into the bathroom, and, upon checking in the mirror, sure enough there was no lens at all in the right eye. Dee and I then looked all over the sink and the tile floor with a flashlight for several minutes, to no avail. Just when I had decided that it must have fallen out and been swept down the drain of the sink and that I needed to get my backup pair of lenses, and as I was planning to call my eye doctor back home to order another pair for Sherry and Greg to bring next month, I saw it! It had attached itself to the mirror, a few inches up. The photo is a tad confusing because of the mirror, but you can see the blue lens attached to the mirror surface with a drop of water in an unlikely way. What a relief!

Dee had a dentist appointment at 11am for a cleaning. She took the bus again. Once there, she showed them a new problem area in her mouth, and they saw one of her teeth had split. It needs to be replaced with an implant very soon, which explains the new pain she had been feeling. She has an appointment set for next Wednesday. It will be expensive, about what most people pay in the US, but the tooth is going to split in half completely, and the nerve is already complaining, so it has to be done. We do have some concern about doing it here, as opposed to in the USA (dental care in Italy historically has not always been top notch), but this guy seems to know his stuff. He is in fact a fellow and teaches this procedure here. We're grateful there is such a thing as an implant and that we're able to have it done.

My Seminary students arrived early, as usual. Donatella now has her cast removed and is walking without crutches, with just a little residual pain as her foot starts getting used again. She had arranged with Dee to bake chocolate chip cookies together, which are not well known here. Italian name: cookies.Thanks to the Hubers we have the ingredients, so they made a big batch of cookies, which didn't last long as kids were in and out during the afternoon.

 

Valentina and her aunt, Barbara, brought Dee a belated birthday present: a box of Lindt chocolates from Castroni's! We are getting to be good friends with this group. Dee really likes Barbara.

For our Seminary class, we worked on learning some of the Doctrinal Mastery scriptures. For most of the time, we played a game that helps them almost memorize a long scripture. It's one that I used back when I taught Seminary, and it's always fun and raucous -- this time was no exception! I print out the entire scripture in small lines of 5 to 10 words each and tape them to little paper plates, which are then shuffled and divided between the kids. Each kid had 2 or 3 plates. The goal is to read the scripture, in order, as fast as possible, with each kid reading the line from his/her plate. The game takes a lot of concentration, looking at the scripture in their Book of Mormon and at their plates. It's very easy to mess up, delaying the reading, which starts everyone laughing and/or chastising the offender. Fortunately, everyone messes up at some point, so it's equal opportunity correction. The first time they read Mosiah 2:41 this way, it took just under 30 seconds. Then I set a goal of 20 seconds, which they reached after maybe eight tries, leading to screams and hugs. They then had to re-shuffle the plates among themselves, so everyone has to learn their new places in the order, and we set a goal of 15 seconds. By this point, the reading is so fast as to be almost unintelligible, but everyone is pulling together. After another dozen tries, they made it in 15 seconds, and again there was an explosion of laughter and shouting. The whole time was fun and loud. I think they know the scripture fairly well now. 😀

 

Meanwhile, Dee was starting to cook her dinner for after the Institute lesson: a "breakfast" casserole with bread, cheese, eggs, and sausage. It would be very well received!

 

The class was pretty small: only seven kids in person in the classroom, with three others online. There seemed to be some other activity going on elsewhere in town, and also a few kids hung out in the hall and never came into class. We had a really good discussion of Alma 30-35, including the stories of Korihor, the Rampeumpton, and the Zoramites. I had secretly assigned one kid to give the opening prayer by reading the Zoramite/Rameumpton prayer out loud after everyone else had closed their eyes. Pretty quickly several kids started looking up and smiling. That led to a good discussion of how our prayers can become rote and repetitive, and how we can have more meaningful worship. 

My basic theme tying everything together was the need for faith. At one point, I asked how many of them had been to China. Nobody had. So I asked whether they believed China existed; yes, of course they did. Then I mentioned that I had been to China, but it was all fake: the cities were made with cardboard cutouts to take pictures for the news, and there were really only a few thousand Chinese people total, who were always staged together for photos and interviews to look like there were a lot of them. At first there were some very confused faces, but then they got the point that we all live by faith in many things. I used a quote from a General Conference talk in 1919, stating that "perfect knowledge is what the devil has", and therefore what good does that do him? FYI, gospeldoctrine.com is a wonderful resource!

Blake also showed up late, after his class ended. We knew he was coming, so we saved him a big piece of the casserole, which he went through quickly. Dancing for eight hours a day can work up an appetite!

We got home a bit late, with Dee having an early morning, but it was a very fun day.