Dee writes: The dentist is quite good, and as I've said before, he speaks Italian, French and English. When he speaks English, it's clear that he's thinking in Italian and translating on the fly. For example, he told me something was going to be a strict fit. He meant tight fit, but the word in Italian is stretto, which means tight and also strict. Missionaries do this cross-language melding all the time, often intentionally for the fun of it. For example, in English you say "pay attention". In Italian, it's dare attenzione, which is "give attention", so Anziano Wright likes to say pagare attenzione to directly translate as "pay attention" from English.
I spent a bunch of time on lesson prep for Friday, plus some Facebook and blog updates. Of course, there is always a lot of WhatsApp traffic for our various Institute groups.
My lesson on Friday will be on 3 Nephi 1-9, including the new star appearing in America at the time of Christ's birth, as prophesied by Samuel the Lamanite. I had hoped to have someone here perform "Star Bright" using my Italian translation, but there wasn't enough time to prepare. So I found a performance of it in Spanish on YouTube, downloaded it, and learned how to insert subtitles -- in this case both the English and my Italian lyrics. I really enjoy learning a new tech tool to add to my repertoire. The video came out quite well, so I will play it during my lesson. You can watch it here (no autoplay -- you have to press the play button), which is possibly violating several copyright laws! 😀
I am also starting a fun project: building a new desktop computer from scratch for the Institute office desk. The Dell we have is seven years old -- it's fairly slow and could die any day. So I'm taking this opportunity to build a deeper friendship with a few of the young guys in our group. It's not about saving money -- we could buy one for somewhat cheaper -- but it should be fun for me and for them. Right now I'm looking at a small group with four other people, who have already responded positively to the idea. We'll have a first meeting sometime soon to go over the specs, where I can start to teach them what to look for, using amazon.it. I'll keep you posted.
Dee writes: To get to the dentist, I could take two buses, but instead I take one and walk about twenty minutes or so at the beginning. When I get off the bus, there's another twenty minutes of walking. So, for the round trip, I walk about an hour and a half. It was a beautiful day, and I enjoyed it a lot. Since my broken pinky toe is still a little tender, I wore my sandals. They have a buckled strap, so they're adjustable in all the right places. I even painted my toenails for the first time in five months. It's been way too cold to walk on these marble floors barefoot, waiting for polish to dry. I learned that I had misunderstood some murky rules about sandals, and really shouldn't wear them here. As soon as they have summer shoes in the store, I'll get something more mission appropriate. If my toe weren't swollen, I wouldn't have worn them at all. Everyone here is still wearing coats, scarves and boots, and the stores are still displaying winter wear. Anyway, I'm learning my way around, and I love to walk across the Ponte Milvio bridge.
There's an eyeglass store near the bus stop that has some really original frames like this pair, where one eye is embellished on the side and the other on the top.
