Permesso di soggiorno!
After a long week and a late night, we each slept in a bit on Saturday morning. For us that usually means 7 to 7:30am 😀. Dee spent the entire day at home. Around 10:30am I ran over to the local police station to try to pick up my permesso di soggiorno (permit to stay), which the mission office said would probably be ready. Things were a bit disorganized and there was no signage to help, but after standing in the wrong line for a while I finally got into the right line. After that it only took about 15 minutes. I then had to produce the correct piece of paper, which again wasn't clear, but the lady was quite nice and helpful, and finally I got my document. Dee will have to come in separately to get hers, as they need a fingerprint scan. The permesso looks like a driver's license, and the expiration date was 01.12.2019. At first I was bummed, thinking that meant that it would expire in Jan 2019, a couple of months before we came home, so we'd have to go through all this again. Then it dawned on me that the date was in European format, meaning Dec 1, 2019, so we actually got a full two-year permit from the date of our original fingerprint appointment. Nice.
I worked on my Sunday School lesson for a good while in the afternoon. With FHE on Monday, I'll have taught five lessons in one week, which is a bit much even for me, but teaching is always fun. Next week is very busy, as you will see, but all with good stuff.
In the evening, Anziano Balzotti and I went together to the Stake Priesthood meeting at the Rome 2 chapel, which is fairly close. Parking is always a challenge there -- we had to walk a few blocks after finding a spot. It was a good meeting, with some excellent talks on building strong spiritual roots, being self-reliant, doing missionary work, and forgiveness. That last talk was given by President Rondinelli, who showed a video with an incredible true story about a man who forgave the young drunk driver who killed his wife and two of his children. President Rondinelli opened it up for discussion, which went well. It is worth noting how different the culture is here. In the US, most such comments from a congregation would be 15-30 seconds each, maybe a minute at the very most. Here, comments are often 3-5 minutes long. Nobody notices; that's just how it is. We Americans are much more in a hurry, which is both good and bad.
Dee made some carrot cake to bring to the Institute open house Sunday; she was busy all day with that and other preparations. I spoke with my mom, and Dee spoke with her parents. Everyone is doing fine, though there is almost always some kind of drama or entertainment in California; today was no exception -- 'nuf said.
