Temple dedication announced!!

Thursday was a big day for Mormons in Italy: the church announced official dates for the temple open house (Jan 28 - Feb 16, 2019) and dedication (Mar 10-17, 2019).  The press release apparently went out in the mid to late morning here, middle of the night SLC time, which was nice in that the Italians got to learn about it here first, not from calls or messages from the US. I saw it on a WhatsApp group and got to tell my wife, then had the fun of calling a number of our young missionaries pairs to break the news to them. There was a huge flurry of excited messages on several of our WhatsApp groups. Everyone was so excited, Italians and missionaries alike! The great part for us two is that we will still be here for the dedication, just barely. We knew about the announcement before we finally posted the blog entry for Wednesday, but we decided to keep that news out of Wednesday's post since it actually happened on Thursday.

The temple completion has been a long time coming, and the temple workers were under strict orders not to ever talk about schedule, including at our dinner last Sunday night. Rumors have been flying for years about why it took so long with little basis in fact, but those of us who know and love Italy are not surprised -- things just take a long time to get completed here. I told people many years ago not to hold their breath.

The weather is great now, with spring in full force. High temps are in the mid-60s, and lows above 50 degrees (we have converted to Celsius ourselves, so that would be 10-20C :-) It might rain a bit in coming days, and it is certainly possible that we will still get a bit of cold, but it is so nice to be outside without a heavy jacket after months of winter. Ugo said that this winter has been unusually long and strong. In a few months we'll be complaining about how hot it is here!

In the morning I walked down to Conad to get some fresh fruit for me, plus a bunch of (heavy) stuff for Dee to experiment with different enchilada dishes for the Friday night dinner. She spent most of the afternoon and evening trying different things, several of which didn't turn out to her standards, but several of us loved trying and eating it all anyway! Dee writes: I thought I would have some time to study and prep for next week's family history class, but I spent the whole day in the kitchen. I enjoy it, which is a good thing!

I spent the entire afternoon working on my lessons for Friday (and letting people know about the temple 😀). Thursday is our light day, and this was no exception. We had almost nobody there until late afternoon, and then a small handful of people for English class, all of whom enjoyed taste testing Dee's culinary experiments.

A minor question came up about the small consulting job I finished for my former employer before leaving on our mission. I was able to make a call or two and get the issue explained and taken care of.

My experiment with the Italian keyboard is going ok. It definitely is taking some getting used to. I used my US physical laptop keyboard all day at the Institute, but of course with the Italian layout enabled I couldn't always see what I was typing. Still, it was nice to have the accented characters available (àèéìòù). My replacement laptop keyboard in Italian is on its way from China, so this practice time will make the transition easier.