Saturday at home
Saturday was a much-needed down day, entirely at home for me. The only times I stepped out of the apartment were to climb the stairs in the morning and to empty the trash in the evening. I am feeling a lot better, so maybe I am finally getting over this stinking cold. In the morning I put together a new stand fan that we bought on Amazon, since our old one broke. It has been getting warm enough that we will be needing it. We have AC only in our two bedrooms, but our desks are in the living room, so this should be a big help as the summer heat comes on. Dee also bought herself a small heating unit that can also serve as a fan under her desk.
I spent a bunch of time working on my Sunday School lesson, about Balaam and the talking donkey -- should be interesting! To help prepare I watched movie excerpts on YouTube from the Italian version of Shrek where the donkey talks -- not quite Eddie Murphy, but fairly similar 😉😁. Dee was preparing for a big presentation Sunday in Primary. I also updated the Institute Facebook page and did a lot of messaging on various upcoming topics.
We have a whole bunch of ways to communicate here, and it often is a bit confusing trying to figure out which method makes the most sense for a particular conversation. Here is a list:
- phone calls within Italy using our Italian SIM cards
- phone calls to/from the US using Google Voice and Skype
- texting within Italy (we also each use a service to allow us to text via our laptop: I use Pulse, Dee uses MightyText)
- texting to/from the US using Google voice, both on our phones and on the web
- WhatsApp messaging and calls (we also use WhatsApp Web on our laptops)
- email
- Skype
- MagicJack
- Zoom
- Facebook
Each one of these methods has things that it is good at and things for which is not well suited. Each involves a phone app, a Windows program, and/or a web page. You can see that there are always a lot of places to be monitoring for incoming messages. It is a good thing that we are not afraid of tech!
In the afternoon Dee walked down to Conad to get a few food items, as well as the Chinese store to look for some supplies for her Primary presentation. In the evening, she made a large batch of luscious cookies for Primary with peanut butter and Hershey's kisses, both rare treats here.
In the evening I spent a bunch of time updating the running history for our Institute center in the months of March and April, putting in the major activities, along with a bunch of photos. It is good to do this as the year goes along rather than waiting for the end. This blog serves as my guide and reminder for what to include. It is fun to review all the things we have done, though often it makes me tired just reading about it all!
