Being obedient missionaries, Sunday night we went to bed instead of staying up until midnight to watch the final session of conference. Wow, did we miss some good stuff! I downloaded and watched the entire session in the morning. They dramatically revamped that Home Teaching and Visiting Teaching programs, changing the name to Ministering. Here's a humorous take on it:
Then, at the very end, President Nelson announced new temples, including one in my home town: Richmond, Virginia! When I woke up Monday morning, there was a flurry of excited emails from Richmond friends. Very wonderful. All in all, it was an eventful conference weekend.
The Monday after Easter is called Pasquetta ("little Easter") and is a national holiday in Italy. So we spent most of the day at home, with the Institute closed. It was good to be able to catch up on a bunch of paperwork. Just after 9am we left here to go downtown to the Termini train station to pick up luggage from Sorella Holmes, who is going home this week. Dee writes: Since the supermarket was closed, there were almost no cars in the piazza, and Doug had a hard time finding the right way to go! We took Sister Holmes' two suitcases to the mission home, where we got to chat with the Pickerds for a few minutes. The President wanted to know how things are going at the Institute and if we need any help. We let him know how much we love what we are doing and that things seem to be going well, with a few small suggestions and requests. He chuckled at my (partially true) statement that we are serving a "culinary mission".
In the afternoon I ended up spending a lot of time trying to install the new Italian keyboard on Dee's Dell XPS 13 laptop. I had bought it from the UK on ebay.it. It arrived a couple of weeks ago and looked fine, but I hadn't had time to install it yet. Whereas replacing my Thinkpad keyboard was a pretty simple and quick procedure, not even requiring the laptop case to be opened, the Dell replacement procedure was incredibly complex, basically taking everything out of the guts of the laptop just to get to the keyboard. I had never seen a laptop like that inside. There were about a dozen components and connectors to remove, each with a different set of screws. The instructions were ok, but not perfectly clear, so it took me a while to figure stuff out. Finally, having reached the keyboard, there were thirty (30!) screws holding it in place. Sheesh! The laptop is very small and light, but there is obviously a price for that.
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| Before |
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| The keyboard exposed (can you count the 30 screws?) |
Obviously I should have checked more closely ahead of time, but who knew? So, I took it all apart and put back the original keyboard, which was slightly faster the second time around. The whole process took over 3 hours and gained nothing. I was frustrated, at both Dell and myself.
Afterwards, Dee took my Italian keyboard stickers (9€ on ebay.it) and placed them on her keycaps, reconfigured Windows to use an Italian keyboard, and was very happy. Shoulda just done that! 😥 Here is the original sheet of stickers, then the same set after she removed what she needed to convert her keyboard, then her new keyboard with stickers attached:
I have had more productive afternoons, let's just put it that way, but I always learn something new when doing computer repairs.
Ugo and I talked about what scripture class to teach after I finish the Book of Mormon on Friday nights next month. I asked if I could cover the four Gospels over the summer, and he liked it. So I am delighted and will start planning for that.