Shopping for chicken

Thursday morning we went to our district meeting. We had messaged the Anziani to help uncover and set up the stair lift for Dee, since we were running late. They too were running late, so they called Sandro, who lives nearby. He came by and opened it all up for us with a smile and no complaints. He is always giving service. Marcella also lives right across the street and dropped in to get her laptop and the files I recovered onto her external hard drive. She says that she can check the files using her son's laptop, since hers is now dead.

It was our first district meeting with Anziano Jensen as DL. It is amazing how different each DL's style is. We enjoyed his training very much. We also got to preach the gospel of backup. These young missionaries usually have only a single copy of all their photos, either on their tablet or (now) smartphone. They tend not to think about the fact that they can lose it. So I copied the photos from two of their tablets onto my laptop hard drive. I am also buying USB flash drives and cables for some of them to do a backup on their own in the future. I asked Sorella Balzotti if I could write a tech article on backup for the next issue of the Roman Forum, our digital mission newsletter which comes out once per transfer. She was delighted, so now I have to do it.

One the way in to the Institute, we stopped at the nearby Lidl and got some food for the big Sunday evening event, as well as some of their wonderful bread. It was nice for Dee to be able to enter a supermarket for the first time in more than three weeks. Dee spent much of the afternoon working on ingredients for enchiladas for Friday night. She also realized that she didn't have quite enough chicken, so she sent me out to get more. There are not many big supermarkets downtown, but there is a small Conad about a ten minute walk away, where I found a great special on two small whole chickens for only 4€. It felt good to take a walk. Dee cooked the chickens in the crock post as soon as I brought them back, so we were able to bring them home to cool down, as they got done just in time for us to leave and were too hot to put in the fridge there.

Ugo had to meet somebody at the Institute in the morning to do an annual safety review, so he stayed for the rest of the day.  It was great to get to talk with him about the Institute, plans for the rest of the year, etc. He travels so much that we don't often get to sit down and actually talk together. When we do, he tends to call us Doug and Dee:-) After all, we've known each other for more than forty years. Thursdays are generally pretty mellow, but we had a number of kids in and out, including Trevor, who talked with Dee for a couple of hours. He is packing to go home next week after living in Italy for a few years.

In the evening we had our every-so-often student council meeting, including the Ganziani. It was quite productive, planning for our upcoming activities and filling in the June calendar.