A cappella

At church on Sunday, six of us missionaries in our ward sang a hymn, "Sweet Hour of Prayer", in Sacrament meeting. We have two sopranos, one alto (Dee), one awesome tenor, and two basses (including me). We ended up doing it a cappella, because all the accompanists in the ward (other than two of the missionaries in our group) were not available for practice. Doing it that way was not our first preference, but we nailed it four times in a row during practice, so we felt confident. Unfortunately, during the actual performance, we got off key in the first verse and sounded pretty bad for a while, before getting it together on the second verse. Oh well. As I often say, in the church you get what you pay for. We wanted to sing this Sunday because odds are somebody will get transferred out this coming week, and there is a lot of musical talent in our district right now. Here is a photo of our awesome (?) group.

Anziani Stucki, Jensen, Whiting ; Sorelle Nelson, Maxfield Whiting

I taught Sunday School on Saul and David; not quite sure that the lesson went as I had hoped, but there was some good participation. Dee taught Primary, because the Primary president is out of town, and then she taught a Relief Society lesson on ministering. For Primary, she had some fun games and moved the (very rambunctious) kids into a different room where she could control them better. Apparently she was able to manage them much better than usual, and they had fun. In her RS lesson, she wanted to show a brief video, so we borrowed the very old projector from the Institute, which we hadn't used to date. It has both an HDMI and a VGA input, but only the VGA port works; fortunately we have an adapter for our laptops, which do not have native VGA ports. The problem was that she forgot her USB speakers, so we borrowed some external speakers from the old desktop in the clerk's office. I was able to get them to output sound from her laptop before class, but unfortunately the video player (VLC) seemed to be trying to output sound to the wrong device. The RS Presidency decided to call me in right in the middle of the lesson, and after the first two attempts failed, I gave up. It is always hard to solve tech problems on the fly in front of an audience. Fortunately they came up with an ingenious solution: one of the sisters streamed the same video on her phone, and hooked it up to the speakers, thus providing the audio for what was being projected on the wall. I called her Sister Angel for saving the presentation!

As far as Primary, I taught the 4-7 year olds. There were six of them this week, including a new girl. They are used to coming into class and playing with no regard for the efforts of the teacher. They were surprised and happy to see I had something for them to do right away. I made it very concrete, with things to touch and do, and I think it made a big difference. The downer was that someone gave a puzzle to Jasmine, age 5, just before class, which distracted her and others. But mostly they were intrigued by all the interaction I had planned. I was up until 12:30 am finishing the two lessons, but it was worth it.

The bishopric had a couple of requests for us. The first was for us to teach the temple prep class for three ward members who hope to go to the temple in Switzerland in August on the bus with the ward to take out their endowments. We are happy to help out, and that will also allow President Pickerd  to get permission for us to go, since we are helping somebody. The class will hopefully start next Sunday (because I don't have enough lessons to prepare already 😂). If you know me, you know how much I enjoy gospel teaching, so this is actually a blessing for me. 

The second request was for me to take the old (7+ years) desktop computer from the clerk's office, wipe it out, and reinstall Windows. That way they hope to use it for indexing on FamilySearch. It will always be a bit slow, but clearing out years of gunk is always a good thing. It is the same Dell model as the old desktop we had at the Institute (apparently that was the church standard model at the time), so I know how it works, and it is definitely usable. The real problem is the very slow internet connection there, but I am happy to use some of my know-how to help out. We brought it home from church, along with the monitor, and on the way we also stopped at Riccardo's home to pick up his desktop so I can finish installing my old 128GB SSD. He was able to get his C drive down to about 100GB, so it should fit.

In the afternoon, I finished making online reservations for Wes and Alyssa's visit. This is much later than I usually do trip planning, so options are fewer and a bit more expensive, but I think the itinerary we have in place should work well. We are looking forward to seeing him and meeting her. I had to call once to ask a few questions about timing for trains, etc., and it was good to get all that resolved.

Dee and I sat down and went over the calendar for the coming week. It seems like there will be a little more free time in the mornings, which will be nice. We went for a walk around the block in the late afternoon, without Dee needing a crutch, just her boot. The weather has been perfect, not too hot or humid, with a nice breeze. It is light until very late these days, and we are trying to enjoy the nice weather as long as it lasts.