Guest speaker Terryl Givens

Tuesday's weather was again lovely. It was so nice to have a full morning at home, which has been rare of late. Dee wore her new brace, without compression hose; progress is slow and steady.

 

My HVAC universal remote arrived, and I was able to figure out how to program it for the four units at the Institute (two different codes) and for our two bedroom units. I still need to figure it out for our ward building and for our classroom in Napoli. Then I will print up a little cheat sheet of all the codes and carry the device with me sometimes.

After some fiddling, I was able to upgrade the version of Window on the old ward desktop from 32-bit Windows 7 to 64-bit Windows 10! That is awesome because now I can use the memory from the old Institute desktop to make it into an 8GB machine, which should run much better. I always learn interesting things by working on different kinds of computers, and this will be a boon to the ward.

Taco Tuesday was fairly well attended. It is always good when all of the chairs in the room are taken by young people, so we old folks can just hang in the kitchen while they have fun being together. We're seeing a lot more of Claudia now that she has officially finished her college classes.

 

Anziano Wiggins joined us, in a threesome with the Ganziani; he was just released to work back in the field for his final transfer, after serving as an assistant to the president since early this year. He is a fun kid and a huge NASCAR fan: his zone conference presentations always included a photo of Jeff Gordon, and he wrote that name on his plastic cup. We use disposable cups, and the kids write their names on them and place them on or around the microwave. They are very light and often fall down from the breeze when somebody walks by fast. Every so often we have to thin the herd. The photo below shows a fairly small population of cups.

After lunch Dee set out some cookies for the group, which are always enjoyed here but rarely finished: Italians aren't into dessert as much as Americans are.

At 4pm I walked over to the LDS Charities Friendship Center for refugees to sing in the gospel choir. We actually aren't doing just gospel, and it is fun. Alessandro, the choir director, is very talented and loves to kid us all, particularly the missionaries, but he is very grateful for our support. We worked on a version of Greensleeves, but with older (non-Christmas) lyrics. After he came back, I went out for a walk around a few blocks. It was a joy to move around, and I am trying to rebuild  both stamina and lower body strength after the long period of forced sedentary life. Also, with Wes and Alyssa coming for a visit, I am worried about keeping up. I also did some ab work and stretching in the morning.

For Ugo's Institute class on church history, we had Terryl Givens as the online guest speaker. Dee & I know him from a Fair Mormon conference that we helped organize here in Italy back in 2015, where he and his wife spoke together. Ugo's train from Padova was running late, so I set up my computer to run the Zoom trial with Terryl and then start and record the class. Ugo arrived about 20 minutes late. Terryl is undoubtedly one of the most gifted thinkers and writers in the Mormon church today. I have read a number of his books (he has written 17 to date) and always enjoyed them. His lesson was outstanding, on the Pearl of Great Price, including its amazing strengths and addressing some of the criticisms often made. He is coming out with a new book on it, which I will definitely read.

Meanwhile, the English class was going on down the hall, with very good turnout. Dee made snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies, all of which were yummy. She tried to make enough to take some to Napoli Saturday, but we ate too many, so she will have to do another batch sometime.

I stayed out in the kitchen, making cookies and waiting for Linda Di Martino. She had said she would come by for tacos, but she never showed. Some of the GANS were more than happy to eat them, though. Also, David Perego was there and we had a fun time talking about his upcoming third-year middle school exam. They have a forty-minute oral test in front of all their teachers at once, who can ask anything they have covered in three years. He is very nervous about it. 

On the way home, we dropped off Riccardo's desktop computer with the new SSD installed. Hopefully he will be pleased with it. As always, I learned some good new techniques and was able to help somebody, so it is a win-win. As we pulled up to his place, my wife got a call from the APs (assistants to the president, two young Anziani) asking us if we could pick up a missionary flying in from Sicily at the airport at 10am Wednesday morning. The mission office is short-handed these days, which is probably why we got the call. We discussed it for a few minutes and called them back to say yes, for which they were very grateful. We had things planned for the morning, including a shopping trip to Metro, but I will go alone (to make room for his suitcases) and hit Metro on the way back, and we are happy to help.