Woot, woot, out of the boot!!
Monday morning I walked down to Conad to buy a bunch of produce for myself and for upcoming meals. The weather continues gorgeous, with very little humidity; it actually rained in the afternoon and was somewhat chilly in the evening. We would sleep with blankets for the first time in a while.
In the afternoon at the Institute, I finished installing the SSD into Riccardo's desktop. It took several steps: compacting the existing drive, backing it up, restoring to the SSD, merging the old two volumes on the hard drive into one for simplicity. Dee had to help me insert the very tiny screw for the M.2 form factor SSD, in the very tight space. Anyway, it was good to get that done, and booting now takes much less time. Riccardo wasn't home in the evening for us to deliver it, so that will happen Tuesday evening.
I also did a bunch of stuff on the old ward computer, installing 32-bit Windows 10 as an upgrade from 32-bit Windows 7, then realizing that I wanted to get the 64-bit version because more memory is available. So that will require some research to see if it is even possible. I may also quietly spring for a small $40 SSD to make the computer pretty fast.
Dee received a new ankle brace from Amazon. She is ready to graduate from the boot, but the brace the doctor gave her is extremely uncomfortable and doesn't work with her shoes. The new one feels much better and allows her to walk in her tennis shoes without crutches, while limiting her ankle movement appropriately. This is a very nice bit of progress.
My wife's dad is having some health issues, including bad back pain, exacerbated by not being able to remember what has happened or why, so the story changes regularly. There were a bunch of phone calls trying to figure out how to help out her folks, but he really doesn't know what he wants nor how to ask for help, which makes it all very frustrating.
A couple of Americans dropped by the Institute, and one of them knew Anziano Wijesundera. They had been friends at church in California. When she walked in, they looked at each other, amazed, and he gave her a quick hug, then backed off, realizing that he isn't supposed to do that as a missionary. It was a very understandable reaction but gave us all a big laugh. I kidded him that the President would have to transfer him after that transgression, but of course that was probably already set to happen anyway.
I gave my FHE lesson on miracles, using a talk by Elder Hallstrom from last October. We had a good discussion with the group, sharing ideas and experiences, including why sometimes miracles happen and why sometimes they don't. Noelle, our wonderful American girl, was there. After the lesson, we devoured Dee's snickerdoodle cookies (a batch made with oil and one with butter, couldn't tell them apart) and played a great game of Cover Your Assets. Dee doesn't play much, but her observation from the other room was how loud we were all laughing together.
About 8:30pm, the transfer call came through. As expected, Anziano W is getting transferred, to Siracusa in Sicily, to be the district leader there. Amazingly, Rome is the furthest south he has served on his mission thus far, so he is excited to get to see Sicily. Sorella Johnson below us is going to Siracusa also, and our Rome 3 district has each companionship affected as well. Change is a constant here. We will miss these wonderful young missionaries, but we always enjoy the new ones too. Something about them being willing to serve, wherever and however they are asked, makes them very impressive kids. The Anziani in Rome 3 jokingly asked if we were getting transferred, and Dee in kind quipped that she was going to Malta (not me, just her). Our DL's response caused us to laugh hard: "we will warn the DL in Malta to arrive on time to district meeting" -- my wife has kidded him constantly about being late. There was a bunch of WhatsApp messaging going all around about the transfers and changes. We got to bed kinda late.
