Meanwhile, Dee taught Rhenald's Gospel Doctrine class, on King Solomon. Several people told me how much they had enjoyed her class, and Simeon (from the Philippines) told her he hoped she would teach next week. It was a rare opportunity to teach in English. I really enjoyed preparing and teaching the class. We had three Africans and three Filipinos along with one missionary. Chris, a new member, showed up in a white shirt and tie and was loving his new look. I'm teaching their class again next week. I really appreciate her doing that so that Rhenald could attend my class. After church, Rhenald said that he would be happy to put on a Nigerian food evening at the Institute sometime, which should be fun.
After church was over, we stayed around for over two hours. First, there was the monthly Relief Society birthday refreshments and singing. Then, we had a scheduled Family History hands-on workshop. Dee and I brought our three laptops, and Monica, an expert family history consultant in the ward, brought hers. I got to help Jenna Perego, using her laptop, so we had plenty of computers. She is very sharp, running Linux on her laptop (my kind of woman! :), and she quickly picked up on the descendancy research method that I showed her. She was so excited to find an actual name for temple work during the hour we had together, and later she spent hours on her own finding even more relatives. She said she needed to do it before her father woke up in the USA and snatched it himself. I also got to show descendancy research to Monica and she loved it.
After that we had a GANS council meeting via Zoom, with Ugo at home, we and Joyce at Roma 3, Francesco at home, and Sheyla calling in from somewhere. It was fairly brief as such meetings go, but we set some dates for September activities, now that the August break is upon us. All of this computer work (i.e., family history, Zoom) was done using Dee's 50GB data plan, using her cell phone as a hot spot. The DSL internet at church is still horrible, so it was nice to have a decent connection; wireless data speeds here are typically amazing (tens of Mbits/sec).
From there we went to the Roma 3 Anziani apartment, not far from church, to do our first apartment inspection. No serious issues were found, though they need a few new light bulbs which we will bring to them on Thursday. We were able to find a parking spot right next to their apartment building -- summer vacations have turned parking into an easy job these days! Here is Anziano Jensen in a nice apron sent to him by his mom. He is holding a bottle of Inka Cola, which is a Peruvian drink and has the flavor of bubblegum. He bought it for Peruvian independence day. You should see how holey his socks are! And he graciously invited us to have lunch with them. He had made some really nice pasta and a cake. We had a taste of pasta, but didn't eat the whole meal with them. They also have an interesting bookshelf constructed out of cardboard on their desk, done by some prior missionary living there:
I tried a brand new 128GB SD card in my phone, but it seems not to work. In theory, my phone supports cards that size, but in practice there seems to be a problem once the actual used space goes over 64GB. On the Motorola forums, a few people had experienced problems with 128GB cards, so I posted a description of my symptoms to see if anybody understands the issue. Meanwhile, for now I am back to using a 64GB card, without putting all my music (about 20GB) and other docs (about 10GB) on it. That is, I am now using it only for photos, which still fit just fine.
In the evening we went over to the Knieses. Their Macbook Air laptops have not been able to connect to their modem/router for a while. My phone and PC connected just fine there, so I am not sure what the problem is. We had a really enjoyable visit while I was debugging. They are just awesome folks and lots of fun. My suspicion is that the modem/router is a poor router and maybe only marginally compatible with Macs (strange as that may seem), so I suggested that they buy a cheap separate router and connect it "in front" of the modem, thus bypassing the modem/router's apparently incompatible WiFi. Finally we had Sorella Knies come over to our place to try connecting to the cheap extra router we use to give internet access to the Sorelle beneath us. That worked fine, but when I carried that router back to their place it didn't work, so I was puzzled. By then it was getting late and I had a call to take, so we will try again in the next day or two.
Meanwhile, Sheri, a friend from Redding in northern California, called. She and her husband Scott got evacuated from their home this past week due to the local wildfire. They just got back home and all is well for them, but several members of their ward lost homes. Sheri is the ward Relief Society (the church's womans' organization) president, so she will help coordinate assistance to the families affected. After hearing of their situation, I had offered our help in giving her some suggestions and insights from having going through losing a home to wildfire way back in 1996. She called while I was at the Knieses, so I called her back after we got home. We chatted for maybe half an hour, with Dee contributing some good thoughts too. Sheri seemed grateful for the input, which hopefully might help someone going through this now.
I phoned Sister Feil. They're a new senior couple stationed in Perugia, and she's going through the shock of Italian shopping. It will be fun to get to know them. They have three singles in their little group (not even big enough to be a branch), so we're going to try to incorporate them into some of our Rome activities.
I have been able to buy cilantro plants recently that I use for salsa. Since our little organic market is closing for August, I bought a second one. It's so hot in our apartment then they wither quickly. I hope they make it to Taco Tuesday.