During my 10-minute talk in Sacrament meeting, on being bearers of light and on handing times of spiritual darkness, I mentioned that serving others was a good way to overcome difficult times. Then I said that my wife had been in the hospital for two days; I thought that Elia, the bishop's wife, was going to have a heart attack. She looked so concerned, until I explained what Dee was doing. It was a fun and effective way to make a point.
For my Sunday School lesson I read out loud the portion of the Misreading Scripture book on David, Bathsheba, and Uria. It took most of the time, so I prefaced it by saying that this was an unusual teaching approach for me, but that it would be worthwhile. It seemed that everyone was quite intrigued by the different "version" of the story. At the end we had a few minutes for some good comments. At that point it was good to have all my lessons done for the week! Ugo taught my Temple Prep class on worthiness for a temple recommend, which was a good fit for him as the recent bishop. I will teach the remainder of those lessons, while he teaches Gospel Doctrine for a few weeks.
After church, I headed downtown to the Institute for our every-so-often student council planning meeting. In person we had Ugo, the Ganziani, Francesco and me. On Zoom we had Claudia, Sheyla, and Joyce. It was done in just over an hour and was pretty productive. We got almost all our activities planned (with a couple of question marks) up until we close for August. One unfortunate decision is that we will not be going to Baobab anymore to help feed the refugees. There have been several near-violent confrontations among the refugees during recent visits, similar to what we saw, and we do not feel that it is safe for the kids. So we want to find another place to do service. Bummer.
From there I went home, arriving about 4pm, only a few minutes before Dee got there after a fairly full day at the hospital. At 6pm we had a senior couples' dinner at the mission home. Dee made a spinach salad with chicken, pecans and strawberries, and they had lots of good stuff to eat. There were two big dining tables, but only just over one table worth of people, so unfortunately it ended up with a small Italian-speaking table with the Simoncinis, Dee, and the Pickerds, and then everyone else. Elder Knies heroically sat at the Italian table, too. Had I known, I would have gone to join the Italian group. Brother Fenn had some good stories at the table I was at, to tell over dinner about the temple construction.
After dinner and dessert, the Fenns gave talks on things they had learned and seen during their 6+ years working here on the temple construction. They go home later this month. It was very similar to what they had done the week before at the Institute, but I got to hear it this time. Dee and I took turns doing live translation for the Simoncinis. We did better than I had thought; live simultaneous translation is really hard! There was about an hour of it, split roughly half and half, so we were tired afterwards, but it was fun for us and the talks were inspiring for everyone. Here is a photo of our group:
Sorella Pickerd mentioned that her Dell laptop (basically the same XPS 13 model that Dee has, one year newer) had had a problem and Microsoft Word disappeared. She brought it down for me to see. Apparently what had happened is that their disk (an SSD, only 128GB) had filled up, and somehow that messed up Office. Then they apparently tried to re-install Windows 10, which is not a good idea with the disk almost full. Anyway, I ended up taking it home. I will buy her a larger SSD, install it, and try to figure out how to get Office back. I love doing this stuff to help friends.
It's pretty late at night now, so I'll add my part separately tomorrow.