New computer on the way

Tuesday morning I woke up about 4:30am, unable to get back to sleep. I hate it when that happens. Since I was up, I sent an email to Merrill, our former FamilySearch "manager" in Salt Lake, asking for clarifications on the need to have a dedicated computer for our new Family History center. I had been hoping to use our existing computer. Given the hour (evening there), I didn't expect a response for a while, but Merrill answered right away, which is very typical of him. He brought a few of their technical people into the email thread, and the conversation would continue through the day. They were very helpful. 

Meanwhile, I started looking on eBay.it for an inexpensive computer that we might be able to use, particularly since I already have the Pickerd's old 128GB SSD, and FamilySearch would provide the license for Windows. I found a brand-new Intel NUC, which is a tiny desktop where you add your own RAM and disk, which would be perfect for this kind of thing. The list price was only 10€ -- usually these things cost hundreds of dollars! So I quickly ordered the remaining two units. The seller soon contacted me to say that the price listing had been in error, asking to cancel the deal. Bummer. It was too good to be true, but for a few minutes there I was pretty excited!

At 9am we had a conference call with Ugo and Christian, who works for the church's Facilities Maintenance group. Christian wants to come on Thursday afternoon with an architect and a builder, whom they have used before, to look over the possible new location on the first floor of the Institute building. He talked about making a deposit to hold the place if their initial assessment is positive. Finally the powers that be seem excited about getting a nice location downtown, and it sounds very promising. We were very delighted.
 At 10:45am we left for Lidl to buy things for Taco Tuesday, mainly lettuce and tomatoes. Unfortunately, those two items were not in stock. That is the problem with Lidl: they have great prices, but limited selection and sometimes the common items cannot be found. So we bought some other things we needed and then drove to Coop, another local market on the way back, where Dee went in and found the two produce items. We still arrived at the Institute in plenty of time to set everything up and prepare the tacos. There was a relatively small turnout, but not really given that it is still August here. We all had a fun time visiting and eating. Both Ugo and the Ganziani brought guacamole that they had made, a rare and wonderful treat!

 

 

At 2:30pm we had a student council meeting, mostly to plan for our fall kickoff activity on September 8. Sheyla, who is our party animal and planner, had done some good work planning and recruiting people to help. The theme will be "At the Movies", and we talked through lots of ideas for decorations and activities, with Ugo ordering some stuff from amazon.it while we talked. We also told the kids the news about the FamilySearch center and the possibility of the new Institute location, and they were pretty jazzed! Claudia is officially released, since she is moving to England to work in the missionary training center there. It was strange not to have her. Ugo gave a wonderful vision-style talk to the council members.

Dee did most of the kitchen cleanup afterward, while I did some work on my PowerPoint presentation for the YSA conference this coming week. Later I showed her what I had so far, and she came up with some great suggestions on how to improve it. She has become quite a PowerPoint expert and a terrific presenter. 

After a number of emails back and forth about the new computer for FamilySearch, they finally made us an unexpected offer we can't refuse:  a brand new Dell All-in-One computer to use for our FamilySearch efforts at the center. I had expressed to them my concern about our lack of available space at our current location, so this was a perfect response.

We stayed a bit later than we had thought, leaving at 8:30pm. We carried a bunch of stuff home for the GANS conference, such as the Wii, some card and board games, food, etc. On the way out, we stopped by the cafe downstairs to ask Signora Chirra if we could get the key to the new place on Thursday afternoon. As always, she was gracious and delightful. We had a fun visit with her and her daughter for a while.

Meanwhile, back in California, my father-in-law has been in and out of the hospital for some issues that are uncomfortable but not life threatening (at this point). Dee's cousin Lynn has been truly amazing in helping out. It is a big concern, but we feel blessed to have her and Jim there to provide some direction and sanity to a difficult situation.