After that we skipped lunch, snacking in our room so that we could work on the PowerPoint slides for our afternoon workshop talks. At the last minute, they threw in a 2pm meeting (or at least we hadn't heard about it before) to prepare for the evening activity. I went, while Dee stayed to work on her talk. Things keep changing a bit: everything is done last minute here, but we roll with it.
At 3pm we each gave a one-hour talk/workshop. Mine was on "Preserving and Protecting Digital Data," discussing backup and online security. There were only three guys in my class when I started, and then Anziano Smith (a senior missionary from Palermo) came in to tell me that there were some more kids who wanted to hear my talk but were upstairs in the wrong room. Apparently, not only did they initially publish the wrong title for my talk, they also listed the wrong room 😬. Anyway, three more guys showed up, so I started over, only a few minutes into my presentation. It went pretty well, with a lot of interest in my topic and some good questions. Ok, it was rather geeky, but they thought it worthwhile. My talk ended in about 45 minutes. Fortunately I had a VGA adapter cable for my computer, because the HDMI port on the projector didn't work. It pays to be a geek.
Dee gave her presentation on family history up in a third-floor room. She has a bunch of good material from past years, which she updated and organized. Her class had about a dozen kids, taking up the entire hour. She said that a couple of kids nodded off (not surprising after lunch) but that most of them seemed quite engaged.
After my presentation, I took a short nap because we knew the evening would go late. After dinner, where we got to visit with some very nice kids, there was a program which told the story of the plan of salvation, entitled "Our Marvelous Return Home". The kids were broken up into seven groups which went from room to room to hear 8-minute presentations on various topics. Dee and I were dressed in white, using some clothes we bought at the temple a week ago. We had only two minutes, talking about the power of covenants. I told a story about taking the Giustos to the Swiss temple to be sealed as a young couple at the end of my mission in 1977, and how the covenants they made helped them remain faithful and overcome obstacles. I started by saying that, when I served my young mission, in two years I got just one kiss from a girl, but that it was ok! Dee at that point pulled me down and gave me a smack on the cheek, and I said "not her!" I then told how Angela Giusto kissed my cheek in the temple sealing room after they finished making their eternal covenants there. Then Dee gave them little symbols of covenants, two pieces of cord tied together. We did it seven times over a couple of hours. The whole program lasted until 11pm.
