Filling the cart and the car
Late Thursday morning I went over to the Benincosas, filling up car on the way after our long drive to Assisi. I helped them get their myldsmail.net emails forwarded to their personal accounts, as well as getting the Groove IP phone app on their iPhone working. Turns out that we had to put $5 credit on each of their accounts to receive incoming calls, even though they are free. The Android version of the app doesn't require that, since it has ads, but for some reason the iPhone version does require it, though there was no documentation to explain that. Another pain is that you can only add credit on Android, so I had to log into their Groove IP account on my phone, then log out and let them log in on their phone. Well, it's basically free, so maybe I can't complain, but still. At least it is working now. I also had Google try again to port their T-Mobile numbers. If/when that works, they will be all set.
In the afternoon, Dee decided that she needed to do some shopping and cooking at the Institute for our Saturday night kickoff social at which Ugo is expecting 60+ kids. That will be a lot of food, so we wanted to get started early, particularly so that she could experiment with the recipes she wants to try. We went to Lidl, but they were out of a few things. Nonetheless, with that many kids to feed we managed to basically fill the cart and the car!
On the way back, I dropped her off at Conad and the Chinese store near our house to get the things Lidl was lacking. Meanwhile, I drove up and carried the two big boxes of popcorn up to our apartment; on Friday morning we will carry it to the Rome 2 chapel nearby, where the social will be held. That freed up some space in the car for other things. After she was done, I picked her up and we went to two different Todis markets nearby looking for hot dog buns, with no luck. Actually, one market had tons of them, but they were too small for the big hot dogs we bought (144 of them!). On the way down to Institute, Dee contacted Ugo who said he would get the buns for us and bring them. Whew!
We got to the Institute just after 5pm. Briefly we chatted with Signora Chirra, who said she was expecting a response from the other party interested in the apartment downstairs. It is not sounding good for the home team -- our church facilities folks seem to have no hurry in making an offer, so we may lose the place, which would be a real shame. We sent off some messages imploring them to make contact, but I fear that there is still too much red tape going on.
After unloading a ton of stuff with me, Dee put herself to cooking. Meanwhile I did some paperwork, including writing up an itinerary for my sister Karen's visit next month. We were there until 9pm, as some of the pudding Dee tried wasn't working out well, so we brought it home after it cooled a bit.
The weather continues to be wonderful, with no need for AC at home. We still assume there will be another hot spell, so we are holding off on moving our offices back to the living room. It will be good to get back to work full time next week.
