GANS dance, with lots of food

Saturday Dee went down to the Institute in the morning on the subway to work on food for the Institute fall kickoff social and dance. She has been killing herself for three days to make food for an estimated 60 people. Being half Italian, she actually planned for 80, though only 40 would show up, mostly because of some conflicts with other church events. We had cleared the date for the social with both stakes, but nobody thought to tell us it was Rome West Stake Conference that weekend, so a number of our GANS were at another meeting. 😕

Dee was there all day, and her food would be wonderful, but with a ton of leftovers. She made two full crockpots of melted cheese for nachos, to be served with the tortilla chips I had bought. We also had 120 hot dogs, with as many buns, plus ketchup and mustard. Here the buns are not pre-sliced, so that needed to be done at the last minute, while we were boiling the hot dogs. She also made chocolate pudding with whipped cream, both from scratch, to put into plastic cups, covered with crumbled Oreos and a gummy worm: they are called "dirt cups". They look intentionally gross, but taste great. We also had popcorn for dozens of people, bought pre-popped in bags, but everyone ate enough of the other items that we didn't use it.  I dropped her off at the subway stop in the morning and then stayed at home all day, being a combo housewife (dishes, ironing, emptying trash) and IT assistant. In the late afternoon I went down to the Institute to fill up the car with all her creations to take to the Rome 2 chapel, and it barely fit. When we got there, a bunch of kids helped us carry it all in from the car (after finding yet another awesome parking spot!) to the kitchen in the basement, which was very warm and humid with no ventilation. That's where we spent most of the evening.

Dee finishing the dirt cups

Nacho plates

Hot dog covered with nacho cheese

Hot dog assembly station

Kitchen staging area

Serving tables upstairs

Ugo giving a welcome address for the evening

Setting up decorations and sound system

DJs

Dirt cups are served!

Things to fit into our car to take home

The dance is underway

Hot dogs and nachos were both very popular!

On the IT front, I backed up the Simoncinis' Sony laptop, then installed the new SSD and restored the image to that. The recent BIOSes make that more challenging than it should be, so I had to learn a few quirks of the particular model to get it done. I also did my usual semi-weekly backup of all three of our laptops here, as well as upgrading Dee's copy of Acronis backup from 2016 to 2017, which handles some of our newer hardware and our network better. The tablet for Sorella Simoncini was indeed completely full, and it took me a while to figure out why. Apparently she had unknowingly downloaded a lot of videos and audios (over 2GB) on her LDS Gospel Library app. Once I found and deleted them, with there not being a good reason to keep them on the tablet, there was room to do things again. I will try to do some training with them when I give it all back. David Perego is planning to build a PC from scratch for a school project and wants me to help supervise him. I am happy to do so, and we messaged quite a bit about the very inexpensive system he is trying to build. The final Google Voice number port for the Benincosas completed sometime during the dance, so they are ready to roll; as we know from experience, it is really nice to have people from home able to call you directly on your old US number.

During the afternoon there was a flurry of messaging with our district leader, Anziano Mayer, who was trying to reschedule our district meeting (now called District Council, which is a good name for what we do). It took us about three tries, because I had forgotten about Dee having a dentist appointment Wednesday morning. Finally we ended up back where we started, at the normal 10am time on Thursday. However, in future weeks we will probably do it on Wednesdays.

We were quite pleased with the dance. There were a bunch of kids from all over, including some investigators, and everyone had a great time, including us, although we were both pretty tired. I must have made 20 trips up the stairs from the kitchen with food, but plenty of other folks helped too. Dee's food was really popular; even I had way too much to eat. As noted, we had a bunch of leftovers, which we will use for upcoming events at the Institute. She said that next time she will recruit more help in preparing the food -- ya think?? But she learned a lot of good stuff and enjoyed it. The woman knows how to work!

At about 9:30pm, with our job done, we packed everything up in the kitchen and had five kids help us carry it all out to the car, including stuff we had dropped off on Friday. It took us a while to pack it all in, but it fit, again just barely! The Sorelle living below us were wonderful: they came down to help us carry it all upstairs in a couple of trips. The party went on until about midnight, so we were glad to be home at a more reasonable hour. We were both completely exhausted, Dee deservedly more so than I, and we  collapsed into bed not too long after getting home.