Picking up a new missionary

I added some items in green at the bottom of yesterday's entry, in case you want to read it. 

Catching up a bit, here are some photos from Zone Conference on September 7 and the Waddells with the missionaries last Sunday.

 

 

 

 

There was another insight that I really liked from Bishop Waddell's talk. I think he was quoting President Eyring, who said that he used to attend his son's basketball games. It occurred to him that, near the end of the game, he knew exactly how much time was left but he often didn't know who would win. By contrast, in the gospel looking forward to the second coming, we don't know how much time there is left, but we do know who will win.

Tuesday morning we left early to pick up a newly arriving missionary, Anziano Cagnacci, from Genova at the train station. The other new missionaries were flying into Rome from the US that morning, so I drove him and his luggage up to the temple site where they had a group photo. Dee walked into the station to meet him at the track, while I stayed parked in a temporary spot. Once they got to the car, Dee walked the few blocks over to the Institute and started preparing for Taco Tuesday. Anziano Cagnacci and I had a nice visit. He knows a sister in Genova who was a young married woman when I was there 43 years ago. He had actually started his mission here two years ago but got sick after a few months and had to go home. So now he is coming to complete the job. It is great to have native speakers as missionaries.

I got down to the Institute by about 11:30am, so we had plenty of time. In fact, my internal clock was off by an hour, so I started panicking when we weren't quite ready about 12:30pm, but in fact we still had a full hour go to! We had a good laugh about it. The group was of average size, and we rearranged the serving table so that people could work from both sides, which seemed to avoid the long lines waiting to add things to their tacos. 

Two-sided serving

 

 

Dee making some peanut butter cookies

As lunch was ending, Dee and I went in to present the Ganziani their new matching ties, with the 'G' embroidered. I'm a total beginner at embroidery, and it's nothing fancy. It was really fun! I was wearing mine already, and they were really both very touched. Ugo also got one. We will try to get the rest of them out to former Ganziani at their upcoming zone conferences. Hopefully everyone else will enjoy them as much.

Three Ganziani ties

After lunch I spent a bunch of time setting up the new Dell FamilySearch computer. The auto-configuration script didn't work, hanging and saying "please wait". Perhaps it was because I hadn't yet configured and connected the church firewall, or maybe it was because I chose Italian. Fortunately, I had done an Acronis image backup before starting Windows, so in the worst case I should be able to revert to how it came. I left it running overnight on the off chance it might complete, but I am not optimistic.

Somebody managed to really break our nice guitar at the Institute, putting it carefully back into the case without saying anything. Nobody has 'fessed up yet. Generally the kids are pretty responsible, but they are still kids.

Dee spent a lot of time on the phone talking with doctors and Pillpack.com to set up mailing pre-packaged prescriptions for her dad, who is not good anymore about taking the right pill at the right time. Her cousin Lynn, who is doing a great job, is feeling overwhelmed, in great part because her own mom (my mother-in-law's sister) just passed away a few months ago with cancer and Alzheimers. It is very hard for her to see something similar going on with her own aunt and uncle. Dee told her not to stress, that we know she is not responsible for their situation, but I don't know how much that really helps.

When we got home at night, our internet was out. We discovered it when Alexa and Google Home couldn't connect to the internet. Losing internet is always somewhat traumatic. Fortunately, we have our phones, and we can use our phone as a hotspot for our laptops; with Iliad's 40GB/month it is not much of a problem in the short term. I tried to call Vodafone about 9pm, but nobody answered. Wednesday morning we will hope for it to get fixed.