Arrivederci, Karen and Dave

Wednesday morning I left at 8:30am to take Karen and Dave to airport, on their way back to London and then home on Thursday. Dee didn't come along, since our small car was full of suitcases. It also gave her some welcome time at home. I used the time to start some laundry. Traffic was fairly light, especially for that time of day, and I made it back home by just after 10am. They arrived without incident in London.

The rest of the morning was spent at home. Dee was feeling tired with a headache, which would last until the afternoon. Having been there many times myself, I felt for her. We left for the Institute at the regular time. Arriving there, the street was almost blocked by huge RAI (Italian state TV) trucks, I assume for an opera performance (the opera house is literally across the street from us). All parking was removed from the other side of the street, but I had to cut very sharply to get into our tiny driveway entrance and ended up scraping the left front bumper on the wall. Bummer. It is  however not the only scrape on our poor car here. In the US I don't think I have ever scraped anything, always driving a larger car, but here we regularly get dings and scrapes. It is not clear whether we will have pay to get them fixed when we go home, but I kinda expect so. Then, once we got inside the courtyard to park, there were some workman, with a car pulled out to give them room. That car blocked our entrance, so we had to wait just a few minutes for them to finish and then Dee walked over to the cafe to ask them to move their car back into place.

The rest of the day was calm. Pam, our friend from American (we now call her PanAm), came by for me to help her with a laptop problem. The battery, or perhaps the connection to the battery, is not working, so when you pull the AC charging cord out it shuts down. The good news is that it is still under HP warranty, and the problem is easily repeatable so it should be simple to diagnose and fix.  I am interested to see how HP handles the service here in a different country from where the computer was purchased.  While she was here, I did a backup of her computer. She inadvertently left her coat and USB thumb drive, so she will be back!

Dee had a fun time making little "googly eyes" from meringue and chocolate chips, which will be used for our Halloween event next week. She is amazing at finding recipes on the internet which can be made with ingredients here. 

 

 

Dee and I talked through details of our daughter Chiara's visit over the Christmas holidays. After doing some checking, it looked like the hotels were going fast, and the trains were also filling up, meaning that the cheap tickets were almost gone. So I reserved us rooms in a hotel in Florence -- the same one that Karen and Marilyn enjoyed -- and bought some train tickets. The mission president obtained permission from the Area Presidency for us to go outside our mission boundaries during her visit, and we are very grateful. Due to the holidays, some places will be closed on different days, but we have a nice trip planned out with her while the Institute is closed.

It was our normal light Wednesday, with no kids showing up until the evening activity, doing PR at the local university (Sapienza, the largest in Italy) for our free English classes. Only a couple of kids showed up for that, so it was basically an easy day for us. Things are definitely calming down, at least for a while, after an extended period of being really busy.

Ivan, a 20-ish GANS from Milan who is friends with a few of our kids here and who has been traveling all over (Latvia, Russia, Turkey, Jerusalem, Athens, and Malta) for the last month, showed up and spent the evening with us. He has had some real tough trials in his life in recent years, and we visited with him and tried to give him some counsel. He asked me for a blessing right before we closed up for the night, and I was happy to oblige. We hope that he can figure out a good path to follow.

I worked on my Relief Society lesson on personal scripture study, and also started to add to the six days of blog that I missed. I was just too tired to do it.