Eleven indexers

Sunday Dee woke up pretty tired, having gotten to bed late. Sacrament meeting was really good, particularly a talk by Fabrizio, my former co-teacher in Gospel Doctrine. He made some very good observations, such as "men build walls; God build bridges." This was after using a scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as a very effective parable -- gotta love that combination! During the second hour, I taught my Sunday School class on Amos and Joel, tying their prophecies into the upcoming General Conference. Almost everyone in the small class had something to contribute, which always makes class wonderful. Dee was out in the hall most of the hour working on her PowerPoint. I would have finished sooner, but a member wanted to talk to me about their family history and how hard it is to read cursive. I told him it's because he's too young. 

Third hour Dee and I gave a joint presentation on Family History and indexing, with her doing most of the talking. It is similar to presentations we have given many times in the past with our Area Family History calling, but this time it fell kinda flat. Not sure why, maybe the hour, maybe the darkened room because the projector was so dim (and out of focus), and maybe because the good joke lines fell flat. Anyway, it was ok, but not our best effort. Our stake has an indexing challenge going on, so we invited everyone to stay afterwards and do some indexing. At first it looked like everyone was going home, but then people started filing in. All in all, we had eleven people stay for almost two hours to index. It was great! Dee and I were both very busy helping and training. Sandro was awesome at reading the difficult names in cursive, and Sandra has done a lot of indexing and is really sharp, helping Jahir with the batch in Spanish (he is from Colombia). The bishop came in later and was stunned  and pleased to see so many people there. He said that they have tried before, without getting many people to come. Almost everyone brought their own computer, and two of our three also got used. Six of the indexers were kids, which was great, and they were surprisingly good at reading handwriting. We also brought a 12-post outlet strip with a 2m cord from home, which helped a lot. The church WiFi was barely passable, so I put a couple of the laptops onto my phone running as a hotspot. Supposedly, after years, we are about to get fiber internet at the chapel, which will be a major improvement.

 

Even though it was not fast Sunday, we had both been fasting,  because the stake requested it for a brother in another ward (whom we do not know) who has serious cancer. During the indexing we both succumbed and had something to eat. When we got home, after 3pm, Dee was exhausted and went straight to bed for a brief nap, without eating lunch, which shows how tired she was! In her family, food usually trumps all 😊. I can skip sleep or food, but it's tough to do without both! I woke up after half an hour, and felt so much better. 

While she was resting, I had a good chat with the Balzottis, always really fun, and with my sister Marilyn. In the evening I went over to the Balzotti apartment to help him finish installing the new SSD I bought for him into his 2012 Macbook Pro. I had never done this before on a Mac, but YouTube is my friend. There were a few twists and turns along the way, but basically it worked fine and now runs much faster, as I had promised him. He was delighted. We also tried his new data SIM card in my 4G hotspot after I had done some research on how to configure it for a non-Vodafone SIM. That all worked great, so it was a very successful tech evening.

The Thackers arrived from the US to start working in the mission office. It has been almost exactly a year since they went home, and we have been continually grateful for what they did to set things up for us and help us for the few days of overlap. They will be living right across the piazza from us, in the Knieses' old apartment, and we are looking forward to seeing them again. I emailed him with a couple of suggestions that may be helpful, but they were understandably zonked from their flight, so we haven't seen them yet.

Dee embroidered a few more Ganziani ties, and I took one to Sorella Balzotti to give to Anziano Osmond in Sicily at his Zone Conference this week. President Pickerd will take it down, along with all the other mail.  I contacted four former Ganziani who have finished their missions, getting addresses for each one. We will ship them their ties sometime soon.

I have started asking Amazon Alexa to play gospel music on Sunday mornings. There are a number of songs by Casting Crowns that we both really like, so Dee showed me how I can get a free copy of them using a neat service called freegal, a combination of "free and legal" via the LA public library.  Very nice.

Meanwhile, back home, our four kids and two significant others gathered in South Pasadena for a lunch out with my in-laws, who were delighted to see their grandkids. Jim was able to wrangle the check away from my father-in-law, which takes some doing! We are very happy that our kids like being together and love their grandparents.

After the Saturday Relief Society activity, Silvia (counselor in Primary) asked me if I was teaching Sunday. I told her no. It turns out that Monica (the President) called her on short notice to say she couldn't be there since her mother is very ill. I was prepping for our third-hour presentation and we were going to be out late at Barbara Rondinelli's so I knew I couldn't do it. She said, "It's going to be a tragedy." I tried looking at the lesson a little, but I was already up until 12:30 and only slept five hours, so I really couldn't do anything. The lesson was on honesty, so I brought some Oreos as an object lesson she could use. The white center is being honest, even with dark things around us, like others lying or problems that we would rather cover up. It turns out another member gave an hour's notice to YW that she wasn't coming either.

Then, it turns out that Levi took the lock off the Primary cabinet last week and replaced it with another, and no one has the key. Fun times.

Jim and I had a nice long phone conversation. I don't know how he juggles everything, but he make a huge positive difference there. It was great to talk with him and we should do it more often.

There was a Temple cleanup on Saturday, and our nonmember Junior wanted to go. He's so involved and serious, taking notes in all the meetings. He goes to two wards on Sundays. He says he wants to study for a couple of years before he will consider being baptized. We'll take him as he is.

We're having an indexing activity next Wednesday. Joyce, our council  president asked on Friday if she should start publicizing it on Tuesday. I told her it would be more effective to do it every day. She looked at me quizzically and still hasn't done anything :) 

Our stake choir is starting to prep for November's stake conference. They sent us the audio and sheet music for all four songs. This turned into about 30 Whatsapp messages. Every part and piece of music is a separate message to download. Whatsapp isn't the best way to handle this kind of info, but it's what we use for everything here.