Coniato vs. cognato

Tuesday morning found Dee finally back in bed after sleeping on couch much of the night. Her dad's doctor called her after 2am here, but it rang once and then went to voice mail. It is frustrating not to be able to get answers to some questions. Apparently her dad will be released from the hospital to a skilled nursing facility in the next day or two, where we hope he can regain some strength.

We left early for Institute, stopping at Lidl on the way to get food for a Wednesday night activity. Unfortunately, we didn't find all the ingredients, so we will need another run to a market. Taco Tuesday had a medium turnout, but with two new nonmember kids whom we haven't seen before, Andrea and Naomi. They ended up staying all day, playing games and visiting and then attending the evening's English class. 

As we were about to have the blessing on the food for lunch, with newly baptized Andrea (a different Andrea) there, Dee tried to be clever and say that he was the newly minted member, using the word zeccato (zecca is the word for a coin mint). Anziano Castro piped up, saying that the word she needed was probably coniato, which means newly minted or forged. Then Sammy jumped in with a clever play on words, that cognato (which means brother-in-law but has almost the same pronunciation as coniato) means when he would marry Anziano Castro's sister. It brought down the house. Anziano Castro yelled "nooooo!" and jokingly picked up a knife to threaten Sammy. We all laughed hard for quite a while.

After lunch, I drove up to the mission office to have a meeting with someone from the church offices in Frankfurt who helps manage cell phone contracts for all the missions in Europe. Anziani Thacker and Willey were in the meeting, as well as President Pickerd on speakerphone for a while. We are paying far too much; apparently our current carrier is not living up the pricing agreed on in the contract, but they make it very difficult to understand (and thus address) the details. Anyway, we had a good discussion about how to proceed and try to save more money. It seems clear to me that we should make a number of changes right away, but things seem to move slowly here.

Grace came by the campus to make tiramisu for the Wednesday evening activity. It was done Mormon-style: delicious orzo-soaked savoiardi cookies (no coffee) with Nutella added. She made a double batch because we will also celebrate the birthday of Chiara, a friend of Franz who has been taking the missionary lessons and plans to get baptized soon.We had bought ingredients at Lidl in the morning, but not enough for the double batch, so Dee sent Andrea and Naomi out to get some more at the small local supermarket. She was afraid that it would be prohibitively expensive, but it wasn't too bad. The whole process took much of the afternoon.

Grace making tiramisu

Noemi came by just after 6pm to meet with Dee as her English partner for her Pathway class. Her English is already amazingly good, but she is always trying to make it better. For example, Noemi at one point said "in fat", but what she meant was "in fact"; it is hard to hear the difference, and the Italian equivalent is infatti, so the confusion is understandable.

In the evening, Ugo held his online class on Isaiah, while there was a big crowd of young people for the missionaries' English class. Apparently several of the nonmembers in the class started asking questions about the temple, so they spent most of the time talking about that and inviting them to the upcoming open house. There haven't been that many kids around on Tuesday evening for a while, and it was great to have so much energy filling the place. We love our assignment here! Simone was there for Ugo's class, and he said that we are his favorite senior couple ever. It is dawning on people that our time is short, and we are all sad.

When we got home, I did a few things to help prepare for our return. First, I had our names added to our son Rich's auto insurance policy so that, once we get home, we can drive my Camry; we transferred the title to him before leaving. It actually lowered his premium a little bit! We will get our own policy soon after arriving, but this buys us some time at first when we will be very busy. I also spoke at some length with Verizon and finally had them activate an old SIM card on Dee's US phone, even though it can't be used until we have access to a Verizon tower. Having spent all the time on the phone getting to somebody who could help me with that unusual request, it was worth paying an extra month or two so that we can have cell service when we get off the plane -- one less thing to take care of later.

Hoping to talk with her dad's doctor, Dee planned to sleep on the couch again, so that her phone ringing wouldn't bother me. Fortunately, the couch is comfy. We installed a different phone app (Groove IP) on her cell, hoping it would work better. She has spoken with a number of helpful people at the hospital, but still hasn't gotten all of her questions answered.