Already by 6am, her noon flight was announced with a three-hour delay. Delta re-booked her connection at JFK so she would get the last flight out that night to LAX. I slept pretty well for the first time in a long while, having used no cold meds. With the delay, I had time to walk down to Conad and get some food, since it would be tight getting to Institute on the back end. We still left plenty early, with Dee willing to wait a few hours extra at the airport to accommodate our schedule, and there was no traffic either way. With my horrible cold, Dee and I had not even so much as held hands the whole time she was back here -- she really didn't want to get what I had, and I don't blame her! But we gave each other a brief hug as she left.
The Balzottis now know the drill at the campus and were all over the daily setup steps. We planned the week a little bit, then did an inventory of stuff we would need to buy at Metro for our "training" run there on Wednesday, showing them how to get from there to the Institute and pointing out where all the critical food items are located in the massive store.
By early afternoon, Dee's flight had been delayed another few hours due to engine trouble, apparently installing a replacement part. So she would be at the airport for a long time. At one point they apparently then taxied out to the runway, but something wasn't right, so they pulled back into the gate. Her flight would eventually depart seven hours late, with her snoozing as she could in the airport. Having tech to communicate in these situations is a real boon, and she would end up with WhatsApp connectivity on the flight to New York, so we knew what was happening, though not how or if (unlikely) she would get home that day.
My final home evening lesson was fun, with a full crowd. Sorella Balzotti picked the quote from our book, doing a very fine job in Italian, thank you. My question of the week was for everyone to tell something really nice and helpful that someone had done for them once. There were some nice stories. I told about Dee's friends, right after our fire in 1996, bringing her back some mementos that she had gifted them from our trip to Russia. All her stuff had been destroyed, and they wanted her to have that memory, which was very touching for her. Anziano Rouse talked about when he was a kid, with his dad in grad school (i.e., poor), and someone anonymously gifted them a bunch of stuff to give the family a Christmas, which they wouldn't otherwise have had. They still don't know who did it. That fit right into my very brief lesson on the sermon on the mount in Matthew 6, where Jesus says to do thing without fanfare, letting God have the glory and not seeking it ourselves.
With the time zone change, I went to sleep quickly without knowing what would happen with Dee. Stay tuned.