Bad News, Good News or Vice Versa

 I feel like a failure.

Do you ever have days when you feel like you can't do anything right? That your best just isn't quite enough? 

That was today for me.

I spent a good portion of the day putting together a really lovely PowerPoint presentation for the Pathway class. Once again, it contained my lesson....seamlessly moving me from one good question, and one good point to another.

At 6:50, I closed down all open windows so that the Zoom and the PowerPoint would work as well as possible. I had exactly 40 minutes before class would begin. Too late, I realized that I had closed down PowerPoint and had mistakenly clicked on "don't save."

I frantically opened it back up but it was gone....completely utterly disappeared into the stratosphere. I worked at it for quite awhile, checking on Google how to recover it, but there was nothing to recover. It was just plain gone. For about two minutes I stared at the screen in despair, trying to figure out how to slap another presentation together in ten minutes. It couldn't be done. I had pieced quotes together - positioned them on the screen - searched for suitable images to illustrate - and gone through several iterations of each slide.

I seriously considered just quitting. Texting Herve in Paris to say, "I'm done." - for about 5 seconds. I decided that I had better face the music. I had 14 pages of notes typed up, not in any kind of order. I had them in front of me, but honestly, when your face is front and center on the screen, it's kind of awkward to keep looking down at all your notes.

There were excellent discussions from the people who participate. Really beautiful. But I was a disorganized flop of a teacher, and I think next week's lesson will signal the end of my teaching career. I just pray that the class members will not remember me as the fumbling stumbling old lady who taught their Institute Pathway class. Mercifully, they will not remember me at all....that is the way it goes.

The lesson was on the Second Coming and the Millennium....kind of bad news good news. Looking at the news these days, it is all bad news.

We took a break in the middle of the day to walk a mile to see Kristina and Cameron. They wanted to meet us for lunch. She is back in town, and they will marry on Friday, go on a honeymoon and then move up north. They gave us a cute little gift from her home in the Isle of Man, an independent little island  between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

She said they might be back in August and we can perhaps see them again. We had an hour with them and it was so lovely. They are so cute. Both are very reserved, very British, and afterward I hugged them both...not something they normally do. So I've been berating myself about that. I wished I had paid for their bill when I paid for ours....it was a little awkward, but I should have done that. Another thing that I've been feeling bad about.

And I didn't take a picture!

I'm going to put this day to bed.

Oh...before that....the good news:  The elders spent an hour and a half today with Matt. They taught him about the Restoration. He loved the Joseph Smith story and was going to go home and read it again, and watch the film online. He installed the church app, and is reading The Book of Mormon.