My almost Lesson

So now that the strengthening marriage class is over we've been moved to teaching a genealogy class.  Granted, this is an area where I have little to no expertise.  But that doesn't stop me from plunging headlong into the work.  I've already identified a few people who weren't listed in the family tree before.  Anyways, I spent a ton of time and effort trying to get ready so that from a personal knowledge perspective, a technical perspective, and a what am I going to say when perspective I'll be ready to present.  I stayed up till about 1 in the morning preparing the night before.  Then I show up at the church with a backpack filled with lesson papers, a subwoofer, and a laptop along with a duffel filled with scrap books, lesson manuals, camera, satellite speakers, and photos of grandparents along with a camera tripod slung over my shoulder.  Yes, I walked to church and yes it was Fast Sunday, call me crazy.  In any case, I'm wandering around the building 15 minutes early trying to get a member of the Bishopric to tell me what the wi-fi password for the building is so I can demo the new family search website for everybody and he tells me that last minute the stake decided to interrupt our regularly scheduled classes that day so they could send in somebody to do a lesson on missionary work.  I was supposed to be informed beforehand, but the person they told to tell me about it was out of town and not checking his voice mail or something.

Fun fun fun, I love it when communication works really well.  To be fair the person who was supposed to tell me was trying to be helpful and was also hauling in his own pair of computer speakers and laptop setup just in case I didn't have anything that would work.

So I suppose you were dying to ask by this point, what was with all the tech stuff I was hauling in?  Well, this class is supposed to have access to a projector so that the way the familysearch website works can be seen by the whole class despite not having computers for everyone in the room.  But the previous teachers for the class tried to find it in the library and it wasn't there.  But telling everybody to just strain their eyes to look at my computer screen from half the way across the room wasn't going to work.  So, I was planning on having the camera on the tripod aimed at my computer screen.  The camera can be wired to display what it sees on a TV screen with standard video ports.  I then could zoom what I was looking at on my computer screen to show it in large view on the TV.  Oh, and the class included video clips from a disk that is so scratched that the church DVD player doesn't recognize it when its inserted so I was going to have to play that on the laptop as well, projected onto the TV in a similar manner as just described.  But my laptop wasn't designed to project sound to a whole classroom, so I was bringing along my altec lansing computer speakers which happen to include a sub woofer along with so that everybody could hear.

End of story my lesson is delayed for three weeks to accommodate the lesson on missionary work, stake conference, and general conference.  But I now have the wifi password, have the ward clerk ready to bring everyone's records to class so they can login to the appropriate website,  and have brought the Bishopric's attention on to the fact that I have no idea where they keep the projector hidden.  Plus my lesson is all written.