I love photgraphing little vignettes such as these around my house because it doesn't take long to spit and polish something with such a small amount of square footage.
For those of you wondering about the term “missionaries”, they’re the guys who ride around town on a bike wearing white shirts, suits and ties. They give up two years of their life to preach their religion—and somebody has to feed them.
That somebody is not I.
Oh, I try, I really do try! But something always happens to put a kibosh on the whole deal. Being that I am a bad (read: stinky) cook, I suspect a message has gone out into the universe (or the mission office) that dinner at the Ashworth’s is a no-can-do.
Take tonight for example—they should have been just now walking out the door after a meal here at our house, but no! Blame it on church. There you are in a nice dress and heels, full of the spirit and wanting to do right. So, I signed up (it’s girl’s camp this week and all the good cooks are in the boonies with the young women so I relented, knowing full well, deep within the recesses of my soul that somehow it would all go wrong). Nevertheless, I mustered the troops. I put my husband, who, as a school teacher feels he shouldn’t have to do much during his vacation (when do I get one? Yah, right), my son (the large one with major coordination problems) and my little guy (read: too short to be of much help) to work cleaning the house. Since we don’t really cook around here, we decided to use the Olive Garden gift card my sweet and thoughtful sister-in-law sent us for our anniversary to get a lasagna which had to be ordered 24 hours ahead of time. That done, we started in on all the laundry that had been piling up and smelling up the joint.
I got up this morning sore in every muscle in my body (I’m not kidding, even the soles of my feet were done in) but the house was looking good. There was still more laundry to do, windows and dishes to wash and the lasagna to pick up which promised to be a real pain since the nearest Olive Garden is about 20 miles away. But first we needed to call the missionaries to make sure they knew what time to come, a precaution learned, to our deep sorrow, from previous experience. The number we had, the one in the ward directory which is supposed to work (gol-dang-it!) proved to be disconnected. So, we called our neighbor who regularly feeds an entire district of missionaries on a pittance of food (and yet they still come) and asked for the correct number. “Oh!” she said, “they’re coming to my house tonight but now that you mention it, I remember that you told me they were supposed to go to your house. I will call them and find out what’s going on.” So, she called. And you know what? They weren’t coming to our house. They weren’t coming to her house. They were going to the house of someone else in the ward, someone who no doubt served delicious food and plenty of it.
Now, this is just one example of how things go skewy when we invite the missionaries over for dinner. There are other reasons, other things that go wrong, other forms of torture—see below for a semi-complete list of bad karma or just plain excuses:
Ant attack, bad back, son’s whacked, that’s a fact.
Can’t cook, restaurants booked, we’re broke, no joke.
We care! Not fair! Folding chairs in disrepair.
Toilet floods, sore bicuspids
Wait a sec, not done, did I mention crazy son?
Got lost, home late, not a single clean plate,
Oven cold, fridge has mold
I think this song is gettin’ old
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