Elders keep nasty kitchens

MAY 1, 2010 Saturday

Hurray, the flat is livable! (And we are both beat.) I started out in the kitchen. The fridge reeked every time it was opened. I had started taking food out of the pantry and tossing everything that had been opened last night. Fingerprints were on and around every light switch. Orson started by vacuuming the front room and rearranging the furniture to work for us. The elders had had a big long table right in front of the living room window. We moved it to the dining area and moved the little dining table into the spare bedroom where all the drying racks are. We don’t have a clothes dryer, so we will dry our clothes there when the weather is bad. I did a load of wash. It sure brought back memories of living on Brinker Street when I was a little girl. There I was hanging clothes on clotheslines just like we did back then before clothes dryers became common in homes.
I finished the pantry and started emptying out the fridge. There were all kinds of things with mold on them. A half inch of ice on the bottom of the freezer had trapped an old meat pie and some frozen corn. I threw away 2 unopened containers of oysters that had been there for who knows how long. Someone had given the elders a gallon ice cream container full of soup that was greasy and had some kind of green leaves floating on it in addition to the mold on the sides of the container. That was quickly flushed down the toilet. (No garbage disposal for us, no siree!)
We left to meet some elders to give them a sleeping bag and a pair of shoes that had been left in the back of the car that was given to us to drive. It is a white Toyota Camry. It even has a radio and CD player in it. I remember when missionaries didn’t have those blessings in cars. Before leaving the flat, we turned off the fridge and opened the doors so we could defrost the freezer.
We met the elders in town (which is maybe about a 20 minute drive from where we live.) Then we headed to the shopping center. Guess what? All the grocery stores are inside a mall. Each mall has either a K-mart or Target in it. You cannot enter those stores from the outside; you have to go in through the mall to get to them. It’s a great way to keep the malls viable but a real pain for shoppers who don’t want to deal with mall shopping. Some malls are really big, and others are smaller. We live near a small one, and there is a huge one a little farther away in the opposite direction. We bought a few things at Target and then headed to Coles, the grocery store. (Target didn’t carry hair products or cleaning or laundry items, but Coles did.) We’d been warned about the sticker shock in the grocery store. We paid $295 for groceries that would have run about $150 at home. Ouch!
After we got back home, we finished up some of the cleaning, had dinner, played Michigan Rummy for an hour to keep Orson awake so he wouldn’t go to bed too early and then wake up at 11 pm. He beat me again. I got the fridge reorganized and clean and then washed the worst of the fingerprints off the wall. It looks so much better in here! It feels good to be here now in spite of the olive green love seat, and one pink and one brown overstuffed chair. Also, we have 2 round end tables each covered with a square of burgundy & tan striped material. Color coordination evidently isn’t of much importance in missionary flats. We did get matching sheets and pillowcases though, so everything is good. We were both really, really tired so going to bed felt very good.