Today is our Preparation Day. We’ve spent the morning “preparing”. That means cleaning the house, doing the laundry, doing the shopping, and anything else related. The morning started, however, with one of the sister missionary companionships coming over with their car that needed air in the tires. I have the air compressor in our garage which I use for pumping up tires, both bicycle and automobile. The mission cars all come with the tire-pressure sensors which indicate when the tire pressure is below 25 pounds. When that happens, they come over to get the tires filled with air. If they come a second time within a week or so, then the tires need to be checked, repaired, or possibly replaced.
Our house (one half of a duplex) is quite small so it doesn’t take very long to vacuum the carpet, clean the kitchen and mop the floor, and clean the bathroom and mop the floor. Nina and I switch each week as to who does the kitchen and who does the bathroom since we both do them differently and between the two of us we probably get everything clean over time. All of the inside stuff is done and all that is remaining is to wash the car.
I don’t wash the car very often. We get regular gully-washer rain showers (two so far this morning), so there needs to be another reason. That reason occurs on Friday. Zone Conference is this Friday and that’s when all of the mission cars get inspected. For us senior missionaries, the checks are mainly for maintenance purposes. For the younger missionaries, the inspections are much more rigorous. One requirement, however, is that the car be clean inside and recently washed outside. So, my next task is to wash the car and then most every needful thing for Preparation Day will be completed. We may go somewhere this afternoon for some sight-seeing!??!!
Sometime early Tuesday morning one of the sister missionary apartments was burglarized …. while they were sleeping. The thieves removed several of the louver-window slats, climbed in, opened the front door, and took off with whatever they could see. Purses, cameras, and a DVD player were taken. The purses were later located tossed into the bushes down by the seashore, minus anything of value. The sister missionaries never have very much money. They have a debit card from the Mission that gets loaded each month with their monthly stipend and they pay most everything with the debit card. A couple of them had another credit card. All of these were cancelled before anything had been charged on them. I spent much of my morning yesterday working with the landlord to get the window fixed and the locks changed. In the process I learned how to lock the louvered windows. Ours are now locked!
Two of the missionaries in that apartment are foreign sisters. While they are taking this whole thing in stride, they’ve now been rudely introduced to the American dark side. It was certainly a wake-up call!
Meanwhile, we now have two new air conditioners in our house!!!!!! They work wonderfully. They cool the air! They make almost no noise! We’ve slept two nicely cool nights. Life is grand!