The Queen's Rambles

I’m going to skip summer camp again today. The prompt is all about food, and as much as I love to eat my food preferences are pretty boring. I could never be a proper food blogger because I eat the same things over and over again. I do have a recipe blog over HERE, but it’s more like a personal reminder blog than a real blog of any sort.

Instead, I’ll tell you about our latest adventure.

Our MOMS Club service project involves going to a church and making lunches for homeless people. We had 90 minutes and three moms budgeted to make the lunches, so I figured we would probably be making at 100 or more. Wrong! We only make 40. They usually give out around 35.

My family and another mom arrived right on schedule. We found our way into the church and located the kitchen right away. We were surprised to see a group of old ladies already making the lunches. They were quite surprised to see us, as well.

Later we found out that the lady in charge of the kitchen knew we were coming and had everything set out for us. These old ladies sometimes work the kitchen and came in on their own volition and just started putting stuff together because they were bored, I guess. Who knows.

Either way, it was fine. Our third person never showed up and I spent most of the time chasing Elsa. It would have been fine if it was just two of us, even with Elsa in the kitchen. We could have just shut the door and let her run around.

Have you ever stood by while an 80 year old woman tried to make a bunch of peanut butter sandwiches? My job was to bag the sandwiches after she made them. People. I try to be nice. I am nice. But standing there waiting for her to make a sandwich was torture. I wanted to just jump in and do it, but she was very proud of her sandwiches. She spread peanut butter on both slices of bread, then put a dollop of jelly right in the center so it would “be a surprise.” It was excruciating to watch.

We fiddled around with loading cookies and other stuff. Erik was a great little helper and got along well with a younger old lady. I did have to give her the hairy eyeball when she told Erik to only put two Oreos in each bag because “we don’t want our guests to get fat.”

I was good and didn’t say anything to an old lady who wouldn’t have a frickin’ clue why that was bad, but it was hard. I work SO HARD to get Erik not to call people fat or worry about being fat or worry about other people being fat. Then people like that (let’s face it, the majority of Americans) say something so thoughtless and leave him with a negative impression about fat people (like his very own mother).

With five of us working, the meals were done in about a half hour and we were able to leave. The old ladies wanted to sit around and gossip with us, but the other mom and I had deer in the headlights looks and managed to escape. I didn’t want to be rude, but I jerked Erik out of there so fast his head was spinning. They started talking about the Casey Anthony trial and all that jazz. It’s bad enough that I’ve had to turn off my car radio so he doesn’t hear about child skulls and a mommy who would murder her own baby. You’d think real, live people would look at the child in the room and realize that it isn’t an appropriate topic.

So there you go. I’m mostly glad they were there because it made our job really fast and easy, but they annoyed me greatly. Also, the church smelled exactly like I remember my old church smelling: musty and dank.

Our club has three more service project dates this summer. I hope other members will sign up to do it so I won’t have to go back. I don’t mind doing it, but with 28 club members we should have enough people that no one person needs to do it all. We shall see.