Squatters in the Basement

It doesn't matter where we live, or how big our house is or who we actually know in the area. It doesn't really matter at all. Before too long, I will have found someone who needs a place to stay for a night, or a week or a month or a year, and dragged them home to live in our basement. Some things remain constant in our lives.
Elder Tory and Elder Guitierrez were perfectly happy to be called as the new Zone Leaders of the North Zone on April 20th. They had great plans for missionary work in their zone!
Little did they know that there were literaly thousands of eager and willing companions waiting to help them in their zone leader apartment! Yes indeed, there in the apartment, tucked away neatly in the seams and inner workings of the mattresses of their beds, were thousands of BED BUGS!! The plague that is sweeping across America is alive and well in Salt Lake City Utah! Despite the most thourough cleanings, taking the offending beds to the dump and introducing what turned out to be just two new hotels for the seemingly permanent residents of the apartment, and FOUR fumigations, the bed bugs still reside in the north zone leaders' apartment! So, I invited Elder Tory and Elder Gutierrez to live in the basement of the mission home, and they did for much of the six-week transfer. They seemed like the nicest young men...

There are many advantages to living in the mission home. For example, the mission president's daughter just happens to be a hair stylist, and you can roll out of bed on P-day and wander upstairs in your pajamas to get a haircut before Sister Winn cooks you a hot breakfast.

So you would think that two seemingly nice young men would appreciate the advantages and be on their best behavior. They sort of did. For example, on Mother's Day, I found this nice note taped to my desk:

It was accompanied by what appeared to be two entire rolls of toilet paper, unrolled and stuffed into every crack and crevice of my desk. Such silly boys, to start such a thing! I returned the two rolls to them, along with some forty more.

The night before I went to Delaware for Kristi's reception, I was up all night packing, as usual. About 3:30 a.m., Elder Tory wandered upstairs for a "drink of water". When I got to Delaware and opened my suitcase, I discovered this in the bottom of it:

He had no idea who he was dealing with! Soon after I returned home, I visited the zone leader's apartment, which they had actually moved back into while I was away. I left him about 24 gallons of water in 500 cups:

The Elders very wisely agreed to a truce with me. We need to do missionary work, after all.