This past Saturday morning, Mariel and I were planning on going to Dim Sum with Cheryl. At about 10 am, we were both woken (awoken?) by a knock at the door. I went up to the door and looked out the peephole to see who it was. I saw the distorted image of two women in black suits carrying . . . bibles? My eyes grew wide and I ran up to Mariel and whispered, "It's Jehova's Witnesses!" Imagine how a normal person might say, "It's a man with an axe carrying a severed head!" and you'll have an idea of how I said it.

Mariel looked slightly panicked and tried to get Enzo to stop bouncing around in the living room with the oh-so-loud tags jingling on his collar. Now please understand that we have nothing against Jehova's Witnesses, per se, but we were in no mood to have a long conversation about religion while in our pajamas.

We sat for a few moment, frozen, when another knock came. And a third.

"They sure are persistant, aren't they?" I observed.

"Shhhh!"

"Oh right. Jehova's Witnesses do have superhuman hearing..."

After a minute or so, I peeked out of the peephole again, and saw that they had moved on to our neighbor's apartment across the way. Mariel and I crossed our fingers that they wouldn't answer, but our hopes were dashed when I saw that one of them had opened the door. I peeked through the blinds and heard the word "converting". We were at an impasse -- how would we sneak out without making it painfully obvious that we had intentionally not answered the door?

At this point, it was getting late. We still had to take Enzo on his morning walk (he was doing the dog version of the pee pee dance), shower, and get to the Dim Sum restaurant in time to meet Cheryl.

"I hope they're actually Jehova's Witnesses, and not the Publishers Clearing House Prize Patrol," I mused.

"Hmm... It is Superbowl Weekend," Mariel said, "Did they have balloons? And a giant check?"

"No... I'm pretty sure they didn't."

Mariel dragged a chair up to the front window, and camped out, watching the two women through the blinds. After what seemed like an enternity, but was probably closer to 15 minutes, the neighbor's door closed, and the women moved on to our other neighbor's door. They stood in front of the door without knocking for a few minutes, writing down notes and chatting to each other.

I decided to call Cheryl to let her know that we were running late. She didn't answer, so I left a message.

"Hey Cheryl, I'm just letting you know that we'll be late. We're trapped in our apartment by, um, Jehova's Witnesses.... So... uh, yeah. We'll call you later."

Finally, Mariel and I decided to shower and get dressed first, and hope that when we were done, the two women would have moved on to another building.

In the end, our plan worked out okay. We successfully avoided religious confrontation, Enzo's bladder remained intact, and Cheryl, in all her lateness, wasn't even awake. The Dim Sum was good, too, except when we accidentally ordered a huge bowl of beef tripe.

sha_sha_new@hotmail.com

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