Secret Agent Man (and Woman)

Recipe for this week: The Clines' top-secret recipe for easy, mouthwatering, tender ribs, revealed just this once. For a limited time only. Act now! Send $22.95 to P.O. Box 23601, Provo UT 84601 (only check or money order accepted, sorry, no COD) and your life will be changed forever!!!!

Okay, okay. Seriously. This recipe takes only 3 ingredients and 2 hours.

Ingredients:

2 lbs uncooked ribs, defrosted (boneless or not, doesn't matter)

18 oz (usually 1 bottle) of barbecue sauce, any flavor

1/2 cup orange juice

Directions:

-Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

-In a 13x9 pan, mix together barbecue sauce and orange juice.

-Separate ribs and place them in the barbecue/orange juice sauce.

-Roll ribs around the pan to coat them well with the sauce. Ribs will cook faster if they do not touch each other.

-Cover pan with aluminum foil and put pan in oven for 2 hours or until meat is tender, falling off of bone (if not boneless).

Serves 2 hungry adults, but the recipe could easily be doubled and even fit in one pan still.

Turned out delicious and tender enough to cut easily with a fork!!! You could make the ribs any flavor you want just by changing the type of barbecue sauce. We just used original flavor, and it still turned out great! Christian says he'd like to try marinating them next time before we cook them. We will try it and let you know how it works. We also recommend turning the ribs over once during cooking, but it will still be very tender even if you don't.

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Last Sunday we decided to go to choir after church. It was fun but very sparse. We had only one bass, 2 tenors, 3 altos, and 2 sopranos. If Christian and I hadn't come, they would have had a 6-person choir consisting of only 1 bass, 1 tenor, 2 altos, and 2 sopranos. Christian and I were annoyed because the choir director directed everything in 2/4 time, and the music was in 3/4. So we both kind of died a little inside. But it was good nonetheless.

We tried to go this week again, but apparently the choir director has..... moved! Dun dun DUNNNN!!!! So we are currently without a choir director!!! We are carefully screening our calls since I don't have a calling yet, and the bishop knows I am musical (however, our bishopric is changing in two weeks, so I might be safe for a while).

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To work as an aide at an elementary school (like I am going to, starting Thursday), you need to be fingerprinted so that they can check your history and, (and I quote my boss) "just make sure you're not an axe murderer from Nantucket". So on Monday I went to one of the fingerprinting locations on BYU campus and asked them to fingerprint me. They informed me that "we don't do that kind of fingerprinting, we just do this other kind. You'll have to go somewhere else". By that time, everywhere else would have been closed by the time we got there.

So on Tuesday I went to the Nebo School District in Spanish Fork which apparently does "my kind" of fingerprints. I filled out some forms, and they took me into the secret fingerprinting room in the back where I washed my hands, they spritzed some water on my fingertips, then put my fingers on the digital fingerprint reader. This is when I discovered the coolest thing ever about myself: I have no fingerprints!!! ....Well, okay, I have some, but they apparently aren't very clearly defined. We tried scanning my fingerprints more than 20 times before the lady finally gave up and overrode the system, sending my fingerprints to my employer even though they sucked and didn't show up. She then proceeded to ask me if I played the piano, which I thought was the most random question in the world, but I said "yes". She said, "For how long?" I told her I'd been playing since I was 3, and she told me that sometimes piano players have really worn-down fingerprints.

Then I realized something. If I have really worn-down fingerprints and nobody can identify them, then that means the police can't identify them either!!! I could be a bank robber, a carjacker, or anything I wanted, and I wouldn't even have to bother wearing gloves!!! Any fingerprints I left would be too unidentifiable to give the police any clues. Isn't it ironic that I learned I could easily be an axe murderer through a process that was specifically designed to make sure I wasn't one? I think it's hilarious. Watch out world, here I come!!! Hide your valuables, lock up your children, because here comes *gasp* Brittany Mealey, the notorious infamous axe murderer from Nantucket!!!

I still haven't heard back from my boss (which I assume is a good thing) about my fingerprints. It's only supposed to take 48 hours for the fingerprints to get there, and I'm assuming they'd call me if there was a problem. The lady doing my fingerprints told me that it is possible that I might have to go all the way up to Salt Lake to do manual ink fingerprints if my digital ones weren't acceptable. The manual ink fingerprint process takes about 2 weeks for your results to get back, which would mean that I couldn't start work for at least 2 weeks. Which is bad, since I'm supposed to start on Thursday. But, again, I haven't heard back, so I'm assuming everything's fine.

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On Friday Christian got good news and bad news. The bad news: He didn't get the computer lab assistant job on campus. The good news: the IT department referred him to the customer service department, who offered him a job as an undercover top-secret high-security secret BYU computer lab spy!!!! (Should I even be telling anyone???) Actually, his title isn't that cool. He's really called a PICS evaluator. It stands for Program to Improve Customer Service. Basically, he goes in (undercover!) and spies on the computer lab assistants and evaluates them on their customer service skills. He has to do a mock one first (as kind of his job-interview test), which he's going to do tomorrow, and then depending on how well he does, they'll decide whether he gets the job or not. Stay tuned, ladies and gentlemen, for more exciting updates!

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We are looking forward to this coming week as Christian starts his squad leader training in preparation for marching band this fall, and as I start as an aide on Thursday (hopefully, if everything went well with my fingerprints). We love you all!!!

Love,

Christian and Brittany