Revenge of the pork taco

I decided on Sunday to make pork tacos (authentic local pronunciation: tack-ohs). Unfortunately, I didn't get the roast into the crock pot until 12:30, which wasn't enough time to force it to submit to being shredded at 6. I had people who needed to be places soon thereafter, so I quickly threw together a completely different dinner (spaghetti and meatballs, cauliflower, french bread, sliced apples), the whole time being careful not to step on Little J and her science project that she was gluing to a display board in the middle of the kitchen floor (the "perfect" wide-open space, she claimed). Despite scientific evidence that men cannot multitask, I somehow managed to make dinner as I jumped over and stepped around the display board,  granting glances and nods of approval to Little J every 30 seconds as she told me to look at what she had just glued to the board, simultaneously interrupting my teenager's monologue of his college social life with frequent questions (to show that I was listening), regularly glaring at the other teenager (to try to curtail his "clever" running commentary), and occasionally making sympathetic noises in response to Swine Flu Mary's (a,k.a., J-girl) groans of misery (to acknowledge that yes, this was indeed the worst illness that could be inflicted on humans and that, yes, it must be truly awful because she had fallen asleep twice during the day--never mind that that's my average score for a single sacrament meeting). I wanted to kill the pork roast, which, as it turns out, wasn't actually pork but beef instead. Yes, it was one of those peaceful, spiritually renewing Sabbath evenings.

The upside of this whole pork taco debacle was that the "pork" was finally cooked enough for tacos on Monday night. Only, it didn't die quietly. This time it sought its revenge on Josh. Halfway through the meal, both Josh and I noticed that he had huge splotches of taco juice all over the upper right shoulder of his sweatshirt. Neither of us had any idea of how it got there. He took his sweatshirt off (yeah, I know, dumb idea), only to get more juice on his shirt with streaks running down his left forearm and ending in a puddle of juice surrounding his left elbow. Josh started panicking and making squawking noises as soon as he realized the taco juice was after him. Being filled with charity and family unity because it was Family Night, the rest of us sprang to his rescue by laughing and mocking him. J-girl tried to explain to us how all of this happened based on her newly gained scientific expertise from this semester's Physical Science 100 class. Just to be on the safe side, we waited a good hour for the juice to cool and "deactivate" (Josh's term) before putting the leftovers away. We had learned that you can never be too careful when it comes to dealing with taco meat.