Orlando Jones and The Lesson In Procrastination

I’m sure you know who Orlando Jones is. He was a regular on the sketch comedy series Mad TV. He was a former spokesman for 7 Up. And he’s been in several movies and TV shows. I’ve been a fan of his for years. My husband is a fan too.

In fact, he got the chance to let Orlando know that at Whole Foods on Christmas Eve while I was at work. Apparently, the actor grew up in the area and was visiting his family for the holidays. The two engaged in a nice conversation, and even took a picture together before parting ways.

orlando devin

Christmas Dinner Scramble

I’m pretty sure Orlando left the store with everything he intended to get, but I think the encounter left my husband with a bit of memory loss. He ended up leaving the store without getting several of the items we needed for potluck Christmas dinner. And that included the items needed for my main contribution: my family’s special banana pudding. It’s a dessert he practically spends the entire year begging me for, and one that his family always looks forward to.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find out any of that until that evening when all of the grocery stores were closed. But that wasn’t all. I also learned we didn’t have the ham we planned to get for our meal. A miscommunication led to that problem.

Needless to say, all that left us scrambling to find a way around having to tell his parents we would be eating vegetarian for Christmas. I must have spent hours scouring the Internet and making calls looking for places that would be open on Christmas. In the end, all I found was a couple drugstores. And that didn’t help the meat problem.

So on Christmas Day, I made my husband break the news to his mother. Luckily, she had six chicken breasts—which was great! At that point, I was relieved. But I still thought the banana pudding would be a lost cause. Then my husband found out his mother also had three bananas.

Hope returned.

With a couple ingredients left to get, my sister-in-law and I took our chances and made separate trips to the only stores open nearby. And success! Christmas dinner was saved.

A Lesson In Procrastination

Although our Christmas dinner still turned out great, it didn’t come without one big lesson. If we hadn’t learned before, we learned about the dangers of procrastination.

It’s like this quote by Mason Cooley, “Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder.”

We waited so long to shop for Christmas dinner that assumptions and unexpected circumstances left us scrambling. Things were definitely more difficult than they should have been, but I am so thankful for a family that is willing to go with the flow and do what needs to be done to make it work.

Needless to say, I never want to go through that again.