A Thanksgiving Full of Buckshot

Just as a precursor, the title for this post is somewhat misleading.  But you'll understand why soon enough.

We had an awesome Thanksgiving!  After shopping with Jon and Natalie for all the grub, we enjoyed a pleasant night on their couch and floor, respectively.  They sure are great to let a couple of college students stay at their place.  We headed up to Grandma Robert's the next day and met up with Cyndi and Dave, who got there before us.  Here's a picture of them in case you've forgotten who they are.

They're pretty fun.  We prepped what we could for the feast the next day, then went to bed with visions of dinner rolls dancing in our heads.  Only to wake up to Thanksgiving more!  After a fairly uneventful breakfast, and wandering around the house drooling, we sat down to our delicious feast.  Seated at the table were:
David, Dave, Nick (Dave's son), Cyndi, Dick, Grandpa Wright, Grandma Roberts, Jon, Natalie, Gage, Amanda.  If you're thinking to yourself "HOLY COW THAT'S A GREAT GROUP OF PEOPLE!" well, you're thinking would be correct.

Note to self: don't eat so much stuffing next year.

One of the highlights of the evening was Amanda mastering 'Yankee Doodle' on those crystal goblets that you can run your finger around the rim and make a note.  After 20 minutes and an endless number of tries, she gave a successful performance to her mom and Dave.  Her mom couldn't quite catch the tune after 3 renditions, but Dave, after hearing the first 3 notes, immediately announced "It's Yankee Doodle!"  Props to you Dave.  Props to you.

So after the symphony, we all headed over to the theater to watch Hugo.  It was a pretty good flick.  Good moral, good acting, good message, and great 3D glasses.  If you pop out the reflective part afterwards, you own a great pair of hipster glasses.  Which apparently was a trend 3 years ago, but really- fashion is what you make of it.  Right?  Hmmmm.  Speaking of fashion, we actually got to meet a live Jedi!

I got her autograph too.  It was pretty cool.  She used some kind of Jedi mind trick on me, not sure what happened there.

Black Friday is notorious for its early morning shoppers, but we all spit in it's face by sleeping in until 10.  Were all the great deals gone?  Probably.  Did we care?  No.  What did we do instead?  We went shooting!
Dave had brought up his two handguns, two very cool .40s, and also his .22 rifle.  There's a shooting range in Murray, so Dave, Nick, Amanda and I went over there to vent some steam and bullets.  Imagine two glass sheets to either side, and targets in front of you.  That's the shooting range.  It was a little disconcerting to see a patch of shattered glass in ours that had obviously come from a bullet.  Not sure what happened there... At first we all shot handguns.  No one was super amazing as far as accuracy goes, but we all had fun with them.  Then Amanda decided to grace us all with her personality that is apparently a dead eye.  Once we pulled out the .22, she shot like Annie Oakley.  Here's your shot of the target.

Pretty good right?  Look at that grouping.  Wait- not good enough you say?  You could do that you say?  Well, let me give you a little perspective on the target.

That's right, at roughly 30 yards Amanda put a grouping of about 2 square inches on a teeny little target.  And note the bulls-eye.  I think the FBI sniper division has found its next scholarship child.

So overall, Thanksgiving was a blast.  The pros?  Delicious food, great family, fun shooting, great jokes, and just an overall atmosphere of love.  The cons?  Getting called Jon 4 times, losing in foosball, overeating, and getting shown up by my fiance in shooting guns.

Until next time folks.

Weekend Fun

Prior to this post, there are a few things you should know about David and Amanda.  In social situations, I like to be the rule breaker.  Many's the time we've been walking across campus, and I'll start singing at the top of my lungs, or say something in a loud voice like "AMANDA I THOUGHT YOU HAD YOUR BOWEL PROBLEM UNDER CONTROL".  Amanda's reaction is always priceless.  She'll duck and run away, pretend she doesn't know me, or just get super red.  I just laugh.

However, when it comes to breaking other rules- say trespassing- I stick to the line.  I usually am super paranoid about ever doing anything even slightly illegal.  Amanda is usually okay with things like that.  For example, using a hot tub when you don't actually live at that apartment complex.  Hot tubbing, prior to my time here at BYU, was an unknown and foreign concept to me.  "Using someone else's hot tub?  But you'd go to jail!"  I think you get the gist.  So there we were Friday night with not much to do, when Amanda says the dreaded words- "Lets go to Raintree and use their hot tub!"

For my reaction, see above picture.

I immediately pulled out all the classics.  "Oh I'm really tired.  I don't really feel like it.  It's a little cold isn't it?  Lets watch a movie!  How bout we make out?"  None of them worked.  Amanda wasn't to be deterred.  So we went over there, with me in a cold sweat the whole time, with the idea of jumping a fence paramount in illegality to stealing a car in my mind.  I could already see the headlines: "Fiancees caught breaking into Raintree hot tub- death sentence expected"  What would happen to all of our unborn little children?  We were doomed.  Finally, we were at Raintree.  We went over to the gate and.... it was unlocked.   So we walked right in and.... pretty much every other person in the hot tub didn't live there either.

In the end we had a great time.  It was so warm, and later that night we made some homemade rootbeer and had some chocolate peanut butter bars.

Moral of the story? Amanda is a friggin hot sexy mama who is always right.

Guess who wrote that.

Ahhh, Love

Mawwiage is what brings us togeva, today.  Well not really.  We're not married yet.  But it seems the new hip and groovy thing to do is to start a blog once you find your significant other.

So here we go.

It would probably be appropriate to start here with a brief Amandavid history.  (Get it?  Our names together?  Get it?)  We were initially set up by 1. Kayleen, Amanda's bestie and 2. Tiago, David's last mission companion.  Those two were dating, and thought to themselves "Who are the two coolest people we could set up on a blind date?"  Yep, it was us.  Amanda was of course immediately smitten by my charming looks and witty personality.  I was attracted to Amanda because of her intellectual nature.  Good joke, am I right?  Talk about the hottest being I have ever laid eyes on!  Not hands though, if any of her family is reading this.

So that date was really fun.  The next week we decided to do a double date and carve some pumpies.

Notice we're still not to the touching phase yet.  That wasn't the end, it was only the beginning.  We went on several more dates, going to comedy clubs, making music videos, watching all of the Star Wars movies (except the last one for some reason), baking a cake....

And then finally, we were Facebook official.  Cong-rats!  What the heck is a cong rat?  Nevertheless, we perservered.  Of course, there were difficulties along the way.  We both discovered that one of us had intense love while the other had an intense hatred for olives.  Luckily we surpassed that hurdle.  But it was a rough patch.  We broke up twice (for 5 minutes each time.  I just wanted to say we'd broken up.  Amanda still shakes her head about that.) but you know.  We're here baby.

We were lucky enough to go to San Diego when Tiago and Kayleen were married.  We laughed about it then saying, wouldn't it be weird if we got married too?

Well, looks like its gonna happen for us too.  And boy are we excited.  The one thing I'm not excited about is Amanda's tendency to figure out every surprise I plan for her before it occurs.  Take today.  As I was innocently looking in my bag, she decided to take a quick peek.  Luckily enough the surprise was in a bag, but she just HAD to know what was in the bag.  My quick thinking deferred any questions.  I didn't get so lucky when I proposed though.  I had purchased the ring in secret, wanting her to be super surprised.  I hid it under my pillow.  In retrospect, not the best of hiding places.  She left a gift for me on my bed, and very sweetly decided to make my bed.  SURPRISE!  Oh wait.....

Luckily, I was still able to surprise her.  I was so calm, cool, and collected the whole day.  Think Harrison Ford and James Dean with a side of Frank Sinatra.  I had her roommate set up a special spot to us with flower petals and candles, and luckily Amanda hadn't guessed that one.

She said yes.  And here we are folks.  Two of the most stunningly beautiful people to grace Brigham Young University will tie the knot in May.  We look forward to the posts and good times.  Until then....

May the Force be with you.  (Yes, that was David's idea)