My Date with General Bear E. Norris

So my life of school and such has been preventing me for the past few weeks to make an entry to the blogging world, BUT I simply couldn't pass up writing about recent events.

Now on to the title of this blog. I went on a date tonight with a boy from my ward who is actually a character created by Mark Twain or some other fictional novelist. His life is simply too fascinating to be considered real. Our date agenda: calling elk and coyotes up Spanish Fork canyon. Yup, we drove up the canyon for about 45 minutes to sit in the woods and call the in heat bulls. Honestly, it was one of the most creative and fantastic dates I have ever been on. On our way up the canyon, my date realizes we are going to need fire wood for our dutch oven dinner. So what does he do? Laments forgetting his chain saw and then rips a dead tree out of the ground and heaves it into the back of the truck. He then pulls another, much larger tree straight up out of the ground and decides we are going to run over it to make it more manageable for firewood. I then decided to take my turn showing off my nature skills and perfectly camouflaged myself in the woods so I could use nature as the big outdoor bathroom that it is. Impressive, I know. We hiked up with the other couple in silence, treading as silently as possible, with me holding my breath in fear a giant elk would bound away when he heard my inhaling. This was a good idea because it made me really get "high of nature" via self-inflicted oxygen deprivation. Survivor Date Man then identified in hushed tones all of the tracks, plants, and droppings we discovered and finally had us huddle in admiration of the red sun calmly setting over the mountains whilst he used his whistle contraption to seduce all male elk in the area. It reminded my a bit of how I perceive internet dating: Getting excited to find a perfect mate over internet chat, deciding to meet in a public place, only to become disoriented and disappointed to discover the 20-something Abercrombie Model/Harvard Graduate is actually an overweight, 40-something high school drop out with a skill for photo shop. Luckily, we didn't have to completely disappoint the hopeful boy elk as they were too far away to reach us before the sun set, but we did get some interested vocal responses to our post for availability. We had an AMAZING dinner after our adventure because Survivor Man loves cooking on top of his plethora of other interests. Dinner Menu: Grilled chicken, potatoes-or spuds as he called them, salad with vegetables from his garden, and s'mores. Before I end this sucker, I need to further list why my date is not a real human being. In case you missed it, he pulled two trees out of the ground with his bare hands. He almost convinced me through his vast knowledge of history, politics, and current events that Abraham Lincoln was actually like every other politician: Dirty and power hungry, the southern states had every right to secede, the federal government should be pretty much eliminated from America and individual states should govern themselves, hunting is actually more humane than pumping our poor cows with steroids and slaughtering hundreds of them a day, and Japan is single handedly killing off 1/3 of the world's marine life with their love of sushi (okay, so this is a bit of an exaggeration, but still). He also hunts bears and mountain lions and showed me a clip of him on youtube literally punching a cougar in the face. He also has 8, yup, EIGHT dogs that he has trained to hunt with him. He earns his money for school by living and fishing in Alaska during the summers. He held the car door open for me and fought off my black cloud twice as a attempted to roll him off the mountain when I mistook our path for a slip and slide. He only hunts with a bow and arrow. He has the scriptures pretty much memorized along with the entire history of America. Does anyone else get the feeling this man is fictional? At the end of the date, he informed me I was a "good sport". AKA, you are the most ungraceful and loud human being to ever live, your dream of living in the woods for the rest of your life is the most ridiculous idea ever cause you would die within the first few minutes away from society, and you could never pull a tree out of the ground like I did cause I am actually a super human combination of Chuck Norris, Bear Grylls, and Robert E. Lee. Essentially, I wouldn't be surprised if I wake up tomorrow morning with a book smooshed against my face containing a fictional character in it who I actually dreamed I went on a date with...