Fire Creek unleashed

A long time ago in a valley far far away, I got to be an extra in a movie called Fire Creek. Some of my friends went with: Roy, Becca, and of course Tyler, who got the imaginary crap beat out of him.

Despite it having been 4 years ago this month, they finally decided to release it. I don't know if we're still in it or if they cut that scene or if they just had to start over because they took so long making it, but I want to go see it just in case.

Being Stefani

This weekend Tyler stopped by for a few before his brother's wedding reception. Aaron was over, too, and we were just sitting around chatting, and then the next thing I knew, I was waking up on the couch several hours later, and they were both gone. I'd fallen asleep in the middle of a conversation.
This surgery and the corresponding drugs make my sleeping habits drastly different. I can't stay asleep because my leg always hurts, but I can't stay awake because the drugs make me drowsy. During my first class last week I kept falling asleep, and I couldn't help it. (When I woke up and asked the guy next to me what was going on, it seemed that no one that had been conscious understood anything either, so I don't feel too bad about it.)
The point is, of course, that now I know how Stefani feels.

Be vs. Earl

Late last night Gabe, Tyler and I went to Beto's. I thought I'd step it up.
I first ordered the cheese quesadilla. The guy taking my order looked confused at me, and said "Are you sure? It's just cheese?" If you have ordered the quesadilla before, then you'll understand why he'd try to talk me out of it. The quesadilla is just a giant wad of cheese in a tortilla. It's more grease than food. Which is, of course, why I wanted it.
Then I ordered two burritos: I tried the Ranchero, and I ordered my favorite, the Adobada. The guy asked me if we wanted to pay together or separate, and I told him together so that I wouldn't have to explain that all three meals were for me.
Tyler ordered the chimichanga, which gave Gabe an idea: What if we had them deep fat fry one of the regular burritos? The worker obliged as though it were a natural suggestion (which maybe it is in mexican countries), and so I had a giant Ranchero chimichanga.
I ate the quesadilla in 1 minute and 27 seconds. About 3/4 of the way through the Ranchero chimichanga I got full. I, of course, ate it anyway. The Adobada would become my nemesis, and we named him Earl.
The very first bite of Earl almost killed me. I was already full, and I couldn't eat any more. I ate another bite anyway. I thought I was going to hurl. I ate another bite. The bite size didn't get smaller, but the time it took me to get it down got longer with each successive bite. Sometimes my stomach would tell me to stop, and it would threaten to send back up what I'd already put down. I'd have to stop in the middle of the current bite and breath really slow and calm, and then I'd keep chewing once I'd lulled my stomach into a false sense of security. I tried to stop eating over and over, but Tyler kept encouraging me to finish what I'd started, and I listened. By the end I don't think I was even swallowing anymore. I'd just chew the bites until they were liquefied enough to slide down my throat without any effort. I had probably an inch and a half of burrito left at the bottom when my stomach refused to take any more and I had to spit the last bite out to keep myself from vomiting.
The Adobada had once been my favorite. Beto's was my favorite place to go eat. Now I was in horrible pain, both from my stomach being stretched beyond its capacity, and my throat was burning from the spices sitting in my mouth and trickling down.
It still hurts today, but I guess everything paid off. Today I weigh 202.2 lbs., even on the most conservative of the scales that I've weighed myself on. And it's a good thing I made my goal, because I don't know if I'll ever be able to eat again.

The Life and Death of the Darth Cannon

A little over a month ago my ward had a dumb activity in which I didn't want to participate. So, instead of going to the activity, Tyler and I built a gun.
My friend Ryan and I had built a potato gun in high school, and I think Tyler had done the same, so we both knew the basic operations and what we needed. At the hardware store, we discovered that this is not only a very common practice, but that they don't necessarily like helping with this, so they don't readily sell the parts that we needed. We ended up compromising and making due with what they had, but in the process, we developed a new kind of potato cannon.
The Darth Cannon ^TM had a fail-safe. In the event that the pressure in the chamber was too high, instead of breaking the combustion chamber, it would blow-off the barrel to relieve the pressure. We were invincible. We couldn't hurt ourselves with this.
So, as any good college students who had built a gun, Tyler and I did science experiments on it. (I bet you thought we were going to use it to break things, huh?) We took it to the baseball field and measured the distances it traveled with different fuel-filling styles, until we'd figured out how to best use the Darth Cannon.
Unfortunately, the Darth Cannon met its end this weekend. We'd gone up the canyon to sit around a bonfire, and I'd gotten bored. So, naturally, I pulled the Darth Cannon out of my trunk (where everyone keeps their home-made guns) and loaded it up. I readjusted the barrel because it had gotten a little crooked in my trunk, but I guess I didn't tighten it up enough afterwards. When I shot it, instead of the potato flying out, the barrel itself shot off. This was good, of course, because it proved that my fail-safe would work, but in all of the excitement, I kind of broke off the trigger ignition that we'd put on it.

Lost in the desert

I could have died and been lost in the desert today, and no one would have been the wiser. Consider the following scenario.

I'm driving back from Las Vegas where I went to Jordan and Ariana's wedding reception. I get to St. George and I stop for some gas and some food, and then head on my way. About half-way between St. George and Cedar City, I cross an over-pass, and suddenly my wheel starts rumbling severely. I pull over to the side of the road, and just as I feared, I have a blown-out tire.
I get my spare tire and jack out from the trunk, and start to jack up the car. The road has a slight decline, and the car rolls forward as it raises off the ground, and rolls off the jack. If only I had a brick or cinder block to put in front of the tire to keep it from rolling. I look around the side of the road for a rock to use. The ground to the side of the road slopes down into a tree-covered gully, but on the hill I see a large flat rock, about 5 inches thick. It's a good bet, so I go pick it up. It's really big and heavy, and it's awkward for me to pick up on the hill. I start carrying the rock to the car, but I slip and stumble backward, falling down on the ground. The rock drops hard on my chest, breaking several ribs and puncturing a lung. I pass out as I'm rolling down the hill into the trees. I die a few hours later.
I don't get back to Provo at all that night. My roommates don't think anything of it, because I hardly ever sleep in my own apartment anyway, and this is the second weekend in a row that I've taken a trip without telling them where I'm going. They don't even know I'm gone.
I don't go to Church the next day, but since I have such a hard time waking up every morning anyway, most everyone is used to me sleeping in, and no one is really that surprised that I'm not there, so they don't think anything of it.
Only a few of my friends even know that I've gone to Vegas, but they know that I could stay a few days just as easily as come back today, so they're not really surprised that they don't see me after a few days. Ronnie goes back to Louisiana and never knows if I come back from Vegas or not. All he knows is that I don't answer my Gmail. Jason moves back to Salt Lake and likewise thinks nothing of the fact that he hasn't seen me after a week. Tyler knew that I was gone, but quickly forgets and is just annoyed that I'm not around for him to watch TV at my place. His girlfriend then gets back in town and he stops coming over, so he never realizes that I haven't come back.
The only one of my friends that knows that I've headed back to Provo is Amy Jo. After she's been back in Provo for a few weeks she calls me when she's bored one day, but when I don't return her calls she just writes me off as a jerk and stops calling.
I don't show up to work the next week. No one at work is really surprised, since they're used to me setting my own schedule, working from home, or just taking breaks whenever I feel like it. It takes until the end of the month for them to call, and then they just want to know my new class schedule. I don't give one to them, but they don't worry about since I don't follow a schedule anyway.
Meanwhile the highway patrol finds my car on the highway. They put a notice on it, and when it remains there for a day or two, they assume it's abandoned and impound it. They never even notice my body down in the gully.
My family calls after a week or two, and I don't answer. They just complain about how crappy of a son/brother that they have, and get annoyed with me for never calling them back. After a few months of not hearing from me, they'll call my grandma and see if she's seen me. No one hears from me, and it's not until I don't come home for Christmas that they suspect that something might be wrong, as opposed to me just being a jerk.

This didn't all happen, of course. I did get a flat tire outside of St. George, but I didn't drop the rock and I was able to get back into town and buy a new tire. All in all it took me about 4 hours to get through St. George on my way back home. It is kind of depressing, though, to realize that if something had happened to me that it would have taken 4 months before anyone even started looking for me. Now I know how Bryant feels.

A sunbeam

Late last night after we'd run out of potatoes (details forthcoming) Tyler, Casey and I were sitting on the stage (a.k.a., Castle Grayskull) drinking slurpees, when my thoughts turned to my life ambitions. I asked Casey if he would respect me less if I had a mohawk, and without hesitating he said "I'd respect you more." And that's how I made up my mind.
"That's all it takes?" Tyler said as we ran up the stairs to find some clippers. "I've been telling you for weeks that you should stop worrying about it and just do it." I told him that it clearly takes more than one person to qualify as peer pressure. He's since objected to that explanation, too, claiming that it doesn't count as peer pressure since I had to ask them to approve it. I'm sticking with peer pressure.
Here's some documentation.
Today when I went to the zoo I noticed that it's a lot easier to make friends with little kids because they love to stare at me.

Abusive relationship

Tyler pointed out to me yesterday that I've done bodily harm to him every day this week. Behold.

1. On Monday we went to go see some fireworks in Spanish Fork. We went in three different cars, and none of us knew where any of the others were. Eventually (despite contradictory directions) Tyler and I found Russ and Christie and Harry Caray together. We had walked for a ways looking for a good spot to watch from, when Moriah called, claiming to be in prime fireworks-watching position, so our combined group was going to rendezvous with her. We all crammed into Russ's car because it was closer, and Tyler was stuck laying across three people in the back seat. Russ dropped Tyler and me at my car. I thought it would be funny if Tyler climbed out of the car head-first. He didn't think it'd be funny or convenient, so I tried to pull him out of the car, and he pulled back and hit his head on door frame.
2. The next day we were at Walmart buying white gas (Wait for it....) and there was this display with a ton of frisbees at the front of the store. I picked one up tried to throw it to Tyler, but the truth is that I throw like a girl (no offense to those girl readers who are more athletic than me), and so I gave it one of those throws that curves complete and goes 90-degrees from where it was aimed. I figured that I'd just grab another frisbee and try again, but I'm not much better. I might not be skillful, but I am persistent (or stubborn?), so I grabbed another frisbee, but by this time Tyler had given up and already started to walk away. As I ran after him my stubbornness turned to mischief, and went on the opposite side of the isle-divider from him, hoping to hit him with the frisbee when he turned the corner. He, of course, foresaw my plan, and was ready for me when he turned the corner, thinking that he would simply catch the frisbee and foil my plan. Just as he appeared and I was about to launch my attack, two girls came out from a side isle and blocked my path. Instead of letting that ruin the moment, however, I stood cocked and ready to fire, waiting for the girls to clear the way. Tyler must have thought it ridiculous, because it only made him more prepared to catch the frisbee. By the time my shot was clear, my tension must have mounted to a degree such that the power with which I threw my projectile compensated for my inaccuracy. I hit Tyler right in the eye from about 8 feet away.
3. After our party last night we convinced Tyler to show off his fire-dancing skills. He had two of the torch-knives that they use, and he was dancing with one while I was soaking the other in the white gas (that we'd bought at Walmart the day before). My job was to spin off the excess gas from the stick that I was soaking. After it had soaked up the gas, I swung the thing repeatedly (because I can't spin it fast enough to get anything off of it) until it didn't look like any more gas was spraying off of it. Then I lit it and (after burning my hand trying to light the other end) gave it to Tyler. On his first spin it sprayed burning fuel in a diagonal line from his right shoulder down to his left knee. It took a second or two before he noticed that he was on fire so he could drop the sticks and put himself out.
4. That night at the ritual late night Beto's run (which Carlos should have paid for), I stepped on his already-hurt toe.

He gave me the credit that at least the last one wasn't my fault.

Just an experiment

This week Ronnie and I are doing the vegetarian challenge. Tyler says that being a vegetarian isn't something that you can just do for a week and then forget about, because it's a big decision that must be weighed out carefully. He says that it'd be like turning gay for just a week. Well, he may be right that this is the first time that vegetarianism has become a one-week challenge, but we're still committed to it. For a week.
So today I was driving around looking for a place to eat lunch. It was really hard decision, since (a) I'd never had to choose a place based on whether it was meatless, and (b) I was really hungry, and it was hard not to just get a burger.
I decided to go to the Pita Pit. I'd never been there before and it seemed like the kind of place that would be veggie-friendly. I had a falafel pita. My coworkers were all shocked and horrified, having heard that falafels were the grossest food ever, but I really liked it. It was hearty and satisfying and really good. It might become my favorite restaurant this week.

Fire Creek

Tyler and I were in a movie this week. Well, mostly Tyler.

We went to be extras in BYU's first feature film, which is to be called Fire Creek. I don't know all of the details of what the movie is about, but this week they were filming a boxing tournament, and they needed extras to play the spectators at the boxing match, so that's what we did. At first.

They wanted to show one of the boxers with a broken nose, to kind of give the feeling of how badly hurt someone can get (one of the main characters gets trounced pretty badly). Tyler volunteered and they made him up pretty nicely. It looked so good, in fact, that the director decided not to just show him with the broken nose, but to show it happening.

So Tyler got pitted up against this big Polynesian guy. The guy kind of tackled Tyler and got in a few shots to the face before the referee could pull him off. Then Tyler was pulled back onto a stool in his corner where a skilled actor (me) played his buddy who tried to clean off the blood. Tyler wouldn't let him touch it (despite the buddy's pleas to help clean him up), but demanded to know if it was broken, which his coach admitted that it was.

We had lines and everything. It was exciting. I have a few pictures of Tyler in action.

Snowmoboard

Thanksgiving report:

1. Ate dinner with Dad's in-laws. It's kind of weird to spend time with those people, not because they're weird, but just because I barely know them and we still act like we're family. The nice thing about your own family is that they love you despite the fact that they know you so well.
2. Bunked up at Snowbird with the Jackman's and the Dubois's. I have multiple surrogate families now. That's kind of neat. And these ones even know how big of a jerk I am, and they still like me.
3. The snow this weekend was so good. Based on the amount of snow that I had to dig my car out from under (literally: I used a shovel), I'd say we got about 3 feet over the weekend. Saturday while we were skiing it was snowing so much that we'd do a run and then by the time we got back to the top the same run had fresh powder again. I think that's what heaven's going to be like.

A Hope for Normal Conditions

We went to lunch early today, and its a good thing that we did, because it started melteding pretty hard as soon as we got back. I think its worked its way into frozening. I hope it at leasts normals in the mountains, but it would be fun if we got some normal here, too.
Brighton opens tomorrow. Are they the first? Well, I'm excited. I'm torn about what to do with my money this season, though. I really liked the Brighton night pass that I had last year; that worked out pretty well. It costs $250. I think the rumor about Sundance puts a mid-week pass at $130 or something like that, which is much more in my price range, but then there's no night skiing and probably no Ben, which for sure would slow down my improvement rate. A real pass (even for students) to Brighton is about $500. I need to sell a Web site or something.

Skiism

Tyler and I went up to Brighton to go skiing today. Now, I know that you're thinking, "It's only October; the ski resorts aren't open yet." Well, that's true: they're not, but we did go up there and there was a lot of snow (driving back it was almost white-out on top of the mountain). The lifts weren't open, but there were some rails set up at the base that we could just hike up to. Here's a picture of Tyler hitting a rail, so that you can be jealous of how great the snow was (I don't put pictures of myself because I suck at it).
At first we were hitting this big, tall, wide rail that had a pretty nice kicker built up to it, which was nice (especially for a beginner like me). We assumed that the rails were set up by Brighton, but when I said this to someone a guy came up and told me that it was his rail, and that he'd set it up. We didn't know, so we then asked if it was cool that we rode it, and he told us no, and went off on this big rant about how people shouldn't come up to the mountain and just expect to be able to ski without bringing anything up to contribute. I think it was lame that he wouldn't let us ride it, but it was his rail, so that's his business. The part that was particularly annoying was that there were about 20 random snowboarders around that didn't even know the guy or that he had set the rail up, and the guy was totally cool with them hitting it. I think he was just discriminating against us because we're skiers.