Of Snow White Bimboness, Armenian Food Delishness, and Bear Lake Deadliness

Pretty much all of Alyssa's immediate and extended family took off for Bear Lake on Monday, leaving us with some much needed peace and quiet for a few days. Good times were had in abundance. Monday night Alyssa and I watched Snow White, which I had never seen up to this point because I had always figured Snow White was a squeaky-voiced bimbo like Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors. Well, I was right. Plus, there were times when I was practically yelling at the characters to get on with the plot. But the dwarves were kind of fun. (Of course.)

Wednesday night we went to the Days of '47 CultureFest downtown. It was fun--we ate Armenian food (meat and raisins on flatbread--yummers) and watched most of the program, which was M.C.d by Thurl Bailey and his friend, Big Buddha. Thurl was all right but Big Buddha was hilarious. For example, at one point in the program they were throwing out foam "Mr. Carrot" toys to the audience, and Big Buddha said "Try and hit the missionaries! Maybe they'll feel the spirit and talk about us in church on Sunday!" You would have to have been there. The program had its ups and downs, but some of it was pretty cool. They had a group of Bolivian dancers who did fancy malarkey with bolas and machetes, as well as one of those Polynesian fire guys, who have yet to disappoint me. (This one was about 12 and won some statewide competition in Hawaii.) Thurl himself also sang, and he was pretty good. As we were taking Trax back to Murray, there was some kind of mechanical problem on our car which caused most of the lights to go out and also prevented us from traveling over 25 miles an hour, for some strange reason. Eventually they made everybody on our car move to one of the other two cars so they could remove it for repairs.

Friday we drove to Bear Lake with Shawn to join everyone who was already there. Fun was mostly had. Friday we fished in Logan Canyon and I of course didn't catch squatarooney (I have yet to catch anything from a non-lake body of water), along with pretty much everybody else except for Calvin, who I swear could catch fish in a mud puddle. Saturday morning we swam in a swimming pool with Shawn, Anika, Brayden, and McKell. In the afternoon and evening we hit the beach, where I instructed Alyssa in the fine art of frolicking in a lake, which she had done maybe ONCE before in her lifetime. Poor sheltered lass. Then Laura and Becca convinced us to row all the way across the lake in kayaks, which, I really must say, sucked. Remind me never to listen to them again. Neither of us made it all the way across (although Alyssa got close), and before we were halfway done we were both seasick, and my back and arms hurt like a banshee. Oh, did I mention we went out without life jackets too? We didn't even think about that until we were already quite a ways out. But that's just crazy old Ben and Alyssa Green for you. Oh well, this story will be water cooler GOLD at work tomorrow.