Jon surprised me the other night by saying he needed to buy some ammo...
"Really? For what?"
"The Elders Quorum activity!"
Clearly...
Take it away Jon!
Ok...yes...here I am. Right. Well as you may have noticed, I am not the usual blogger. But Amelia is using this as an opportunity to get me "involved". So here goes.
As most of you know, we have been in the process of becoming more southern the last year or so. Or as our friends here might say "We're fixin' to learn us how to be country folk." Two weeks ago, our Elder's Quorum President announced an activity that would certainly help us-and me in particular-along our way: The First Annual Vicksburg Ward Elder's Quorum Guns and (Root) Beer Outing.
At first I was confused by the BYOA on the announcement, but with only a little coaching I was able to figure out how to buy my own ammo at Walmart (see above). We met at 7 AM at the church and drove 45 minutes into the sticks (all the way to Yazoo County Mississippi...yep, you heard me right).
We set up the contraption to fling the clay pigeons out over the open meadow. It was pretty fancy-it could swivel around and move up and down so you wouldn't know where the trap was coming from. But we weren't good enough for that...we just set it on slow and let it throw them the same every time....
You have to understand that there was a mix of people at this activity-most of us are city folk who have only ever shot guns at scout camp, but the rest are seasoned southern folks who grew up shootin' armadillos for supper...
For the first 30 or so traps we had four or five of us out there shooting at them, and we probably missed 80%. Seriously, after the first round we went and collected 17 of them from the brush completely unbroken....
But then I decided it was time to play for keeps... Well, and we started this game. It was kind of like the old schoolyard b-ball game called Bump (or Lightning or Speed or many other names) wherein if you shoot and miss and the person after you shoots and scores, you are out. So we lined up four at a time, the leader calls "pull" and takes the first shot. If he misses, the second guy gets to shoot at it. If he misses the next, etc. When somebody finally hits it, everybody who shot and missed is out. The extra motivation made us MUCH more accurate...
Notice the barefooted boy second from the left. The family who owns the property we were shooting on had three of their kids out with us. None of them had shoes on, the youngest (a boy about 5) didn't have pants on. They took turns riding around on the three wheeler and chasing down the unbroken clay pigeons between rounds. What a life. Oh, and they all out-shot me (including the 11 year old girl, NOT including the pant-less five-year-old. He probably could have, but they didn't let him shoot).
All in all it was probably the most fun I have ever had at an Elder's Quorum activity... Even though it was over 100 degrees outside by the time we finished.
After I came home and showed Amelia how bruised my shoulder was we went to a wedding reception for one of the daughters of a family in the ward. She grew up in Mississippi, and apparently had dreams of a real Southern wedding...right down to the wedding bonnet and the paintings of a swamp and southern mansion behind the buffet line of jumbalaya and crawfish.
Check out that spread! And here's a close-up of the main event.
I brought one back to the table with me, although I have admittedly never done a southern crawfish boil. All the kids at our table were confused at how to eat the suckers. Amelia told the seven-year-old next to us that you "break open his body and suck out his guts". That cured him of his desire to eat any. And me too for that matter!
I remember a similar dish from the Folk Dance tour in China last year. However, I was much braver then... I couldn't muster the courage to eat the whole thing this time :( We have to have some goals for next summer, right?
