Date Day; Big Burgers, Guns, and Pixar

So lately Steve & Nicolle time has become more scarce. Nicolle is really busy with work and our Ward has alot of turnover so I've been helping quite a few people move as of late. On Thursday we finally got a hole in our schedules and decided to make the most of it.

First stop, Helmer Idaho population 83. Helmer isn't so much a town as it is an intersection, a place that would have stumped Robert Frost as BOTH of the roads here are the road less traveled. In Helmer there is this wonderful old general store that has been there since the late 1800's.

And in this old cafe they serve these:


Behold! The Helmer Burger! A 1/2 pound of hamburger, a slab of ham, pickles, onions, lettuce, tomato (not for me) all on a toasted bun. The Helmer is quite simply the best burger in the world. Here's another pic so you can appreciate the size of the Helmer.


That's one of my good friends Steve-O preparing to up his body fat by a couple of percent. In the back you can see some of the old photos that decorate the place and really give you a sense of history.

Now one thing about going to Helmer is that when we are that far from Moscow, Nicolle thinks she can let her hair down some......

One of these days we'll grow up enough that we'll no longer think it's funny when Nicolle gets apple juice in a beer glass, probably not this year though. The next stop in our date extravaganza was a little rock pit 3 miles outside of Helmer.

After almost 2 years of marriage, I think I have this whole romantic scene thing down. The rock pit outside of Helmer is romantic (to me) because it is the closest public place to Moscow where you can go shooting. Over they years I have deposited enough lead here for it to qualify as a EPA hazardous waste dump. Now this rock pit is 30 miles from Moscow, how perverse is that?! I live in NORTHERN IDAHO and the closest place where I can go shooting is 30 freakin miles away!

Now I never need a reason to go shooting, but this time we had one; I really wanted to try out this little baby:That's a Ruger LCR .38 special, sweet little gun and a very effective mugger deterent. Now the LCR isn't big enough to ask someone if "they feel lucky."

but the LCR is big enough to give the mugger a smile that says: "Go procure your buying drugs money elsewhere." Here's a clip of the LCR in action:

I have found that the secret of target shooting is that you have to really WANT to hit the target. In that clip I was imagining the target to be an Islamic terrorist who is also a member of PETA and Greenpeace. That explains the fast moving trigger finger.

Now the the trip to the rock pit was part of our date day, so of course Nicolle got in on the action.

That's my wife holding a gun and smiling at me. That is either really hot or really terrifying, I'm not sure which. Here's a video of Nicolle auditioning for Annie get your gun:

Before the events of that video, that .22 Nicolle was shooting was MY .22; now it is officially OUR .22. I didn't ask Nicolle what she was imagining that would make her really want to hit the target......perhaps ignorance is bliss. After some practice, Nicolle really did well:


Not bad from a distance of about 30 yards from the standing position, that box is officially dead. Next up, it was time for the shotgun and some clay pigeons.

Two things to note from that video. 1) I know its only June, but a portable camera tripod might not be a bad Christmas idea for us. That video was taken with our camera on the most level rock I could find. 2) The one thing I don't like about camera is that it saves all videos in .MOV format, which is a format invented by Macintosh. I tried to edit that video to get rid of some of the non important stuff. Apparently I didn't really want to edit the video because the wonderful Macintosh program wouldn't let me edit it, and whenever a Mac program won't do something you are obviously the problem, not the program because everything from Apple is PERFECT. I swear Macintosh is some ancient Sumerian word for: "Over-hyped, over-priced, piece of crap."

After we got done shooting, we drove to Pullman to watch the new Pixar film "Up". I'm glad Pixar redeemed themselves after "Ratatouille". Pixar films are supposed to be funny and Ratatouille wasn't, but Up definitely was funny. Our favorite line came from the dog

"Hey I know a joke! A squirrel walks up to a tree and says "I forgot to store acorns for winter and now I am dead." Ha! It is funny because the squirrel gets dead."

So at the end of the day we had alot of fun and ended up loving each other a little bit more. Married dating has such a better outcome than single dating where all I did was spend 6 years spending money on someone else's wife.