Weekend Fun

This weekend was monumentous for me in many ways. First and foremost, though, is that I got the oportunity to go pheasent hunting. Now, I'm an outdoorsy chick. Want to go fishing? I'm there. Skiing? Just try to stop me. Outdoor hunter/jumper courses? Why, that's my middle name. Typically, though, things like hunting tend to be guy activities (except for my mom, who asked for a shot gun for Christmas one year). And being a girl, I don't get too many invites.

My parents go hunting every year. I've been hunting while my parents have gone, but I typically just got to sit in the car while they got all the bird-blasting fun. It was neat to see my dad, the mild-manered salesman, pull out a huge knife and clean the birds right there in the forest by a running stream. That's a real man for you. But for some reason they never let me, as a little girl, handle a 12-gage shotgun. What gives??

.

So, this was my time to shine. We started out with some clay-shooting. This was not my forte. I did get a piece of one of them, but missed for the most part. I suffer from "afraid of the ball" syndrome, where I uncontrollably close my eyes when trying to catch/bat a ball. I found that this carried over to shooting, and I closed my eyes whenever I pulled the trigger. This made it difficult to hit the fast-moving clay targets. I did get to know the gun, however, and took that as a victory. Here are some picks of me (pink hat), Jim, Wade and Charlie:

.

Next, we moved on to actual, live targets. We had a dog named Wyatt with us, whose job was to point out the birds and make them fly into the air so that we could shoot them. This, I was much better at, as they were rather slow moving and tended to stay rather stationary for their first few minutes in the air. I shot one bird, and co-shot two others. The one I got was the biggest one, a large rooster.

.

I think it's safe to say that I'm a phenomenal hunter (though I had a sore shoulder for the next two days). So, it was a great weekend. Oh, and I also got my second highest ever bowling score and signed up to go to Syria/Jordan this summer with my church. Booyah.