It's great to be a Merrill...

We flew out to Utah back in early July for Amanda and Stuart's wedding. They were married in the LDS Temple there in Logan, UT. The day was beautiful. Beautiful marriage, beautiful weather, and beautiful mountains. Oh how I love and miss the mountains! There was plenty of quality Merrill-family fun to be had as well. We spent the weekend up at Bear Lake playing volleyball and frisbee and Bananagrams, drinking raspberry milkshakes, making S'mores ("You're killing me, Smalls!"), and sunning ourselves on the trampoline. It was all so very wholesome and soul-gratifying, you could have set us in any number of Norman Rockwell paintings...

Bear Lake

Bryce and Natalie are getting married next weekend!

The culmination of this vacation came in the form of the annual Merrill family "Barbie"-cue held at Uncle Bill and Aunt Sheralee's house. For the past 5 years I have been hearing about this family tradition but had not had the opportunity to attend/participate until this year. Here's how it works:

Each year has a specific theme. This theme serves as an umbrella for all the families to work under when creating their displays/dioramas. Aside from staying within the theme, the only other rule is that each submission needs to have at least one Barbie as part of its display (I hope I'm getting this right). The goal is to then pack your display with as much firepower as possible....hence the name "Barbie"-cue. This year's theme was Sci-Fi and below are the BEFORE shots of the various submissions...

Terminator

Avatar (blue Barbies!)

Jaws

Star Trek (which ended up winning)

Explosives packed under the forward console

Star Wars (they even painted the Barbie's face like Darth Maul)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Hitchcock's The Birds

Dallin and I worked with Bryce and Natalie on Cowboys and Aliens. The movie hadn't been released yet, so we advertised it as a coming attraction. We poured lighter fluid in the water tower.

Our Barbie tied to the train tracks. 

And the AFTER shots...

Her leg was completely blown off.

Captain Kirk catches fire.

The Enterprise up in flames.

And the charred remains...

Dallin's final preparations.

Not even our little green men survived the attack.

So it's a tradition that allows for one to be both creative and destructive. A bit morbid? Maybe. Especially given how much everyone loved surveying the blackened and burnt Barbies once the flames were put out. But it's nights like this when I really feel that I married into the right family.