Healthy Dessert

Katherine, the girl I went out with last night, is doing a sugar-free thing for a little while, which presented me with a dilemma. I wanted to have some kind of dessert or snack after bowling, but I didn't know what I could get that was sugar-free.

I remembered that some of the girls I worked with last summer also tried a sugar-free diet, so I called my friend Hannah. She gave me a few ideas, including "yogurt parfait," which is what I went with in the end. She explained it as yogurt with granola and fruit, so I bought some strawberry yogurt, Honey Bunches of Oats granola, and a mango.

When Hannah explained it to me it sounded okay. Probably not going to be my favorite dessert, though. Well, it turned out to be absolutely delicious! We finished the mango last night, but there's some leftover granola and yogurt, and I just had more today. So if you are looking for a healthier dessert, this is a good choice.

Note: The yogurt isn't absolutely sugar-free. Katherine is just trying to avoid things like sweets, so she was okay with it. If you're trying to find something absolutely sugar-free, best of luck to you!

Truth or Dare Bowling

Last night I went on a date with a girl in my ward named Katherine.  You should already be impressed that I went on a date.  Anyways, I checked the weather the day before to find predictions of thunderstorms.  So all the great outdoor date ideas I'd been considering were out of the question.  I decided we would have dinner at my apartment, then go bowling.

Now, I enjoy regular bowling, but I wanted to make it a little more memorable.  I decided that for each frame we would have to bowl a different way.  For example: lefty, backwards, or granny-style.  I started looking online for some more ideas and found a site that suggested truth or dare bowling.  So I found/came up with a bunch of questions to choose from.  But because I wanted the best of both worlds, I decided that we would do truth and dare.  This is how we did it: the first bowler picks a dare at random (I printed off the truth questions and the dares and cut them into individual strips), and both bowlers bowl that way.  Then you pick a question at random, and both people answer.  It works better if you pick the question before bowling so that you have some thinking time.

You could do this a lot of different ways.  You could make it work with a group too.  Have each person pick an individual dare or question instead of all doing the same one.  If you do that I'd suggest returning them to the pool afterwards so that other people can still get it (and so you don't run out of papers).  You could actually do truth or dare and let people choose which they'd like.  Or you could say odd-numbered frames are truths and odds are dares.  Or if your score is odd, you have to do a dare, and if it's even you have to do a truth.  I'm sure there are even more things you can change.  If they let you, I'd suggest putting up the bumpers so that there aren't gutter balls (you'll get a lot).  Unfortunately at the BYU alley you have to have someone under twelve for the bumpers.

I had a lot of fun, and I got to know my date better.  And I didn't even have to make conversation!  The truths were plenty to keep it going.  Sometimes we had to remind ourselves were bowling because we got talking too much.  We had a great time, and the result was quite amusing: we tied.

Let me know if you want to see the list of Truth questions and Dares that I used.

Elder Ballard's CES Devotional

May's CES Devotional by Elder Russell M. Ballard was great!  Though he discussed heavy topics like technology, pornography, and (gay) marriage, he kept the mood light and made a few jokes along the way.  He talked about some really important things though.  I highly suggested watching, or reading, at the very least, this talk.  I suppose the CES devotionals are directed at the young single adult age group, but I think this one was very relevant to teenagers, and I think you will get a lot from it.  So here it is!  It's Sunday, so watching this is a great way to spend some time today!

CES Devotional May 2014

Love,
Nick