Our First Date "Aaaaa"

A few days after the brownies and wrestling Jason showed up to Institute much like any other day, except this time, Joe came too. I asked (read: told) Joe to fill in his name and phone # in my planner (cause I am super pushy). I also managed to finagle my way into going to lunch with him, and a few other friends of ours. Poor Joe had no chance! :) Interestingly enough within an hour all three of the other lunch attendees got called away to do other things that interfered with lunch and it was just Joe and I left. I casually mentioned that I was still hungry- and poor Joe (totally blindsided) agreed to go to lunch with JUST me. We decided to go to Marie Callendars, and we had a quite enjoyable lunch. During which I finally figured out that he had gone on his mission to Bulgaria (not Bolivia), and that he had only been home from his mission for a week or so. He was still feeling disconcerted from not having a mission companion at his side, and because of that, females made him decidedly nervous. He went on to tell me more about his mission, and that the hardest adjustment coming home was slipping back into the habit of speaking English, and hearing the sounds unique to the English language. He said one of the ugliest sounds to his ears was the hard "A" sound. That sound doesn't exist in the Bulgarian language, and it was just such a harsh and ugly sound. To which I replied, "Oh, you mean like in Paaaam?" The look on his face was priceless. He still gets teased because of it! Even though I intended to pay for my own food, he, being the gentleman he is, paid for the bill, then drove me back to the institute building to get my car. On the ride back, I learned that his awesome sense of style was not his sense at all, but that of his younger brother... Seems that he grew a bit on his mission so his dad took his younger brother to buy Joe a whole new wardrobe to come home to. He actually didn't love the style of his clothes much at all. :)

Stay tuned for installment 3: Subtlety and Games? No thanks!