Yours truly: i played a mean trick.

On my poor missionary cousin about seven months ago.

I did. It's true.

When my cousin was on his mission, every single letter he wrote me ended with the phrase, "...And you can't get married till I get back, don't forget our little promise!"

After about a million of these reminders from him, I got to thinking I could really take advantage of this situation.

So last spring, my family went to visit my grandparents in St. George over Easter/Conference weekend. My family invited Kolton along (and I maybe wanted him to come too) so he drove himself down to Provo and since I had classes and had to go a day later than my family, he stayed the night and we drove down the next afternoon. We had a lovely time all weekend chillin with the family and such, but one night we decided we oughta get outta the house and go for a drive, so we decided to drive down to the St. George temple to have a little look-see.

When we finally made it to the temple, we just sat outside the gates in my car and chatted and had a lovely time before we drove home.

In my weekly letter to my cousin, however, the night was explained a little differently.

I thought it would be really funny if I wrote to him and told him that I was engaged. I only thought this because he had been such a freak about it and was so concerned about me getting married before he was home.

Instead of us just driving to the temple and staying in the car, he got the story that we had walked around the temple grounds and found a little bench where Kolton had gotten down on one knee and proposed. In the letter I explained that we didn't have a ring yet, but that we were super excited and all was well. At the end of the e-mail I wrote in fine print. "Austin, this is just a belated April fool's day joke. Don't freak out because I am just kidding!!"

However, that dear cousin of mine did not read the fine print. In his next e-mail that he sent to the whole family he talked about how I was getting married and that everyone probably knew already. His whole tone of his letter was just so sad and depressed and I felt so bad when I was reading it! Just a few minutes after he sent the first e-mail, he must have read through mine again because he sent out another one saying that I was just kidding and not really getting married.

Oh it was so embarrassing!! I had just been messing around and he had taken everything so seriously and was so sad. I felt awful!

So the next e-mail I sent him, I told him he was a freak and that I was just teasing him because he had been so worried about something that probably wasn't ever even going to happen.

Well.....this weekend when I had to call him (my now returned-missionary cousin) and tell him an important, kinda big, new development in my life, I was reminded of this funny/mean little trick I played on him.

and I felt a little bad being so anti-climatic.

However, this weekend ended just a little differently