Sunday, November 25, 2012

Merry Thanksgiving

The week of Thanksgiving is one of my favorite weeks of the year. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and I'm sad it's over. At least we have the Christmas season to cushion the blow.

Only one of my classes was scheduled on Tuesday, and that just consisted of group work--the professor wasn't even there. After work, I got prepared to leave. I had offered to take a girl in my ward, Larissa, up to Salt Lake to meet her aunt for Thanksgiving. Even with my GPS, I managed to get lost a few times. But then I went home. And it was great to be home--I did no homework whatsoever during my time at home! I'm excited that in two and a half weeks I will be home again for longer, and I won't even need to feel guilty about not doing homework! I'm just worried about all the muddy homework projects I have to wade through before that time.

Wednesday consisted of getting ready for Thanksgiving. I went running in Bountiful. It was great to run on Bountiful Boulevard again; on that day and on Saturday I ran the furthest I've ever run in Bountiful. I discovered a cord I could use to hook up my laptop to the stereo, which meant that I could play my Thanksgiving music on good, loud speakers. (If only I had more good, loud Thanksgiving music!)

We had a bunch of family over to our house for Thanksgiving. We brought up a folding table and a former eating table (it got replaced by a smaller table and was banished downstairs) in order to fit everyone. We had all sorts of Thanksgiving foods; it was great to wake up to the smell of turkey cooking. After dinner and after some people had left, I introduced my family to Loaded Questions, a game that some equine acquaintances introduced me to this summer. It's like a combination of Apples to Apples and the Ungame, which makes it ideal for my family. That evening we watched A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and an episode of The Munsters, "Low Cal Munster," which I have had for eight years but haven't yet counted as a Thanksgiving show (because it originally aired in October).

Then Friday started the Christmas season! We didn't do a whole lot of decorating, in part because we are planning to be out of town for Christmas Day. But we did some. I have been glad to start listening to Christmas music. I have four Christmas albums this year that I didn't have last year. One is the Lower Lights' Christmas album, which I bought at their concert in October. I also listened to the MoTab's latest Christmas concert album, Once upon a Christmas with Nathan Gunn. I'm kind of disappointed. A long time ago, they mostly had operatic guests for their Christmas concerts. The only one of their concerts I've seen was in 2005, when they had Renee Fleming. I didn't care much for her because she was so operatic. I think the only people who like that kind of singing are those who have been educated to like it, and what's the point of that? This was back in the day before they started releasing entire concerts as albums. Then something changed, and for five years in a row they had non-operatic guests: Sissel, the King's Singers, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Natalie Cole, and David Archuleta. I've collected all of their Christmas concert albums, and some of them are great. But Nathan Gunn is operatic, and I think their guest for this year is also operatic. I hope they return to non-opera singers next year. The new president of the MoTab has said he wants to be on  "young people's playlists," but picking opera singers is not the way to do that.

But I don't just listen to religious Christmas music. Amazon gave me $2 of MP3 credit, and I had $2 on the Amazon gift card my sister got me, and they had Colbie Caillat's new album Christmas in the Sand for download for just $4. I usually like to get physical CDs, but since I could get an entire Christmas album without paying anything, I just decided to go ahead and download it. It's good, although I'd say I'm neither impressed nor unimpressed. By far my favorite new collection this year is Christina Perri's EP A Very Merry Perri Christmas.
 

I also made a discovery. Last week I ranted about how terrible Christmas radio stations are. Well, I discovered that 98.7 is now an all-Christmas station, and it is much better than FM 100 and 106.5. In all my time listening to it the last few days (which admittedly isn't a whole lot), including my hour drive to Provo, there have only been five songs I've heard before, and one of those is Cherie Call's song "Gifts." I've only heard it because I own it; I've never heard it on the radio before. The other four were fairly typical (Beach Boys, Mannheim Steamroller, Carpenters, and "Feliz Navidad"), but at least they weren't "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," "Jingle Bell Rock," or "Christmas Canon." So if you are a Wasatch Front person who likes all-Christmas stations, I recommend 98.7 instead of the old standbys. I think they are more likely to play local artists than FM 100, which is ironic because FM 100 is owned by Deseret Media Companies, which also owns Deseret Book and some of those Mormon recording labels. I don't usually like all-Christmas stations, but I might convert to this one. (I only discovered it because they are usually a mainstream station and I went to listen to them.)

I'm sorry this post has sounded like an advertisement for Christmas music. I'm sure this week was more interesting than I make it sound.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

My annual rant

I was quite disappointed to see all the Christmas stuff up on campus this week. Lit Christmas trees in the rooms where we have church. Hanging ornaments at the Cougareat. Large trees in the library. I don't understand why the only holiday BYU decorates for is Christmas, because Christmas is the holiday when there will be the smallest amount of people on campus. The only times when there are big breaks from classes are August and December, and in August there is education week. I think BYU should spend that time and money for holidays when people will actually be around. Like Easter. Or the Fourth of July. Or--here's a novel idea--Thanksgiving.

This is what bothers me most about early Christmas. It's like people forget all about Thanksgiving. Some might say, "I can still enjoy Thanksgiving while having up Christmas decorations and listening to Christmas music." But I don't think that's completely possible. I don't think it's possible to do that without saying, at least to some degree, "Thanksgiving, you're nice, but you're just not good enough for me."

A lot of people seem to think that as soon as Halloween is over (or even before it's over), it's time to start thinking about Christmas stuff. They either think, "Halloween is over, which means it's Christmastime," or else they think, "Halloween is over, which means it's Thanksgiving, which means it's time for Christmas stuff." Either way, it's overlooking Thanksgiving. And they're celebrating Christmas nearly two months early!

I abstain from Christmas until after Thanksgiving to respect Thanksgiving. But I also do it to respect Christmas. Some people think I must be a grinch or hate Christmas. On the contrary, I love Christmas. Christmas is a special time, so I don't want to bastardize it by celebrating it early. If I did, I would no longer associate Christmas stuff with Christmas. I want to keep special, so I keep it in its proper time frame.

Some people say, "Shouldn't we have Christmas in our hearts all year round?" Well, we should have feelings of peace on earth, goodwill to men and love and joy and happiness and all that year round. But if you think we need Christmas to have those things, then that's sad.

Some people say they could listen to Christmas music year round. If you did that, then it would no longer be Christmas music. It would just be ordinary music. I think that the draw of Christmas music is the emotions attached to it, and listening to it when it's not Christmas dilutes those emotions.

I sincerely doubt it's the quality of the music that people like, since most popular Christmas music you hear isn't very good. This is a rant I could explain even during Christmastime, but it's especially annoying at Thanksgiving. It seems that most Christmas music falls into three main categories:
  1. Good music that is overplayed. Everyone likes Nat King Cole, but do we really need to hear "The Christmas Song" yet again? He sang other songs, you know.
  2. Music that might have been good at some point, but it is outdated. I cringe whenever "Jingle Bell Rock" comes on. Both the voice and the instruments are annoying. Maybe it was cool in the 1950s, but it's not anymore. There is some music that is good after fifty or sixty years. This is not an example of such music.
  3. Music that was never good to begin with. The best example of this is that [expletive] awful "Christmas Canon": "Merry Christmas Merry Christmas Merry Christmas on this night on this night on this Merry Christmas night" AAUGH! As far as I'm concerned, this song should have never been made. And if it was made, it shouldn't have been recorded. And if it was recorded, it shouldn't be played. And if it's played, it most certainly should not be played FIFTEEN TIMES A DAY FOR TWO MONTHS OF THE YEAR!!! Whoever decided it was a good idea to record the song should be shot with a BB gun. Whoever decided it was a good idea to play it over and over should be slowly, painfully tortured by being required to listen to this dreadful song on repeat 24 hours a day for three months, which is almost what they do to us. I have never met one solitary person who actually likes this song, but I've met plenty of people who hate it.
Now, if these songs were the only Christmas songs that existed, I could understand it. But they're not. Think about all the musicians there are who have recorded Christmas albums; and if not albums, EPs; and if not EPs, singles. Why, just this year there are new Christmas albums by Rod Stewart, Cee Lo Green, Lady Antebellum, Colbie Caillat, Scotty McCreery, Blake Shelton, and Christina Perri. (Funny side story--Last weekend I told my mom I wanted Christina Perri's new Christmas EP [which I bought this weekend], so she said she'd keep an eye out when she went to the store. She came back and said, "No Jan Perri." Only in my life could Christina Perri be called Jan Perri!) There's seemingly an infinite supply of Christmas music. But what do we get? "Jingle Bell Rock" and "Christmas Canon."Over and over and over.

I choose to respect both Thanksgiving and Christmas by observing Thanksgiving. People in my ward have been impressed with my two Thanksgiving ties. I went home last weekend to put up Thanksgiving decor, such as Pilgrim lights and inflatable turkeys. I've been eating candy corn and fall-colored M&Ms (I bought six bags of Thanksgiving candy on November 5). And I've been listening to Thanksgiving music.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of Thanksgiving music (only 25 songs), and a lot of it isn't very good. But considering the quality of the above mentioned Christmas music, that's not much of a loss. Hymns 91-95 are Thanksgiving songs. Most of my recordings of them are those terrible recordings from LDS.org. I don't understand how they possibly made them so terrible; they could have visited any BYU ward and asked for a few volunteers to sing and play piano and it would have been ten times better than what they have. But it's free Thanksgiving music.

Hymns make up a significant amount of my Thanksgiving music, and I have a few other odds and ends. But the other bulk of my music is songs from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. I love listening to those songs--not so much because of the musical quality (although it's certainly not bad), but because of the strong emotions attached to them. I believe I have every song available from that special, but it took me four CDs to collect them all, and there are still three pieces of music unavailable: the music that plays when Franklin and Marcie meet Peppermint Patty at her house, the music that plays when Snoopy and Woodstock dress as Pilgrims, and the brass version of "Linus and Lucy" that plays when they make their popcorn-and-toast feast.

I didn't download this song, because I don't use iTunes and I can't find it on Amazon. I can't decide whether I should be disappointed or relieved. 

I am so excited for Thanksgiving this week. It's one of my favorite days of the year. The family gets together, there's lots of good food, the weather's wonderful, and it's just a good day to relax and be thankful.

And I will happily start listening to good (non-radio) Christmas music. The day after Thanksgiving.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

A tarantula story

I'm making this post because it's something that has simply amazed me this past week, and I kind of want to vent.

You may recall that I have a tarantula problem. Now, this tarantula is kind and benevolent. But scary. And very, very weird.

This past week and a half has been especially weird. It must have eaten a radioactive cricket or something with all the weird stuff. For simplicity in this post, I am going to use the term roommate to refer to my roommate who shares my room, and the term flatmate to refer to my roommate who does not share my room. These are things the tarantula has done in just over a week:

  • My flatmate came home at 2:00 a.m. and wanted to go to bed, but the tarantula had placed all of its stuff all over his bed. This tarantula owns an incredible amount of stuff. It's especially incredible when you consider that it's a creature that doesn't even own a car. I would guess it owns 75% of the stuff in the apartment. Or at least 50%.
  • A girl made cookies for that same flatmate. The tarantula gave those cookies to its dinner group. Without asking my flatmate.
  • It also gave the pumpkin seeds I made on Halloween to its dinner group. Without asking.
  • My flatmate's boss had made my flatmate some banana bread or something. That disappeared too without my flatmate getting any. That wasn't even something that was ever mentioned to be shared with anyone, and there wasn't enough to share anyway. 
  • And by the way, this was a dinner group the tarantula recently joined. It left its previous dinner group because it didn't like the food they made. 
  • It opened my and my roommate's bedroom door early in the morning and then closed it again, without any explanation. (This was at least the second time it has done so.) 
  • It was on a date in our apartment in which he and the female made pumpkin pies and construction paper leaves. During this date, it listened to Christmas music and even blasted "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" really loud.
  • For this date, it used my pumpkin-shaped pie dish, which is fine with me. But then it lent the dish to the girl without asking me, when it could have just as easily sent her home with the other one.
  • And in this date (which involved long periods of silence, and lasted until after 12:30, which is cutting it close to the Friday night curfew of 1:00), it used my flatmate's construction paper. Without asking him.
  • A few weeks ago, it added a bookshelf to our kitchen (it already has two whole shelf cases in the kitchen, each consisting of four shelves completely full of stuff that belong to it). This week it moved that new bookshelf and put it on its desk. At least it's out of our way now.
  • It has placed a large pile of boxes in front of my flatmate's side of the closet.
  • It folded my underwear.
  • It moved some of my roommate's clothes from a closet outside our bedroom into his bedroom closet. Without asking my roommate.
  • It put some random stuff inside our bedroom door. One of the things is a "Welcome to Paradise" sign it itself bought at DI this summer.
  • After an extensive redecoration this summer before it even moved in, this weekend it put up two new posters in the kitchen. One is a Mormonad, and the other is a poster seemingly bragging about the St. George Marathon. 
  • When a neighbor came looking for evaporated milk, it asked (however tarantulas speak) my flatmate if he had any evaporated milk. My flatmate was thinking of powdered milk instead, and responded that he didn't have any. To which the tarantula said, "Yes you do," and pulled a can out of my flatmate's cupboard to give to the neighbor.
Any of these things by itself would be unusual by itself, but relatively innocuous. But all of them happening in one week--it's insane!

I sometimes think I'm the strangest being on the planet. But all this makes me realize that might not be the case. 

A note: The tarantula is a good being and I like it. This post focused on the negative, but there are good things as well. They just don't always balance out...

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Death Valley Days

You will have to forgive me for this post. I am actually posting something that happened last weekend, even though I mentioned it in my post last weekend. But I'm going to tell you about my field trip to Death Valley.

You will also have to forgive me because I know that blog posts about vacations are boring. When I read vacation posts, I think, "Well, that's nice for them, but so what for me?" But I understand why people like to post them, because they are interesting to the poster. So since I find it interesting, I'm going to post it.

You also have to forgive me because I am not a photographer. I just have a cheap point-and-shoot camera I got five years ago, and I'm not good at taking pictures anyway. Also, I think some sand got in my camera, causing the little lens screen thing to not function quite properly, so sometimes the pictures are a little obscured.

On Friday, November 2, our class met at 7:30 a.m. to prepare to go on our trip. We all (about thirty of us) piled into four vans and one pickup truck. These are twelve-passenger vans, so it was pretty roomy. I was in the van with my professor, our TA, and four classmates, one of whom is the TA's younger brother. We headed south, our professor pointing out faceted spurs and cinder cones along the way.

We stopped at a church parking lot in St. George for lunch. We had to go to the St. George Temple Visitors' Center to use the restrooms. Then we got back in the vans until we got to our next resting spot at a Las Vegas gas station.

Then we made it to our destination in Death Valley. For some reason they kept our location quite hush-hush all through the semester, but I knew where we were going because of rumors. Thus when our professor said, "Welcome to Death Valley," there were some jokes like, "Oh, is that where we are?" This was our first stop. I think it's called Dante's View. You can see all the deposited sediments on the valley floor and the alluvial fans. Death Valley is in the Basin and Range Province. The valleys form because the continent is extending. As air from the coast hits the mountains, it rises up, dries out, and comes down again drier and warmer. Hence the reason Death Valley is the warmest place in the U.S.
We went to our campsite near Stovepipe Wells. We set up our tents (I was about to set mine up but someone invited me to share a tent) and we had a dinner of hot dogs and bratwurst. There was a kangaroo rat running around trying to catch any food we dropped. That night, many of us went out to the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes. The moon was bright, and since we weren't near a city, it was easy to see the stars. It was a beautiful night, and as I was lying in the sand with my shoes off, I looked up at the night sky and thought of how amazing it was. It's amazing to think that there are billions and billions of stars out there and we can see them, even though they're so far away!

The next morning, all of us went back to the dunes. We had to analyze the sand formation. The dunes--at least part of them--are pretty young, which we know because they have a lot of things besides quartz, such as feldspar and magnetite. The dunes had varying sizes and directions of ripple marks. Unfortunately, I'm not too good at understanding the relationship between saltation and ripple formation. We looked at the sand particles, and at the interdunes (the flat place between dunes) some of us licked pieces of the ground to discover that it had a clayey texture (it stuck to our tongues). We found a kangaroo rat den, which shows differing layers of the dune.
We climbed to the biggest dune. I'm glad I'm in better shape than I used to be!
The Mesquite dunes are transverse dunes, which means that there's a lot of sand and one prevailing wind direction. As a kid, we used to go to some dunes near Flowell (Fillmore) at Easter. Those were barchan dunes. Barchan and transverse dunes basically form the same way, except that transverse dunes have a large sand supply.
We went and saw this formation. I believe these are clays, which is why they erode like this. And there is igneous material (I can't remember if it's ash or cinders or something else) on the top.
We went and ate lunch on a road. That location had very soft ground that consisted of volcanic cinders underlain by volcanic ash.

Then we drove for about an hour on an extremely bumpy road to get to my favorite location on the trip. This place is called the Racetrack. It's a playa (a dry lake bed, from the Spanish word for beach). Which is pretty cool by itself.
But this is no ordinary playa. All over the ground are rocks, some of which apparently are as big as 800 pounds. And they move! No one has ever seen them move, and no one is quite sure why they do. But they definitely move and leave tracks. One theory is that it is so flat that when it gets wet, it gets really slick and wind can push the rocks along. Another theory (which makes more sense to me) is that it freezes over on occasion, which obviously reduces the friction and the rocks can slide. But it still remains a mystery.

The woman in the pink is our professor.

We stood on a mountain (covered in rocks with a "rip-your-pants" texture--I think it was chemically eroded limestone, but I could be remembering wrong) from which these rocks originated. I think the photographer on the right side of this picture is the one someone apologized to (since there were thirty of us in his picture), but he said he needed us in his pictures because he worked with a BYU grad.
The texture of this playa was different from what we would see in other places.

Then we drove back on the bumpy road for another hour. I'm kind of glad the road is so bumpy because it prevents dumb, irresponsible people from messing with such an awesome place. Then we went and looked at some volcanic craters. There were sediments deposited, and a magma chamber came up through the sediments. It was mafic magma (meaning it has a lot of magnesium and iron), which tends to be more peaceful than silicic magma (like Mt. St. Helens), but there was a lake here, which resulted in a big explosion (when mafic magma mixes with water, it becomes explosive, which is why the Iceland volcano a few years ago was so disastrous). On top of all the sediments are cinders and I think ash.
We headed back to our campground and ate fajitas and visited with a transient (in a positive sense) named Ken at the next campsite over. I guess he was lonely so he came and visited us for a long time.

The next day was Sunday, and surprisingly we as BYU students were out doing things. We followed the roads on alluvial fans. We came and visited this area, called the Devil's Golf Course (one of my classmates said, "We're so mean to the devil"). I believe this is also a playa, and I think these are basaltic rocks. Water occasionally deposits halite on top. I couldn't help licking the deposits a few times.
This is a bad picture, but I was glad to see an example of olivine in its natural habitat. Olivine is a green mineral in mafic lava--the more mafic it is, the more olivine there is. I hope this is olivine--if it's not, I'll be disappointed.
Then we headed to another playa, Badwater Basin. If you look closely, you can see a sign on the mountain that indicates where sea level is.
Badwater Basin gets more water than Devil's Golf Course (probably because of its elevation), so the salt is more a result of dissolution than it is of deposition. The halite was easier to lick here. Strangely, this week I was in the geology computer lab, and the computers around me had screensavers of different locations, one of which was here. It gave me the strangest cravings. I think it was the first time I've had a craving for an entire location. It sure was tasty!
Our final stop in Death Valley was near this ghost mine (Death Valley used to be used to mine borax). It was really hot; I would guess it was in the 90s. We ate some lunch and had a brief devotional before heading out.
On our way back, I introduced my fellow passengers to the Lower Lights. We stopped in Vegas at an In-N-Out. I was surprised that the one day we went out to eat was a Sunday. I was a heathen with my class and bought some food (some others just ate leftover food on the truck); I justified it because I needed to use the restroom and I would feel bad doing so without being a customer. Someone jokingly said that we might as well be drinking coffee, since we were already breaking a commandment. Then we headed back (making another gas station stop in Beaver), and we arrived in Provo at about 9:00.

I know you might not think it sounded that fun, but it really was. I think there's just something fun about a weekend-long field trip with a class. It was fun to be with all these geology people when I'm an English Language major. I could pick up a rock and examine it without anyone looking at me funny. It kind of made me sad I'm not a scientist. But then I think of all the chemistry, physics, and math I would have to take, and I think, "Nah. I'm good."

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Fin Octobre, Début Novembre

Yay! It is my favorite month! But I'll have to skip all the celebrating tonight because I'm very tired and I want to go to bed, and I have to take a shower because there's sand in that part of my body I don't like talking about, namely my hair. So I'll keep it short today.

I had an OK Halloween. I had to do homework and studying. I turned on some Halloween music while I carved the Obama pumpkin you may have seen on Facebook. A girl I knew this summer, Amberly, stopped by with a friend of hers. Amberly admired our Jan Terri picture and told her friend she would have to show her Jan Terri, so I brought my computer out and we watched "Get Down Goblin." I took a short break from homework to make an appearance at an informal Halloween party. And then I watched that ridiculously cheesy TV movie The Munsters' Revenge.

But November 1 was a crazy day because I had to take two tests and do some other odds and ends (including voting). I was glad when I got everything that day.

And the reason I had to do all of that on Thursday and why I am so tired now is because I went on a field trip! My geomorphology class all went out to Death Valley. It was really, really fun. I was thinking about what a good decision it was to become a geology minor. We saw transverse sand dunes, volcanic craters, and mysterious moving rocks. Maybe I'll tell you all about Death Valley sometime. But not tonight.

As we were driving home I texted my roommate Scott to ask if he could meet me on campus to help carry some stuff back. Well, he showed up with seven other people from my ward. I didn't expect a welcoming committee!