Simple pleasures

Sometimes it's about the little things in life. And August is full of simple pleasures.

For example, there are few things more enjoyable than picking plums from your own tree on a summer evening and eating them directly off the branch. Sadly, the plums are basically over for another year, but I got good use out of them. I love that they come back every year like clockwork; I can depend on them every August. We didn't have as many this year as we did in 2016, but last year we didn't have any.

 I made them into plum rosemary upside cake and plum crisp. The cake was especially yummy.

On Tuesday, my grandparents took me to see Pirates of Penzance at CenterPoint Theater, which I had never seen before. It was a little weird getting used to a nineteenth-century musical, even though I'm in the nineteenth century every day. I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the outlandish costumes and the snarky, anachronistic comments on the supertitles.

Wednesday was my day off this week, so I used the opportunity to hit up four more county seats for my bucket list.

First I went to Heber (Wasatch County). I didn't do anything substantial there; just looking for fall treats to review. (I still haven't found them.)

Then I drove to Duchesne (Duchesne County). I had lunch in a little diner called Cowan's. When I got there, a white-trash man and a white-trash woman were fighting with each other over something. They looked like they could have been a father and daughter. They had ridden to the restaurant together, but she walked home. All the waitresses were perplexed about the whole incident, and I heard one of them say that the woman had applied for a job at the restaurant. Pro tip: If you want a job at a business, don't go to the business and behave badly. One man asked the waitress how you pronounce Duchesne. And there was a man doing a radio spot for the Duchesne County Fair and an advertisement for the restaurant. He was glad the fighting couple had left before he did his live radio recording.

Then I headed out to Vernal (Uintah County); my uncle used to live there, so it wasn't a new experience. The last time I was there was back in 2012. I was on my way to the Utah Field House of Natural History, but I saw a sign pointing to the DUP museum, so I took a detour there. It was across the street from the Vernal Temple, which I haven't been inside since its open house. The DUP volunteers were happy when I told them their museum was better than the ones in Ogden and Logan.

Then I headed to the dinosaur museum. Just like Salem, MA, has taken witches as its theme, Vernal has taken dinosaurs as its theme. Dinosaurs > witches. The Morrison Formation from the Jurassic Period of the Mesozoic Era in eastern Utah is fabulous. What I also like about this museum is its display of mammals from the Eocene Epoch of the Paleogene Period of the Cenozoic Era. Dinosaurs get all the publicity, but uintatheres and brontotheres are pretty cool too.

I had recently told my friend David about my plan to visit these county seats, and he suggested I could hit Manila (Daggett County) the same day as Vernal. I'm glad I listened to him. I drove up past Flaming Gorgeous (sorry) into Daggett County, my first time in that little county. Along the road, there were geological signs explaining what geologic formation you were in, what the age was, and an interesting fact about it. I appreciated it. I drove through the Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Permian, Pennsylvanian, and Precambrian, with a random spot of Oligocene.

I stopped and ate dinner in Manila, which was a tiny county seat. All these little towns have restaurants that try to be sit-down restaurants when they should really be fast food joints. I said I wanted water with my meal, and my tree-hugging conscience was dismayed when they brought me water in a paper cup with a plastic lid! At least I didn't have to use the straw!

This is the Daggett County town hall.

 Then I drove home through Wyoming. I could make some disparaging remark about Wyoming, but they have Yellowstone, so I won't.

It turns out Wednesday was also International Cat Day. It is entirely ridiculous that a useless little creature of another species should bring me such joy.

Saturday at This Is the Place was Dog Day, where entrance was only five dollars and people could bring their dogs. I was dreading this day, since dogs aren't my thing, and it was going to be busy, and I was stationed in the Native American Village (NAV), my least favorite place to work. But it was surprisingly not that busy, and there were few dogs. A coworker from another team was visiting the park with her mom, and the mom asked for my contact information because her company is hiring! I realized that This Is the Place really would be an ideal job if I didn't already have a degree. But I didn't go to college to work with no air conditioning and no benefits.

The park was also hosting a Lower Lights concert, right across from the NAV, so all day I got to see them set up and rehearse. One of the set-up crew was wearing a kilt, and he brought his daughter in a witch costume. Weird. I attended the concert in the evening as a guest, not as an employee. We usually see them at Christmas, and indeed, they apologized for becoming a Christmas band. They really are a lot of fun to hear live. I speculate that they were all in town the past week to record new albums, since it's been nearly two years since their last one.

I hope the rest of August turns out just as simply delightful.