Rewind five years

I had a busy week! On Monday and Wednesday, I headed to the Woodbriar Trail and enjoyed all the June wildflowers.

Here, a mulesear is photobombing a sticky geranium.

I love the blue of Wasatch penstemon.

Utah sweetpea!

On Tuesday, I was off work, so I ran up North Canyon, my favorite trail, where I hadn't been since October. I was glad to see heartleaf arnica

 and a Nuttall's violet.

As I was running up, I was thinking how I missed pink springbeauties this year; since it was so rainy, I didn't do much spring running. But near the top, I saw some mixed with some glacier lilies! Glacier lilies first come out in March, so I was surprised to see them in June!

This weekend was the conference of the Mormon History Association. I didn't go, but I did some things this week that made me feel like I was still part of that academic community. Three years ago, a book I coedited, A Historian in Zion, was released. It was a reprint of the autobiography of Andrew Jenson, Assistant Church Historian at the turn of the twentieth century. For this book, I wrote the epilogue about the closing years of his life. He had a custom-made gravestone, an obelisk with a globe on top. The globe showed the route of his first trip around the world. His name was on one side of the obelisk, and his three wives each had their names on a side. At the time I wrote the epilogue, my boss told me that the gravestone had been stolen. But more recently, he told me he heard it was still there. I decided to go check it out for myself.

Now, finding a tombstone in the Salt Lake City Cemetery is surprisingly nonintuitive. The cemetery itself has no database, either online or on site, to tell you where people are buried. There might have been records in the sexton house, but it was closed. Findagrave.com does not say where in the cemetery he is buried. Wikipedia had coordinates, but they took me to the wrong spot. The Salt Lake Cemetery is huge, so just combing through it is not practical. I was ready to give up, but I finally just had to Google "How do you find someone in the Salt Lake Cemetery?" And a tourist website directed me to Names in Stone. Bingo! I finally found it, but it shouldn't have been that hard! I had looked at pictures on Find A Grave, but apparently the marker was moved at some point, because the surrounding landscape was different from the pictures.

Well, the obelisk is still there, but the globe is gone. If someone stole it, I hope they drop it on their foot, and then their foot never heals, and they have to limp the rest of their life, which will hopefully be short.

My old boss from the Church History Library is leaving to be a mission president this month, so he hosted a dinner for me and his two current research assistants. When I went to his house, he gave me a copy of a newly published documentary history he edited, The Annals of the Southern Utah Mission. I spent the summer of 2014 looking at PDFs of handwritten nineteenth-century documents, making sure they had been transcribed correctly for this book. Five years later, it's finally published.

With nearly nine hundred pages, this book is huge! I will have to make room for it on my "I edited this book" shelf.

Today I attended his farewell. It was a large church building, and all the overflows were full. They had four young men blessing the sacrament and sixteen passing it! I have never seen that before. Elder Snow of the Seventy commended their efficiency.

The 2014 nostalgia continued on Friday night. In 2013 and 2014, when I was in Provo, I loved attending the Rooftop Concert Series, free concerts during the summer months. They are a fun atmosphere and wonderful ways to spend summer evenings. (How can you prefer winter to summer? Winter doesn't have outdoor concerts!) This year is the last year, and this month the National Parks were playing. I hadn't been to the Rooftop Concert since I moved from Provo in 2014, and I wanted to see TNP. I first heard them in May 2014 at the Rooftop Concert.

I missed most of the first act, but the second act was Mindy Gledhill, whom I also saw at Rooftop back in August 2013. She is a talented musician, but I've grown a little tired of her. Also, her latest album is about leaving the Church. I'm glad for her to do her thing, but her thing is not my thing. The audience was surprisingly apathetic about her. 

But the National Parks never disappoint. It's always so enjoyable to hear Brady's voice and songwriting, the fiddle playing, and the contributions of the other band members. It's fun to be around fellow fans who know the words to every song. As far as local bands go (as opposed to individual singers), they are probably my favorite. I bought a new T-shirt and their Until I Live album on vinyl (even though I don't listen to records that often).

They mostly sang their own stuff, but they also played Clean Bandit's "Rather Be." That song (which I love!) was popular back in 2014, during my last months in Provo. The nostalgia had come full circle.

Toward the end, they said, "This is the part of the show where we go off stage and you awkwardly wait for us to come back on, so we're just going to play two more songs." I appreciated that, because encores are always awkward. During their last song, "As We Ran," they told everyone to get low, then they had everyone jump while they played one of the more upbeat parts of the song. They really put on a fantastic show. I highly recommend seeing them live.