Fish, fries, facts

 On Tuesday at work, I was helping with "gold" panning. There is a stream where we mix the pyrite into the sand, and this stream empties into the pond that is surrounded by the mini train.

There are fish in the pond, and this week they decided to raise the level of the pond. But that meant that a lot of the fish were swimming up the stream! Then the kids would find them and pick them up. We couldn't have that, so all day we were battling fish. The stream was so shallow that they would get stuck. The stream goes underneath a sidewalk between the pond and the main portion of the stream, and a lot of them were hanging out under the sidewalk. At the end of the day, I used a hose to flush any remaining fish from under the sidewalk back into the pond, then we placed rocks to keep them from swimming back upstream. I find it so interesting that these fish have an instinct to swim upstream, even though there is nothing for them up there.

There are two fish in this picture; one is trapped by a rock.

There are several fish hiding under the sidewalk here.

Tuesday night was the last night with my nephews in town, so I took them to get ice cream. They love french fries, but since they're from California, they didn't recall ever having fry sauce. I had to rectify that while they were still in Utah, so I grabbed some fries and sauce from Arctic Circle. Preston (16) liked it, but the others didn't—but they might have liked it if I hadn't told them beforehand that it had mayonnaise in it.

They left with my parents early in the morning on Wednesday, which was also my day off. But it wasn't much of a day off, because I had to spend most of the day wrapping up my freelance project. But at least I was in air conditioning all day! I am now in the house all by myself.

When I'm at work in a site but there are no guests, I find things to do. I know some of my coworkers get bored at work on slow days, but I never get bored. When I was at the mini train this week, I used a shovel to dig up massive thistles. 

I also finished reading a book on the history of the Fourth of July, and I started reading a book on the history of St. Patrick's Day.

This is related to my project where I'm writing the history of Pioneer Day. Sometimes I discover things in my research that make my jaw drop. The Twenty-Fourth of July has been celebrated since 1849, but it wasn't called Pioneer Day until the 1870s. Last night in my research, I discovered that before the name "Pioneer Day" was used for July 24, the notoriously non-Mormon railroad town of Corinne had its own Pioneer Day on March 25! 

Sometimes I search Twitter (even though I don't have Twitter) to see what people are saying about Pioneer Day, but inevitably I get frustrated by all the borderline anti-Mormons mansplaining (or the religious equivalent) Pioneer Day. I also see a fair amount of well-intentioned people, even scholars, getting the facts wrong. For example, it is widely reported that 1857 was the first statewide celebration of Pioneer Day. No, it wasn't. And sometimes people make it even more wrong by omitting the "statewide" part. I also saw a recent video by a historian explaining Mormons and the Fourth of July. Even though he's the professional historian, I couldn't help thinking, "This information isn't wrong, per se, it's just incomplete." 

I'm hoping that maybe by the end of the year, I can have my academic article submitted! I do need to make some changes still. But I kind of don't want to, simply because it's currently twenty-four pages long, which is a perfectly symbolic number of pages.