A full week

I had a full week!

On Monday, I went to North Salt Lake's Pride night. It wasn't anything special: They have food trucks and vendors every Monday in the summer, and this time they also added a DJ and a few booths of LGBTQ+ organizations. I didn't feel a need to engage with any of the booths, but I asked the NSL folks if they received any pushback for hosting Pride events (I noticed that the marketing two years ago was bolder, and they had Pride flags two years ago but not since then). The woman said as far as she knew, there was no pushback. So that was good to hear! 

With it being June, I once again began looking for goathead/puncturevine plants to eradicate. There are a few spots in the neighborhood that I have adopted to keep clear of goatheads. I do think I have made a substantial difference for these abhorrent plants.

My mom's garden has rhubarb, and she got some recipes from Pinterest for rhubarb cookies and rhubarb custard. I don't trust whoever made these recipes, because they just had rhubarb thrown in/on them. That wasn't great, and as the days went by, the rhubarb dried out and got tough. I don't recommend these recipes; rhubarb needs to soften up in some way.

The custard was good. It just wasn't good as rhubarb custard.

Then that evening I ran to the radio towers on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail. In late May, there's a spot that is gorgeous and fragrant with lots of Palmer's penstemon flowers. 

This is a picture from last year

I hoped I might see the bloom this year, since it was still early June. Unfortunately I missed the blooms, because I was on vacation during the end of May. But that's not the worst part. I have seen this spot posted on a lot of Facebook hiking posts. I was dismayed to see that a lot of the plants had been trampled, presumably from people taking pictures. Ugh, why can't you stay on the trail for your pics?!

I am so sad that there's no Summer Baking Championship this year to fill my Monday nights.

I went on additional runs Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and the wildflowers were spectacular.

sego lilies

tufted evening primrose

silky lupine

mulesears with Wasatch penstemon

I'm not sure what these are!

mulesears

On Wednesday, I hoped to go to bed earlier, but once I was done exercising, Reggie came and sat on me for more than forty minutes. 

On Thursday, we employees of the Utah Historical Society got to tour the new building north of the capitol, which will house the Museum of Utah when it opens next May. They have installed a stained-glass ceiling with Utah iconography.

This is an active construction site (we had to wear vests and hard hats), and I was amused to see a protective plate with "Hole" written on it. That isn't amusing on its own, but one day earlier, the Nancy Bluesky account had posted this strip from 1955, which I love (and I want to save it in case I give another PowerPoint in which I tell authors not to use big words just for the sake of big words).

On Friday morning, I noticed the friendly neighbor cat crossing the street. All of a sudden, the cat had vanished, and I recognized that the only place it could have gone was in the storm drain in the gutter! So I went and looked in the storm drain, and I didn't see it. I took a picture of the drain as a reference point, and next thing I knew, it had popped out of the storm drain! You can see that I took a picture of the cat here, but I didn't realize it was in the picture until I looked at it today! 

(Also, I rescued an injured neighbor cat from this drain about twenty years ago, but the grate has been replaced since then. Cats are just the most wonderful little creatures.)

On Friday and Saturday, I attended the Mormon History Association conference in Ogden. One of the perks of working for a history organization is that they pay for me to go to academic conferences like these. It was good to meet historians whose work I have long admired, and it was fun to see colleagues from various aspects of my career: BYU Studies, Church History Department, Wayfare magazine, and last year's Affirmation conference.

I won't tell you about all the sessions I attended, because it won't be interesting to most of my readers, and frankly, much of it wouldn't be interesting to me. But here are a few highlights:

• My BYU boss indirectly asked me to attend the session he was presenting at, because he was talking about Latter-day Saints in prison, which is a book project I helped out with. As he read his paper, I recognized that I had written much of the material. He acknowledged me by name in his session, so two people I know told me it was nice for him to give me a shout-out.
• A woman named Adrienne sat by me during the Saturday morning opening session. When I told her what I do professionally, she asked if I'm a runner. She had talked to my Utah Historical Quarterly boss the day before, and my boss told her that she has always worked with runners. (She might have said quiet runners, I don't remember.)
• When I went to lunch, Adrienne happened to be there and invited me to sit by her and an older man who used to work with sugar beets. I asked if you could eat sugar beets like you do regular vegetables; he said they are too salty and act as a laxative.
• The Saturday morning session was about pioneer monuments, by a woman who does not typically work in Mormon history. She talked about handcarts in historical memory, and she asked if anyone could help her with the chronology. After the session, I offered to send her my Pioneer Day article, since I do talk about that a little.
• One of the folks with Wayfare asked me to sing in a choir for the closing Sunday session. Because it's Sunday, it's a devotional session. We sang "Amazing Grace" and "It Is Well with My Soul," which are simple songs, but these were really challenging arrangements. They're some of those songs where the different parts have different rhythms. I usually sing tenor, but I had to do bass for these, because the tenor just went too high. We only got to practice three times before performing, and I practiced a little at home. We got better over the course of the practices, but I still didn't quite get it, and I think we messed it up a little. But it's done!
  
  
  
• This devotional took place in a 1930 building in Ogden. We met in the gym, and there were balls on the floor of the gym. I wore my rainbow tie, and someone told me it matched the volleyball on the floor.
  
  
  After the sessions yesterday (Saturday), I decided I wanted to try an Ogden trail, since I've never been running in Weber County. I ended up going on the Indian Trail, which was fairly steep, and it was hot, especially at the beginning. I came across some big rock outcrops, and I guessed it was Cambrian-era Tintic Quartzite, and my Rockd app confirmed that! (For those who are newer to my blog, back in 2013, I had a geology field studies class in which we hiked through Little Cottonwood Canyon and made a geologic map, which was one of the most memorable classes I ever took. Ogden Canyon evidently has the same or similar geology.)

  

  This was an outcrop of Tintic Quartzite.

  
  

  

  And I believe this giant layer of tan rock is also Tintic Quartzite

  
  

  

  I don't know whether this was Maxfield Limestine or Ophir Formation

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  It's nice to have eventful weeks. But also I hope to have some less eventful times.