Tan Christmas

Trail running is my favorite form of exercise, and I was able to do it six days this week. And I'm sad about it!

I want to save the Great Salt Lake, but it's very hard to when we got almost no snow in November, and almost no snow in December so far. At least we had a wet October. I want it to feel cozy and Christmassy, but it's hard to do that when the weather is in the fifties and sixties and there's no snow.

Actually, at the beginning of the week, we had some small piles of snow from the previous storms. And yesterday, Saturday, I ran up by the radio towers between Salt Lake and North Salt Lake, and I did see some patches of snow. 

In fact, there are already hyacinths sprouting in my mom's garden! It's still a week before the winter solstice! 

When I'm not running, I have been doing Christmassy things. The most Christmassy thing I did was to take my parents downtown to get standby tickets for the Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert. We can usually get in, and that's always a good time. This year's guests were Stephanie J. Block and Sebastian Arcelus, a married couple who are Broadway stars. I'm sure they would be great on Broadway. I thought Stephanie's singing style was a little odd for Christmas songs. The concert always features a story, and they told the story of the Apollo 8 astronauts reading verses from Genesis on Christmas Eve in 1968. I think that is an odd choice for astronauts to read to the world, and I also think that is an odd choice of a story to feature, though I always like hearing about astronauts. The organist Richard Elliott always does some epic mashup, so he played "Far, Far Away on Judea's Plains" along with "Glory to God" from Messiah, but it was arranged and accompanied so that it sounded like 2001: A Space Odyssey—it was very impressive but also kind of an odd mashup. They also had the audience sing along with a few Christmas songs. It was a good concert, just not as good as some of the others I've been to.

I have been doing other Christmas things like reading from Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, watching Christmas shows like The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, buying Christmas things like The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures, and getting Christmas treats like Sodalicious cookies with peppermint frosting right before they closed the location by my office.

And I continue to go through my Christmas playlist. I should finish the 2021 section today and make it to 2022. I use iBroadcast to upload and stream my personal collection, and the website seems to be down today, but at least the app is working. Yesterday I listened to the playlist while I used a giant zucchini from our garden to make stir-fried vegetables. They were OK.

This week I have been doing some tedious things for work (formatting footnotes), so I have been watching some things online. After watching the Christmas episodes of The Twilight Zone, I decided to watch the episode "It's a Good Life" with Billy Mumy, which is very famous, but I had never seen it. I found this episode quite startling in how relevant it felt—it could totally be retitled "GOP." The premise is there's an evil, omnipotent six-year-old named Anthony who can read minds and send people to the "cornfield." No one is allowed to say anything bad or complain, or else he will punish them. So they all have to tell him everything he does is good, because they are terrified. Many of Anthony's actions negatively affect not just others but also himself, such as when he sends potential playmates to the cornfield. When one character opens up an opportunity for someone to attack Anthony and bring him to an end, everyone is too afraid to do anything. When will Republicans wake up and stand up to the horrible monster who is destroying their lives?