October, November

Ah, what a wonderful time of the year! 

On Monday, my family carved jack-o'-lanterns, but I didn't carve mine with them because I was at a ward activity. We had one pumpkin grow in our garden this year, and it was still a little green. I carved that one, and my mom bought other pumpkins from the store. Ours was bigger than the others.

Since it was such a big, healthy pumpkin, I kept the seeds to plant next year.

As I posted on Facebook, I decided to make mine look like the first known image of a carved pumpkin, from 1867 (at that time called a "pumpkin effigy"). It was such a big, beautiful pumpkin that I wanted to do something special. At first, I carved the face and worried it was too boring. But then I noticed that the original image had ears. It was just quirky enough that I was delighted.

On Tuesday, the Church History Department held a book release for volume 4 of Saints, and I was invited because of my position at Utah Historical Quarterly. The last time I went to a similar event, it was pretty informal. This time, I was surprised to see lots of reporters and photographers there, and most people were dressed up (probably because most of them were Church employees). I was wearing a haunted house sweater and a skull button-up shirt, so I felt overly informal. Oh well. Going there feels like home. I used to work there, and I talked to a colleague there who told me about the work being done on the Brigham Young letters project, which was what I contributed most to during my time there in 2022 and 2023. And yet, it also feels like it's not home, because I will probably never work there again. But I'm glad my Utah Historical Society job gets me in the door without actually working there. (I got a free copy of the new Saints book, but I already have items in my to-be-read list.)

On Wednesday, I went running to the radio towers, and on my way home I passed a Trump–Vance sign (which makes my respect for people plummet), and I noticed the apostrophe was facing the wrong way. See, it's supposed to have the round part on the top, because it is standing for 20. But with the round part on the bottom, it's a single opening quotation mark. Microsoft Word and other programs default to the way it appears on this sign, but the campaign team apparently couldn't hire a good editor to notice that. Make Typography Great Again.

Halloween was pretty low-key. I worked from home, and then I went on an evening run. It was fun to pass the beginning of the trick-or-treating festivities. I lit our jack-o'-lanterns, and I piped my Halloween playlist (up to 599 songs) both inside and outside the house. We had three groups of trick-or-treaters, eight total. I wanted to make sure we had plenty of candy, so we have lots of leftovers, which has made me sleep poorly the last few nights. I watched The Mummy (1932) with my mom, which I also watched on Halloween the last time Halloween was on a Thursday.

On Friday I was disheartened to get a bill in the mail. I had a physical exam in August, and apparently my insurance doesn't cover preventive exams. What the heck!? I didn't check that, because I've never heard of such a greedy, draconian policy before. Why am I paying insurance if it doesn't do anything for me as a healthy individual? Whoever made the policy should be handcuffed, with the end of a chain attached to the handcuffs and the other end attached to a train, and then the train should take off. (That's something I dreamed up more than a decade ago.)

Yesterday I went to the thirtieth birthday party of my friend Madi, and my friend Calvin was also there. Don't you think I look like a model?

And then I went up to explore the new Hornet Trail in Mueller Park. I was amazed at how beautiful the leaves still were, even though it's November. After less than a mile and a half, the trail reached a bridge, at which point it was only a downhill bike trail, so I had to turn around. It was cold and starting to rain, so it was a good time to do so.

I have been swapping out Halloween decorations for Thanksgiving. The outside is all done; I still have a little to do inside.

I have had my inflatable turkey for twenty years now! That is more than half of my life. Back in 2004, my baby niece loved to go outside and look at the turkey. "Turkey" was one of the few words she could say. It has held up well, even though the technology of inflatable decorations has gotten simpler. My inflatable cornucopia was made in China, and the LED lights are irreplaceable, so if they go bad, I'm out of luck. (One of the lights last year turned into a strobe light, so I had to exchange the whole thing.)

Here are this week's AI dream images. 

a woman gleefully smashes a cockroach with a small bottle

in a tour bus in Hawaiian mountains, Mark and Shane discuss their opinions on Coldplay and the show "Hoarders"

Mark wants to return three Squishmallows he just bought, but he can't find the receipt

(Oddly enough, I had this dream before I bought three Christmas Squishmallows this week. The ham cracks me up.)

Mark and Ann climb up a staircase with weird, tiny steps at McDonald's

Mark buys Costco muffins that come in the flavors of apple, pumpkin pie, banana pie, and turkey sausage

Mark and Susanne are in a car watching a Looney Tunes cartoon involving a seahorse

Mark looks in an eighteenth-century book that has a Marmaduke comic in it

Mark goes to a vendor fair in Plymouth, Massachusetts

Mark rides in a van with a woman and her family, and his boss pulls them over while acting as a volunteer sheriff

Mark can't figure out which stack to put the folding chair on

Mark's mom has bought many brands of protein bars

Mark's mom has bought many brands of protein bars (Each prompt usually generates three or four images, and these were both so funny I had to include two)

Mark calls his classmate on an old cellphone to see what she knows about the Salem Witch Trials

Mark chases a girl in orange and black clothes who stole fruit-punch-flavored snacks from a concessions stand (Hmm, I wonder where it got inspiration for this image . . . )

Mark attends a conference with his mom

Mark tries not to step in a puddle in his nice shoes

Mark is in a hotel with a female pop superstar and she plays her new song

Mark thinks he sees an ugly dog, but it's actually a porcupine, so he avoids it

elevated wooden slopes covered in snow are popular for biking, running, hiking, and sledding

Susanne brings her burger franchise home, so Mark tries to make his own pastrami burger

The Church History Museum has a jazz band playing "The Great Pumpkin Waltz," and they gave out large pyrite rocks

Mark's LDS ward choir releases a Christmas album

At Latter-day Saint stake conference, Mark's mom wears a cactus shirt, and his dad wears an enormous shirt

Mark finds some of his mom's old recipe cards, and he has torn one of them up

***

Whew, as if all the dreams weren't enough, here's pumpkinundation roundup! Now that we have switched to Thanksgiving, this includes Thanksgiving foods now.

For a ward activity, I made pumpkin black-bean turkey chili. I've made this before, and this time it was more watery than usual. Maybe because I used fresh pumpkin instead of canned? It was still good though. 8/10.

This Wowza Bakery Pumpkin Spice Cookie takes the classic and adds a generous amount of frosting. It was better than most. 8/10.

These cheap fruit pies are so trashy, and I love them. I worried the Kroger Caramel Apple Fruit Pie would not have much caramel, but there was a big glob of caramel filling. 8/10.

Thomas' Pumpkin Spice English Muffins have been around since at least 2013, and I'm glad. I don't love most English muffins, but I love these. Since I have so much sugar at this time of year, I usually pair them with eggs and cheese. The muffins have small pockets of pumpkin filling. 8/10.

My official review of DiGiorno Thanksgiving Pizza should go up on The Impulsive Buy this week. The turkey on it is great. There's something odd in the gravy, or maybe it's just the crispy onions. I am delighted this exists, and I would love to see more pizza companies follow suit. 7/10.

Well into fall

I'm just trying to soak in all the fall I can while it lasts!

On Monday, I decided to try the new trails in Mueller Park. They are in a pay area, but I'm not sure if you have to pay to hike, or only if you use a pavilion. In any case, the gate is closed for the season, so you don't have to pay now anyway. There was one called Hornet and one called Maple Syrup. They were both relatively easy, so I'll have to go back sometime. But there were lots and lots of mountain bikers.

I have an app called Rockd that shows where you are on a geologic map. Part of this trail is in the Farmington Canyon Complex, which is from the Archean era, in the Precambrian. So it's around 2.5 billion years old. It's amazing to see something so old!

An Archean metamorphic rock

After I got home, I decided to cook colcannon, which is basically mashed potatoes with cabbage and onions. Earlier this year, during the St. Patrick's Day season, I made colcannon for the first time and fell in love with it. Apparently it's a traditional Halloween dish, so I decided to make it again, and I hoped purple cabbage would impart a spooky color. And it did. Unfortunately, I didn't know that purple cabbage is tougher and takes longer to cook, so the cabbage is seriously undercooked. The texture is not great. And the flavor just tastes like potatoes and cabbage instead of tasting like colcannon.

On Tuesday, I went on a short trail run after dark, using my headlamp, and I heard coyotes howling in the distance. So that was cool.

Since I work in scholarly publications, I get paid to attend academic conferences, and Thursday and Friday was the Church History Symposium, which was put on by BYU and the Church History Department. So it was an academic conference with a devotional bent. It was at BYU on Thursday and the Conference Center on Friday. On Thursday they had Emily Belle Freeman, the current Young Women general president, and on Friday they had four previous Young Women general presidents. During that Friday session, someone asked why the current Young Women theme mentions "Heavenly Parents" but the Young Men one doesn't. The former presidents said the asker would have to ask the Young Men presidencies. (I don't care that much about that, but I am annoyed that the Young Men theme talks about becoming a missionary, husband, and father. What message does that send to young men who don't do those things? I'm 1/3 for those things.) Some of the sessions were more devotional than others. In some of the less devotional ones, they talked about how Correlation in the 1970s kind of lessened women's autonomy. Two presenters talked about food, so I asked if they tried cooking the recipes they came across in old records. They said the recipes are vague, like a "good amount" of flour. I have found that myself in old records. It's hard to cook old recipes, because they were written in different ways, and they also used different ingredients. 

They had a display of different artifacts, and I was surprised to see some pig-themed artifacts from 1989. My mom had an old pin/button from the same period with a picture of her and her friends as Young Women leaders wearing pig snouts. But it was apparently unrelated to the pig artifacts I found. (My mom thinks she got rid of the pin; it is missing.) 

Most of the presentations were centered around Young Women, rather than Young Men, because the Church Historian's Press is publishing a history of Young Women this coming spring. I contributed to that book in a very small way. It's wild to me that I was still working for the Church History Department less than a year ago. I miss working there, but I'm also glad I don't work there anymore, and I'm also sad that I don't want to work there.

And I also keep beating myself up for my awkward social interactions at the symposium.

As fall proceeds along, I don't know how much longer I will have for trail season, and I knew I had to go on a long run on the Mueller Park/North Canyon loop. I haven't been able to do that this year, for a variety of reasons. But I am happy that I was able to do a successful fourteen-mile run! It was challenging, but I wasn't even completely exhausted at the end. I was surprised to see new construction of a few other trails. My knee and my stomach cooperated all fourteen miles. Unfortunately, since it was the early afternoon, the sunlight was less pretty than it is in the evening.

I still go on walks to pull up goathead plants, and this week I had two people tell me they have seen me, so they asked me what I'm doing. One said he's noticed fewer goatheads this year. So it's glad to know my efforts aren't entirely unrecognized.

Here are this week's dreams.

the maintenance team removes old drinking fountains from a building, even though they still work

Mark has an appointment with his insurance agent, but the receptionist thinks he's there to eat at the restaurant

Mark visits the visitor center at the North Canyon trailhead

the gift shop sells a toy organ that can scroll through different sheet music

Mark debates whether he wants to run up North Canyon while wearing jeans

Mark carries a lot of things while wearing a bathrobe

David gives Mark an old, blue dinosaur towel to dry off

Mark finds a lost pair of car keys, so he returns them to an old lady in a care facility who likes drinking sweet tea

Mark picks pomegranate arils and pomegranates from a tree in the sunroom

Mark admires his cousins' old penguin bedsheets

Mark goes to Spanky's restaurant, but they are too busy and understaffed to serve him, and yet he lingers in the store

***

Here's this week's pumpkinundation roundup!

I think I first had Caramel Apple Pops in 1997. They're better than a regular lollipop, but also lollipops aren't that interesting. I always worry I'm damaging my teeth when I eat them. 7/10.

I added too much water to Trader Joe's Pecan Pumpkin Instant Oatmeal. It's fine; I don't love oatmeal. 6/10.

Sweet Rolled Tacos is a fancy ice cream shop at the Gateway, and I was happy they had the Sweet Rolled Tacos Pumpkin Party, which is pumpkin ice cream covered in chocolate chips and chocolate sauce. I think the pumpkin flavor got washed out by the chocolate sauce. And I am very annoyed when dessert places put plastic on their food. It's so wasteful! At least this one was a ring I could wear, but then I could feel my finger falling asleep. 8/10. 

I don't even like gummi bears that much, but Apple Crisp Gummi Bears sounded so unusual I had to try them. (The bag was Red Button brand, but I don't think they actually made them.) They are an apple flavor with a cinnamon flavor. They're OK. 6/10.

The Caramel Apple Cinnamon Kind Thins have a noticeable apple flavor, like dried apples. I don't love the flavor of dried apples. These are fine. 6/10.

Brooker's Founding Flavors is a quirky ice cream shop in Utah County that is themed around the Founding Fathers, and the employees wear colonial garb. The Brooker's Founding Flavors Salem Witch's Candy Corn Brew doesn't taste like much, because candy corn doesn't taste like much. But I'm glad they did something creative besides pumpkin. (The other ice cream I tried is made with Halloween Oreos, which is beyond the scope of pumpkinundation roundup.) 6/10.

BYU has a store called Milk & Cookies, leaning into their reputation of chocolate milk. They were advertising Milk & Cookies Pumpkin Spice Milk. But I was disappointed it was just whole milk with Monin syrup. It wasn't even their own proprietary flavor. And the syrup wasn't really that great. 3/10.

I have reduced my consumption of Trader Joe's products, but I wanted to try Trader Joe's Pumpkin Blondie Brownies, because brownies and blondies are great! Unfortunately, these were more like pumpkin bread than blondies. They didn't have the chewy texture I hoped for. 6/10.

Chocolate Pumpkin Spice Kind Thins are made with pumpkin powder, but the spices are more prominent. And chocolate is always great. 7/10.