Secondhand wildfire smoke

If you live in Utah, and most of you do, you know it was exceedingly smoky this week. I don't recall it ever being so smoky for so long--and yet, none of the smoke is local. It's all from other states. Crazy.

As the summer is coming to an end, I took the opportunity to go trail running three nights in a row, for more than an hour each time--the most I've done ever, really. It was interesting to see the blood-red sun as it was setting. I also saw lots of rabbits. Apparently August is the time that rabbits come out. Don't they know they should come out in April? (Fortunately, turkeys know they should come out in November.)

On Saturday me and two other people intended to hike the Living Room Trail in Salt Lake. (If you chafe at my pronoun choice, I'm a native speaker of English, so I can say whatever I want.) Unfortunately, we got confused by the multitude of criss-crossing trails, so we didn't make it there. But it was still fun.

As we were coming back down, I found a goathead plant, so I pulled it up. Then as I was carrying it in my hand, a dog not on a leash came up and tried to bite it! I think it soon realized it wasn't what he wanted.

I am continually amused by our cat. I don't understand the widespread hatred of cats, because they are inherently hilarious. She had been rolling around on the ground, and I didn't want to let her in when she was covered with grass.

 

Then I found her sleeping in an interesting position on the couch.

I also got to see the movie Once I Was a Beehive. While it was a little hokey at times, it was surprisingly good--one of the better movies in Mormon cinema, and yet it's about girls' camp, a rather random topic for a movie. It wasn't preachy. Of course, I have no firsthand experience to know how accurate the depictions were. Sometimes I felt like they tried to include too many pop-culture references that will someday make it appear very dated--like, in ten years will we still be talking about hipsters, One Direction ("1D"), Siri, The Hunger Games, and the expressions "totes" and "I know, right?" In the early 2000s, there was an abundance of low-quality Mormon films (I'm looking at you, Halestorm...). Things have gotten better--but my job has made me suspicious of the historical integrity of many of the "true-story" movies.