Easter and a cannon

I had varied experiences at This Is the Place this week. On Monday and Tuesday, it was super rainy, so we closed early. When that happens, I like to go downtown to the Church History Library to do research for a project I'm working on, and on Monday this week, I was in a line behind Paul Reeve, a famous author in the world of Mormon history, who wrote the excellent Religion of a Different Color. But I was too shy and scared to introduce myself.

Then as the sunshine returned this week, This Is the Place was super busy. I gave several field trips. One class only had two students, and another had eight. (The rest had more typical numbers.) I feel conflicted about working there. It really is a mostly relaxing, mostly low-stress job. I don't dread going to work every day, and I enjoy all the quiet time I get, and I even like giving field trip classes. I like hearing the funny things kids say. On Friday, I was in the barbershop, where we put shaving soap on people's faces and then "shave" it off. Some kids wanted their mom to get a shave, but another kid didn't want her to, so when I put the soap on her face, he started crying. One toddler, "who was no more than two," took a look at her sister with soap on her face and said, "Oh no! What happened?" Then she covered her eyes. It was hilariously adorable. A few weeks ago, one kid (probably about three years old) said to me, "Tank you! You're handsome!" as he was leaving.

At the same time, though, I work less than forty hours a week, and it's seasonal, so I get no benefits. I'm a published author working with high school students, and I get less money than I could make working retail. It's way better than retail, because the people who come to the park are there because they want to be. But I can't help but feel vastly overqualified. (Because I am.) And sometimes I feel bad about myself that I can't get a real job.

On special occasions, we fire a nineteenth-century cannon. There's no cannonball, just black powder. On Friday, we were trained to operate the cannon, so all of us new people got to shoot it. I can now add "shot a cannon" to a list of my life's accomplishments. There are various words that must be shouted with each task of shooting the cannon, and I was somewhat inadequate because I literally cannot yell. It is a little intimidating to use such an enormous, noisy, dangerous weapon.

I enjoyed preparing for Easter. It does baffle me that such a wonderful, meaningful holiday gets so much less attention than the holidays of the last quarter of the year, and it seems to become increasingly less popular. Not that it's endangered, it's just shrinking. I mean, I like Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas more than Easter as well, but I wish Easter got more attention. All year long, I look forward to listening to the most adorable Easter albums ever made, but they're like fifty years old. Why isn't there anything more recent?

This year, I'm trying to do new things for holidays, so this year I bought an Easter lily, because we have never had one. It is gorgeous and fragrant. Our poinsettias always die after the holiday, but two years ago I bought a shamrock plant that keeps coming back to life, so we'll see how long this holiday plant lasts.

In 2012, I began counting carrot cake as an Easter dessert, and in 2013, the fad of carrot cake flavors for Easter began. Just this year alone, I have had many carrot cake items made specifically (or presumably) for Easter: Oreos, My Sugar Fix cookies, Crumbl cookies, Normal Ice Cream composed cone, Hostess Donettes, Dove Promises, and maybe some others I'm forgetting.

I'm all for it, because I love carrot cake. But really, it's the carrots that have the Easter connection, not the cake, so I decided to make carrot pie for our family dinner. I found a recipe online. I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected I would, but it was still a perfectly passable pie.

 We did have carrot cake as well.

Today in Sunday School, we read Doctrine and Covenants 19:16–19, and one person commented about the significance of the em dash in verse 18. Not many people know what an em dash is (you probably didn't notice that I used an en dash in my scripture reference), but I do, and I didn't buy his interpretation of the punctuation mark. So I looked it up and found that the original publication used colons instead of em dashes. But I didn't have the heart to invalidate the meaning he found in punctuation.