The fresh'ning breeze and the clear, blue sky

My leisurely work days have come to an end. Not only do I have real work to do at work, I've hit that time of year when I need to bring work home with me. It's only going to get worse from here. But I'm trying to remain optimistic and enjoy living in the moment.

I'm hoping I'll be able to work from home some this week. Well, I'm officially supposed to be off Thursday and Friday because of the best holiday of the year, but I wouldn't be surprised if I work from home on Friday and Saturday. But I'm hoping the forecasted snow will enable me to work from home other days as well. (Some people get to decide whether we work from home when it snows, but they don't always do their job.)

I had to take advantage of the opportunity to do one last trail run before the snow sticks around and before work gets obnoxiously hectic. There are trails above Wild Rose that I don't often do because they are very steep, and there are many intersecting trails and I don't know where they all go. So yesterday I wanted to see where one of them went. It was a lovely, but chilly, day.

The trail was a dead end overlooking City Creek Canyon, so I don't need to go on that exact path again, but I'm glad to know where it goes.

We don't have any Druids in Utah, so I know this is not a Druid ritual.

I also went to another side trail, but it was not a dead end. I will have to see where it goes some other time. But I don't think it's an official trail, and I often feel bad contributing to unofficial trails. I've been using Wild Rose for five years now, and it amazes me how much the trail has widened and unofficial trails now look official.

It's fun to see the Depression-era ridges that were put up to prevent erosion from overgrazing.

I wore gloves to keep my hands warm, because they are the first thing to get cold. (When I see runners wearing pants and jackets but no gloves, I think, "You're doing it wrong!") But I used my gloves to hold my water bottle and to wipe my sweat, so they got wet, and I didn't know which was colder, no gloves or wet gloves. I haven't had wet gloves before?

At one point during my run, I had "Eggbert the Easter Egg" stuck in my head, so I had to replace it with "Guffy the Goofy Gobbler" and "Little Johnny Pilgrim."

This is one of my favorite weeks of the year. I just hope it will still be my favorite now that work is picking up.

***
That was the blog post I wrote before church. I was delighted when I showed up at church and we sang "Father, Thy Children to Thee Now Raise," which is the least sung of the five Thanksgiving songs in our hymnal (91–95). I'm a big fan of Thanksgiving music. My mom tells me this is one of the first hymns her family learned around the time they were baptized on Guam in November 1966. I was thinking about their legacy of faith as I was singing it. (I snapped a picture of the hymnbook, but then I remembered that you're not supposed to take pictures in the chapel, so I'm not putting it here.)

But thinking about a legacy didn't stop there. In the previous edition of the hymnal, the one my mom learned from, there was an additional verse to this song:
Thankful to thee that a pilgrim band
Brought us to dwell in this favored land,
Led o'er the deserts and plains by thee, 
Here to a land of true liberty;
Thankful to thee for the mountains high,
The fresh'ning breeze and the clear, blue sky;
And for the fields covered o'er with corn,
Which now our loved mountain vales adorn.

A decade ago, when I learned about the "pilgrim band" lyric, I recognized that it was talking about Utah pioneers, but I supposed that Evan Stephens chose the term "pilgrim" to connect it to Thanksgiving. Now I'm not so sure. I'm not sure when he wrote this song, but during Stephens's lifetime, it was indeed popular to compare pioneers to the Pilgrims. But Pilgrims were just starting to be associated with Thanksgiving during his time, so I'm really not sure. Regardless, the verse got me thinking about the heritage of both the pioneers and the Pilgrims, who did hard things for their values, and that's why I am where I am today.

I also taught an elders quorum lesson today, and I went on a tangent about how we use the term "stripling warriors," even though the scriptures never say that. They say "stripling soldiers." We never use the word "stripling," but we do use the word "soldier," so why do we keep the word we don't use but disregard the word we do use?

***
It's time for the penultimate installment of pumpkinundation roundup!

I made these pumpkin blondies from The Pumpkin Lover's Cookbook for a work function. My coworkers loved them. I liked them, and they were nice and pumpkiny, but I thought they were more like pumpkin bread or cake than like blondies. 7/10.

The snack table at work has had these Trader Joe's Pumpkin Joe-Joe's. They're fine, but they're not as good as Pumpkin Spice Oreos (which need to make a comeback! Are you listening, Nabisco?). 7/10.

With the Joe-Joe and the blondie, I also had a pumpkin chocolate chip cookie. They almost all taste the same. 7/10.

I got to try a Costco Pumpkin Cheesecake. I'm not a huge cheesecake person, but this was better than I expected. Not as tangy or dense as most cheesecake. 8/10.

Good & Gather Apple Pie Date & Nut Bars are Target's answer to Larabars. I liked these better than Larabars (they seemed nuttier), but they're still kind of weird. 7/10.

7-Select Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Mini Muffins are something that I forgot I even had, meaning they're not very memorable. But they're OK. The chocolate chips on top didn't do much. 6/10.

White Pumpkin Pie M&M's didn't come around until 2017, but they've been coming back because Mars finally nailed the pumpkin version of M&Ms (after a few misses in the preceding years). I like the pumpkin flavor with the white chocolate. 8/10.

In Park City, I went to lunch and had Windy Ridge Cafe Hot Turkey. This entree cost fifteen dollars, but it wasn't even that good. It was Cheesecake Factory prices for Village Inn quality. It was only worth half the price. I ate leftovers the next day and it was even worse, but it might have absorbed flavors from the container. But then I remember that food doesn't usually absorb flavor in that container. 6/10.

But the Windy Ridge Cafe Mile-High Apple Pie was worth the five dollars. It wasn't an unusual apple pie, but it was a large piece with ice cream. And since three-dollar cookies are the fad right now, I thought this was reasonable. 8/10.

There are so many cookie shops these days that I thought I'd try a Goodly Cookies Pumpkin Mallow Cookie. It's a pumpkin chocolate chip cookie with a toasted marshmallow on top. This was like a Chip cookie, with a dense, thick, moist interior. I didn't think the marshmallow added much—but it also didn't detract from it, so this was a wonderful cookie. 8/10.

I've seen these Voortman Bakery Pumpkin Spice Wafers for years, but I didn't get them until this week. They do have a pumpkin spice flavor and real pumpkin in them, but I didn't think they were unusually good. Everyone loves wafer cookies, but the pumpkin didn't add much new to the experience. 7/10.

I first saw a Pumpkin Spice Larry & Larry's The Complete Cookie in New York City in June 2018, and this year I saw that 7-Eleven was selling them, but I could never find them. I finally found one this week at a Park City grocery store. Since this is a protein cookie, it's dense and not super flavorful. It's OK. 6/10.

For over a month now, I have been searching for Roasted Turkey Pringles. I was even one of those crazy people who kept refreshing the Kellogg's website to try to get the Friendsgiving Turducken Pringles kit, but it sold out before I could order it. But I finally found them at Smith's! How are they? Well, they do have a strong umami flavor, but I wouldn't call it turkey. But I still really like them. But I also love most Pringles (except for any Pringles with a cheese flavor, which I absolutely can't stand). 8/10.

I got Pecan Pie M&M's a few weeks ago, but for some reason I neglected to post them here. These are one of my favorite M&M flavors. Like, I don't know that I can pick out a pecan pie flavor per se, but they're still a delightful seasonal chocolate. It would have been more innovative to use real pecans (after all, we have peanut and almond M&Ms), but I don't know if they would be as good that way. 8/10.

My latest frozen turkey meal is Smart Ones Slow Roasted Turkey Breast, which was the saddest of all the meals I've had. Even though the mashed potatoes were flavored, I thought they were the blandest. And the turkey wasn't a very good quality. 5/10.

And then we have Apple Pie Larabars, which are a typical Larabar. 6/10.

And I might as well show you this new apple variety, Autumn Glory apples. But aren't all apples a glory of autumn? These are pricey, but I did find some on sale at Lee's. They remind me of honeycrisp, but they're more like candy. I'm not sure what to think of the flavor, but they're definitely a wonderful apple, sweet and crispy. Possibly my second favorite (after Pink Lady). 8/10.