Sunday, June 26, 2022

Blurry

 This is going to be ashort post because I can't see well. I am typing without looking at my screen because my eyes are blurry. I had PRK on Friday morning. They used a thing to keep mye eyelids open and taped the other eye shut. There were lots of drops going into my eyes, and I had to look at a green light. Then lasers came and did their magic. Then they did the same to the other eye. 

Since then, I have been a little blurry. I can see better than without glasses before, but it will take some tyime to heal. Today (Sunday) has been the worst day. But I hope it will get better. They said it would get worse before it got better.

Just for fun, I am going to post this without proofreading. And I typed it all with my eyes closed.

Sunday, June 19, 2022

A few items

 I have several unrelated things to discuss this week, so I'm dividing my post into sections.

A Big Change

On Friday, I went to Moran Eye Center for a consultation for LASIK surgery. I don't qualify for LASIK (my corneas are too thin), but instead I qualify for PRK, which is the same idea, except that it has a longer recovery time. So this coming Friday, I will have eye surgery! I am nervous (the recovery will take several days) and a little sad—I have worn glasses for twenty-five years, and they are almost a part of my identity. But I will be happy to have good eyesight. There are so many things I don't like:
  • My glasses fogging up when I wear a mask
  • Being blind when I'm swimming or paddleboarding (because goggles fog up)
  • My glasses flying off when I workout (only certain styles of glasses do this)
  • Not being able to trim/shave around my ears because glasses are in the way, but if I take the glasses off I can't see
  • Not being able to see when I wake up in the morning
  • Not being able to see where my lenses end, and having the edges of my lenses blurrier than the center
  • Not being able to conveniently wear sunglasses
  • Having to plan Halloween costumes around glasses
  • The cost of glasses
This will be a key moment in my life!

A New Musical

This year, my cousin and niece have been attending musicals and inviting other family members as well. One of the musicals was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I knew I had to see it. I was a huge Roald Dahl fan in elementary school, we used to watch the 1971 movie all the time at my grandparents' house, and I was borderline obsessed with the Tim Burton movie when I was in high school. 

Tuesday was the day, so I accompanied my sister and niece to meet my cousin at Eccles Theater for the play.
When it started, I worried it would be too sweet and not subversive enough. It ended up being overly subversive. The book and the two movies are dark, but there's a subtlety to it. This musical was not subtle at all, and it strongly implied (at least) that Augustus, Veruca, and Violet actually died. I didn't like that (I like the scene in the book and the Burton movie when they see all the naughty kids leaving the factory). I was also surprised to see a twenty-first-century musical lean so heavily into Bavarian, Russian, and fat stereotypes. But it was still entertaining. They kept some of the songs from 1971, and they incorporated elements from the book and both movies. 7/10.

Picking Things

Longtime readers of this blog will remember that every June, I like to go find goathead plants to pull up in an attempt to eradicate them. This year, I'm taking a different approach. I used to like to go to lots of different spots on one or two occasions each. This year, I'm going to only a few spots on multiple occasions. I think this will be more effective. I will be able to catch the plants while they're still in their early stages, while they're easy to kill and haven't developed seeds. And if I keep up on it, the plants will be so small that I can continue eradicating them all summer, instead of just the month of June. (The plants get too sharp and dangerous when they get big.) This way, I think I will be able to notice a bigger difference. 
Baby goathead plants. They're so cute! Just like Chucky the doll.
But I never have time to do everything I want in June. It's also the season for picking cherries from my sister's tree. I wish I had all the time I wanted to pick cherries, pit cherries, and bake with cherries. But pitting cherries just takes. so. long., even with a cherry pitter. I looked online for an electric one, but I could only find impractical industrial ones.
So many cherries! So little time!
And speaking of plants, here's a butterfly on some Wasatch penstemon. (I started running up North Canyon yesterday, but it was so dusty and windy that I didn't think it was wise to complete the run.)

The Best Halloween Ever?

OK, so, I feel a little awkward geeking out over my own very niche fandoms, but this is my blog, so I can do what I want. I know this is four months early, but you guys, this is going to be, like, the best Halloween ever!

Back in 2018, they released the soundtrack for It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, but the original recordings were lost, so they lifted the music from the TV special with all the sound effects still intact. People were understandably disappointed. But! This week they announced that they had found the original recordings, so they are rereleasing the album, the original versions, this August! I know this is insignificant for most people, but this is a huge deal for Vince Guaraldi fans. (I think August is too early for a Halloween release, but they release Christmas albums in October, so I'm happy to see the holidays get equal treatment for once!)


Also, this year there will be reboots of both The Munsters and The Addams Family! I hope they both get Halloween release dates. I don't know how the Munsters movie will be, but they totally nailed the look. 
This year will also see the release of Hocus Pocus 2. I think the original is shockingly overrated, but it can still be fun. (Once in a while I see posts asking which is better, Hocus Pocus or The Nightmare before Christmas, and how is that even a question?)

And back in 2018, my favorite Christmas album for that year was JD McPherson's Socks. Ever since that time, I've thought he should make a Halloween album, because his sound perfectly matches all the monster songs from the 1950s and '60s. Last October, he tweeted, "Which is funnier behind the wheel of a crashed vehicle: A: A ghost. B: A Frankenstein. I’ll show you why later." I don't know what that means, but I'm hoping and speculating that that was for album art for a Halloween album. That would be simply amazing! And I'm hoping that DBone and the Remains make more music, because they are by far the best Halloween music I have found.

And I'm also looking forward to the 2022 Halloween Squishmallows.

So, thanks for letting me geek out!

Sunday, June 12, 2022

Books, not bullets, part 2

Back in 2018, I attended the March for Our Lives event at the Capitol. This week, they had another rally. It wasn't as well publicized this time around. But yesterday, after running up North Canyon, I decided on a whim to attend.

Unlike last time, yesterday's event was inside the Capitol. There weren't as many people. But even though it was less publicized, there was still a good turnout. I went straight to the Capitol, which was sparse at first. But then the main group made their way inside after marching from West High. I joined in some of the chanting: "No more silence! End gun violence!" and "Vote them out!" They had various college students and activists giving rousing speeches. And one of the members of the band AJR (who sing "come hang, let's go out with a bang!") gave a speech, since they were in town on their concert tour.

I purposely wore a BYU hat and a UofU shirt to show this issue applies to everyone.


I just simply can't believe that we still have such lax gun laws, and that any attempts to tighten them are met with irrational people making all sorts of strawman arguments and making it seem like guns are the most important things in the world.

I have not heard a single convincing argument from those who oppose tougher gun laws. Not a single one:

  • "Criminals don't follow laws. If you outlaw guns, only criminals will have them." Well, first of all, this is a true statement. But it is a strawman argument. We don't want to get rid of all guns. We just want to make it harder for the bad guys to get them. Additionally, the Uvalde shooter bought his gun legally. The Buffalo shooter bought his gun legally. The Parkland shooter bought his gun legally. And all three of those are under twenty-one. Why would we make it so easy for them to buy them?
  • "The Second Amendment says the right to bear arms shall not be infringed! Gun control is unconstitutional!" How convenient for you to ignore the first part of the amendment, the part about the "well regulated militia." "Well regulated" indicates there must be regulations. "Militia" indicates that there is a different purpose behind the Second Amendment than simply "Anyone can own any kind of gun they want." Especially since the high-capacity assault rifles used in these mass shootings didn't exist when the amendment was put in place.
  • "Maybe we should arm teachers." I suppose if the teacher in Uvalde had a gun, she might have been able to prevent the shooting in that one particular instance. But there are a number of reasons this is a terrible idea. We already expect teachers to be babysitters, counselors, peacemakers, etc., in addition to being educators, all at low pay. For them to be safely trained in guns and de-escalation is just another burden that is beyond their pay grade. If they don't get the training, it is unsafe for them. Additionally, if all the teachers had guns, I can easily imagine scenarios when a student manages to get a hold of the gun (whether wrestling it from a teacher, or a teacher accidentally leaving it unlocked). Or I can imagine a teacher having a mental health crisis using their gun to injure the very students they are supposed to protect.
  • "We already have background checks!" Great! Let's make them universal!
  • "But if we have background checks, then the government will take away everyone's guns, and then people won't be able to defend themselves if the government comes to strip them of all their rights." This sounds like a far-fetched, hypothetical event that could maybe, possibly, sometime in the future happen under certain circumstances. But the mass shootings and other gun violence we are seeing aren't a hypothetical. They are literally already happening right now. They are reality. We need to fix the reality before we worry about these absurd hypotheticals. And after January 6, 2021, I am more concerned about an armed population trying to take over the government than I am about an armed government trying to take over the population.
  • "The answer to guns is more guns!" We already have more guns per capita than any other nation, yet we have a disproportionate amount of gun violence among developed nations. If it were true that more guns were the answer, we would already be the safest.
  • "It's not about the guns. It's a mental health issue. Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well, people use guns to kill people. Could they use knives? They do sometimes, but mass stabbings are far less fatal. There's a reason the killers choose to use guns. People have mental health problems in other countries too! And, if the people who blame mental health were out there providing viable solutions to mental health, I would one hundred percent be on board with their changes. But they seem to use the "mental health" argument to deflect it away from the guns, then don't do anything about mental health either.
  • Mike Lee wondered if "fatherlessness" could be to blame. But Kevin Shafer, a BYU sociologist who studies fatherlessness, shared this graph about fatherhood in developed nations, showing that that's not the problem.
When I was a teenager and didn't know much about politics, I assumed that Republicans were the ones that wanted gun control, because it just seemed so logical to me and I thought Democrats were usually wrong.

I hope I can help change people's minds about this topic. The far-right has cultivated a dangerous, misleading rhetoric surrounding this issue. We need to depoliticize it and get some commonsense solutions. I literally don't see any reason for any civilian to own a weapon that is meant only to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. I don't see the need to own a weapon that is meant not only to kill but also to absolutely destroy bodies, to the point that the remains are unrecognizable. 

At the Capitol, there was a booth where we could write messages to lawmakers. So I wrote one.
The rights of people to live, learn, worship, and shop are more important that the rights of 18-year-olds to own assault rifles. They just are. Period.

Thanks for listening!

Sunday, June 5, 2022

MHA 2022

 Every June, the Mormon History Association has its annual conference in a designated city. This year it was in Logan, and now that I have a master's degree, I thought I should attend this academic conference.

I have never been to any MHA sessions before. In 2015, my boss had tickets to a women's history tour in Provo as part of that year's MHA, but he sent me in his place. But this time I decided to attend of my own free will. Earlier this year I paid my membership dues to MHA (while I still got the student discount), which subsequently gave me a discount to the conference.

Saturday morning, I drove up to Logan. It's always a lovely drive up there. I saw some blotches of yellow on the hills between Brigham City and Logan, and I thought, "Oh, how pretty!" And then I realized that all the yellow was dyer's woad, a noxious weed. Oof.

I checked in and got my name tag, which made me feel fancy and official. We got custom totes and programs.


Various organizations and publishers had booths set up with swag and books for sale. But I already have too many unread books to buy any more. (And I don't really read books for fun.) 

I first attended a session about Mormon literature in suburbia. I went because one of my Sundance coworkers was presenting, but I was also able to introduce myself to people who work in the Church History Department (where I also work). 

After the session, I found a colleague who works in the cubicle next to mine, and I hung out with him, because I didn't know what else to do at the conference. He found a bunch of his friends from grad school, so I felt a little awkward. (I Felt a Little Awkward is the name of my autobiography.) We went to a plenary luncheon session with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. We hadn't registered for the lunch, so we just listened to her while everyone else ate the catered meal. She talked about the Mutual Improvement Association diary she kept in the 1950s and compared it with Seventeen magazine of the era. She is simply amazing, but you probably don't recognize her name if you don't follow the history field. But you have undoubtedly heard her quip "Well-behaved women seldom make history," which was in a random academic journal article and then took on a life of its own.

I ran into a couple of classmates from grad school, and then my coworker and I went to a session about slavery debates in Utah in the 1850s. (Yes, there were slaves in Utah.) My graduate committee chair presented at that session, but I didn't talk to him because I didn't know what to say. And also, I Felt a Little Awkward.

They had a snack session, so I grabbed some fruit and lemonade, as well as an entertaining pin from the B.H. Roberts Foundation booth. (They also have entertaining memes.)

Then I headed to my final session, which was about race: a Mormon pioneer who fabricated a "mammy" in his reminiscence, Mormon blackface performances, and race among LDS South Indians. I learned that the hymn "Love at Home" is an old minstrel song!

There were a few more events after that session, but I didn't care to stay for any of them, because Logan is a long drive, and I had to get up for church in the morning, and also I Felt a Little Awkward.

Last year, I determined that ice cream is a Fourth of July dessert, even though it's very broad, so I decided to get some Aggie ice cream before I headed home. When I was doing Pioneer Day research a few years back, I learned that in 1996, they made a special Centennial Ice Cream for Utah's 100th anniversary, which had a cream cheese base (for dairy and agriculture); English toffee (for European immigrants); cherries (for toil and agriculture); and honey grahams (for grist mills and beehives). And I was surprised and pleased to learn that they still serve it, twenty-six years later! So of course I had to get it. And my brain keeps agonizing about how I Felt a Little Awkward buying my ice cream cone.


I don't think I'll go next year, since it will be in New York. But I'm glad I went this year.