Winter Week

It was a real winter week this week! And as I think about the highlights, a lot of them are food related. Sorry about that.

I was off work on Monday for Presidents' Day, and the conditions were such that I thought it was a good opportunity to go to Cave Peak again, just as I had done on Valentine's Day. It was a little less muddy this time, and it was overcast, which made it an overall more enjoyable run than two days earlier.

This is the turnoff to go up to Rudy's Flat, which was still too snowy and icy for my tastes

I wanted to do something presidenty for Presidents' Day, so I took my dad down to Draper so we could go to Brooker's Founding Flavors, a quirky local chain of ice cream shops themed around the American Revolution. The ice cream flavors are mostly named after eighteenth-century figures, and they have eighteenth-century-style hot chocolate. I had hot chocolate that was supposedly Jefferson's recipe, and I had a scoop of Abraham Lincoln birthday cake ice cream in it. (Of course, Lincoln is an exception to the overal eighteenth-century theme.)

On Mardi Gras last year, I felt like getting a king cake, but I didn't want an entire cake at home, so I took it to work. My supervisor got the baby in the cake, so she vowed to make one for 2026. And she did! She likes baking, and I was impressed that hers tasted like a professionally made cake.

Near our office is a cupcake shop called So Cupcake, and they announced recently they're shuttering at the end of the month. Since it's green season, I went and got a lime cupcake for the very last time. I don't go to bakeries/dessert spots as often as I have in the past, but so many good ones have closed that I feel like I should go to them more to keep them afloat.

Then Wednesday we actually had a snowstorm! We've had little snowstorms on the hill since the end of November, but this was the first substantial one. I remember the days after Thanksgiving being sad because we hadn't had snow yet, but then I looked forward to the cozy, snowy season still to come. And . . . it didn't come. I would listen to a spooky Christmas album and think how it was a spookily worrying Christmas season. And then January wasn't any better. So I'm glad we finally got snow, even if it wasn't snowy for the traditionally snowy holidays. So now I know that nature still knows how to snow. But does nature still know how to snow on Christmas?

I had to drive down the snowy roads for my appointment at The Park Barbershop. The first time I went to them in August, I followed my appointment by going to a boba place in North Salt Lake for the first time. Since it's green season, I went to the boba place again and got an avocado smoothie. 

I'm going to Taiwan this week, so I brought in my suitcase, and Reggie enjoyed playing in it. I will miss him while we're gone.

Because of snow, I swam with the swim team on Tuesday and Thursday, and Friday I went on a street run. Though I prefer trails and abhor ice, it was a nice evening for a run, as long as I was bundled up.

Friday I received my order of little green lights for my gold St. Patrick's Day tree. (I have some battery lights, but I don't like burning through the batteries, to say nothing of the hassle of turning them on.) 

And I also got a set of string lights where you can change the colors with a remote.

A few weeks ago, a friend invited a large group of people to go snowshoeing or cross-country skiing at Solitude Resort, an event called Nordic Nights. Only four of us ended up going, which made me feel better about the times I've invited people to things and no one has come. I took an old set of snowshoes that my sister bought decades ago (probably late '90s). As I put them on, I realized they were broken, so I strapped them on my boots as best I could—I didn't want to pay the money, or deal with the hassle, of renting snowshoes.

There was a one-kilometer snowshoe trail around Silver Lake, and there were little LED candles in the snow to light the way. While we were traversing the trail, one of my snowshoes came off, and I didn't feel like putting it back on if it was just going to come off again. So I had one snowshoe and one boot, and I got to learn the physics of snowshoes versus boots. 

I happened to see an old coworker from Sundance (2019 and 2020 festivals) there with her boyfriend. We chatted a bit, and she asked, "Do you still do the thing were you only eat holiday treats?" And then I think her boyfriend said something like, "Oh, this is the guy?" Well, it was something to indicate they had talked about me before. 😆 And then later, one of my friends asked me if I was going to have one of the complimentary s'mores. I said, "I only eat s'mores around the Fourth of July." An older woman walking by heard me and said, "I'm a s'more snob."

It was a fun evening, and it was nice to take advantage of winter. But I didn't think it was worth the price and the crowds if I could just go snowshoeing closer to home. (Well, in a normal year I could.)

It was also an eventful week in dreamland: putting a pet scorpion in a bag of orange and black caramel corn; sleeping next to a lion; feeding treats to a cat that disguised itself as a tortilla and was sitting in a bag of tortillas; going to the Olympics; getting a job at a barbershop / shoe store even though I had zero training, and a client with smallpox-like welts on his skin hugging me.

Blah

Maybe you'd be interested in a recap of the Sunday School lesson I taught today? I began it by discussing the origins of the book of Moses and the book of Abraham. I talked about Moses 1 and Dieter F. Uchtdorf's "paradox of man." I showed pictures of various political and religious figures and asked, "How does knowing we are children of God affect the way we treat ourselves and others?" I talked about the Creation and asked, "How can we care for creation?" And I talked about the seventh day of Creation and asked, "Why is it important to have a day of rest?" I ran out of content at the end, but the class contributed with their own comments and insights. I thought it went well, and I received several compliments.

I also bless the sacrament every week, because I don't like passing it, and that way they won't ask me to pass it. Today we had a high councilor speak with his family, and he said he pointed out to his priest son how carefully the sacrament prayer was enunciated. I never know how good a job I'm doing, so it's nice to get a validating shout-out. (Unless he was talking about the other person who prayed?)

(I put these two paragraphs at the end of the post, but then I moved them to the beginning because they seemed less frivolous than the rest of the post.)

Every January, I miss Christmastime. It's nice to have a refresher after all the chaos of the holidays, but I still miss it. And that is especially true this year, because I felt cheated out of the full Christmas experience, and I had a lot of missed opportunities. 

I couldn't find my new Christmas ornament from Holiday World, but I found it this week. I learned about a delightfully quirky Christmas album that came out in 2025, but not until Christmas was over. I felt like I didn't get as much time playing and sharing my Christmas playlist as I would have liked.

But of course, the biggest reason was that it was such a warm and snowless Christmas season. I didn't get the cozy, white vibes we think of.

But at least December was better than January. We had good air quality and clear trails last month. But this January, it's super smoggy. We had a skiff of snow over a week ago, but it still hasn't melted, even though it's been sunny and above freezing. That keeps me off the trails. I went swimming four times this week because of the icky January weather. I want it to get better . . . but there is no indication that it's going to.

And I get extremely frustrated with a segment of the population who think climate change is a hoax because they think they're somehow smarter than the people who actually study these things professionally. How can they not notice what is going on in front of their eyes? I am hopeful that emissions are slowing, and hopeful that other countries and private entities are doing something, even if the US isn't. I look at humans' successes in reversing the decline of the ozone layer and in generally making the air cleaner than it was in previous decades. I hope we can have normal winters and Christmases again. But that's all I can do, hope, because otherwise I just feel helpless.

There are some Christmas fanatics, and I honestly feel worse for them when Christmas is over. Because of my veneration of holidays, I treat every (major) holiday the way others treat Christmas: a designated season with special decorations, songs, clothing, and other things. So it's less sad for Christmas to be over when I just move on to the next holiday with all its trappings.

But . . . the replacement for Christmas and New Year's just isn't that great. I started the Valentine's Day season this week, and it's nice to have something in January, but of my nine formally canonized holidays, it's my least favorite. It's just boring and not that special.

It began as a boring, ordinary, religious saint day. Then Chaucer wrote a poem where he said it was the day when birds chose their mates, and then people associated it with romance—either doing fortune-telling rituals to determine their future lovers (as they also did on Halloween), or sending valentine messages. Then in the 1840s, companies in the US capitalized on valentine cards and other gifts. What a strange holiday.

I just don't love all the heteroromantic stuff about it. I appreciate efforts to make it about familial or platonic love, but I still don't think it can shake its romantic overtones, or at least it's not close to doing so. And platonic love is something we have all the time anyway. 

And of course Christmas has all its famous songs, and even the other holidays have a few standards. But the only semifamous Valentine's song is "My Funny Valentine," which literally has lyrics like "my dimwitted friend" and "your looks are laughable." I'm not making that up!

Anyway, the best part about this time of year is the candy and treats, and I love trying all the red velvet, cinnamon, chocolate strawberry, rose, etc., flavors. Such as festive coffee creamers in noncoffee cozy drinks (Pero and Postum). 

raspberry rose

chocolate covered strawberry

Hmm, I feel like this was kind of a dumb post. Probably because I didn't have a lot to talk about—you probably don't want to read a list of all my swimming times or see pictures of my swimsuit. Oh well, when you've written more than eight hundred blog posts, they can't all be winners.

Embracing the Season

As I have said many times before, this is my least favorite time of year. But I've been trying to embrace what it does have to offer.

Monday was Epiphany, which isn't really part of the holiday calendar in a state dominated by Latter-day Saints and a nation dominated by Protestantism. We have a donut shop, JJ Donuts, at the bottom of our hill, and they made rosca de reyes for Epiphany, since it's a traditional Mexican treat. I had never had one, so I wanted to try one. It was OK. It didn't really have much flavor. I much preferred the Mardi Gras king cake I got at Parsons' Bakery last year. 

On Tuesday, I practiced with the swim team, the first time I had done so since October. And I also swam twice on my own. My swimming has definitely improved since last year, and especially since I took swimming lessons two years ago. In 2023, I often had an existential crisis when I was swimming freestyle. But I've been swimming eight laps freestyle in a row without stopping, which would have been way too much for me in past years.

Then yesterday (Saturday), I took my dad to Great Salt Lake State Park for a ranger-led tour of their mirabilite mounds. Mirabilite is a salty mineral, and under certain conditions, it forms beautiful mounds. Because of the low lake level, these have only been documented at the GSL in the last five years, and it's the only place in the United States where they've been found. It needs to be subfreezing temperatures in a dry climate and at a salty body of water. I didn't think the ranger tour was necessary, but it was cool to see them, especially since they're only around in the winter.

Fish from streams sometimes end up in the lake, and then they wash ashore. There were also several dead birds, but for some reason it seems grosser/sadder to take pictures of dead birds.

While we were out there we stopped at Black Rock. There was once a resort there, and Black Rock was a favorite spot for Fourth of July and Twenty-Fourth of July celebrations in the nineteenth century. It's no longer surrounded by water, but it was still cool to see.

Courtesy Utah Historical Society

This past fall, my uncle gave my parents a big bag of pine nuts he collected. In November and December, I spent some time shelling them, which is a very time-consuming process. This weekend, I wanted to make some pine nut cookies, but the nuts I had shelled were moldy. Sigh. Then my mom peeled more, and I was able to make the cookies, which were very small and like shortbread, similar to Girl Scouts Trefoils. I like them, but I don't think they're worth the troubling of shelling pine nuts. Why are pine nuts a thing? They're so much work, and they're not that great. They're most commonly used in pesto, and I can't stand pesto. (Parmesan strikes again!)

OK, so there's not a lot of things that are special to this time of year, but there are some things. Here are this week's dreams. 

Mark looks for an available bathroom in his grandparents' four-level house, which they share with Santa and Rudolph

Mark calls his junior high crush and asks if she wants to get ice cream sometime, and he is relieved when she declines

a four-inch wasp lands on David

Mark doesn't have a music folder for the performance of "Utah, This Is the Place"

Mark wears blue shorts he finds while walking through a construction site, and he sees a white scorpion

Mark plays a game with his family and wins with the entry "potato room"

Allie enters Five Below, and the owner gives her the keys

Mark washes his hand in David's lemon wine

four dogs try to enter the house, but only two are allowed

the cat is out of water because the carpet soaked it up

Mark rides his bike to the border of a small town, where there are sego lilies in bloom (I'm so sad it didn't actually do sego lilies)

Mark watches giant waves at the Great Salt Lake visitor center

Mark trips in floodwaters at BYU

Voldemort and Dolores Umbridge kiss

Mark takes a bath in a bucket while reading a book of random facts

Mark asks his friends what they're doing for Valentine's Day while his mom removes a red velvet rope

a video game involves stabbing the belly of a jellyfish

a man has Mark assemble bullets while the class watches, and microphones amplify the sound

Mark finds his brother's letters written in Chinese at a used-book store

a jumping spider hitchhikes on Mark's orange, then builds a web on his jack-o'-lantern

the city narrows the street by putting trees in front of people's houses