Clash of the Titans

Let me preface this post by saying that I'm not one of those "guys" that makes it a habit to bore the world with cat pictures and stories. I continue to stand by the fact that if I weren't married to a cat fan, my only pet would be the limbless creatures growing in my fridge. However, learning to like Lucy The Cat over the last five years has been an easy thing to do, especially now that I know that she has the potential to be the clawed victor in any feline death match. This was discovered during the two months we resided at my in-laws house, and Lucy (left) was forced to live with her evil aunt Tinkerbell (right).

Tinker and I don't get along so well, she's a Hatfield and I'm a McCoy. The problem is that she's allowed to growl, hiss and scratch, and in order to stay legit with the family all I'm allowed to do is shriek like a little girl and leap away. She might be winning the battles but I'll win the war, in that I won't be going to cat hell. Or should I say, back to cat hell. On the other hand, Lucy's like the Switzerland of cats, she's never hissed or intentionally scratched anyone, and is terrified of leaves and bugs. I was so proud of Lucy the Cat when she took over the roost after we moved in. Every so often we'd hear blood curdling cat screams a few rooms away and Tinker would come running through the house with Lucy nipping at her heels. I had to act like the disciplinarian so Randy wouldn't kick me out of the house, but every time Lucy swiped at Tinker a little scratched up piece of my pride came back to life. Take that you diabolical little she beast!

Ensign Repeak

In keeping with the theme for the last week of September 2009, "Haul your kin up a mountain", Sara and I played sherpa to my mom and siblings up Ensign Peak. Yes, I know that I'm only a few postings away from a previous Ensign Peak blog, but we just can't get enough of that view! We did make a horrible error though,before our ascent we ate a ginormous pizza at The Pie...not so great planning on my part. The goal was to be at the top by sunset, and dinner beforehand made a lot of sense at the time. We all got to taste the pizza several times that night!

Sometimes blurry pictures look best blurry. This was a period of time that Zoe would rather look at the carcase of a singing purple dinosaur than the front of a camera. Pictures from this phase wherein she's not looking everywhere but forward are a rarity, so the ones above and below had to find their way onto the blog. The hike down the mountain that night marked the genesis of a new Zoe phase, which I like to call the flashlight fetish. We're still waiting for this one to wear off. Also, may I add that Sara is drinking from the water bottle that I won during The Amazing Race on the cruise boat a few years ago. Its a major award!

A Spiel From A Spelunker

There's no better place to enjoy a beautiful late summer day than within the guts of a mountain. Sara and I recruited my brother, Bryson, and my sister, Staycia, as co-spelunkers and off we went to Mount Timpanogos. It actually ended up being an entire day's event as we had to get to the trailhead by seven o'clock that morning in order to get tickets. I guess we Utahns love a free caving day. We've got a little bit of everything in our state and the wise ones enjoy as many of them as possible. After all, caves will never come and visit you.

The trail up to the cave was pretty fun. Sara's favorite part of the trail was telling Bryson and I over and over again to get away from the edge. We like to live on the edge, oh yeah. Timpanogos is the second tallest peak of the Wasatch Range, so getting nearly to the top isn't something done in a few minutes, but it still isn't a very tough hike. Back when I was a sinewy young mountaineer, my cousin Jeremy and I pretty much ran up the mountainside and got to the top of the 1.5 mile trail in a half hour. We were able to do it so fast because there was no one there to keep us from the edges.

Caves aren't exactly the best medium for photography, this is probably why you rarely see bat tourists. The tour through the cave presented by Ranger Vanessa (I don't remember her name, but I think a cave woman should be called Vanessa) was very well done, and seemed much longer than the tours I'd seen in the past. Here we are posing among the speliothems, always worried that today will be the day the earthquake hits and we all become fossil fuel. There's a reason they call it a cave in, you know. Isn't it fascinating how much time it took to make all the formations? I simply can't fathom thousands of years, it's hard enough for me to picture 5:00 on a Thursday morning when I'm just getting to the office. I'm super glad that Staycia and Bryson came with us, we had a lot of fun, especially when we got to smell the pack rat at the end.

Follow the prophets, but watch where you step

We Mormons have been asked to follow the prophet. The easiest prophets to follow are the ones that move the least, thus we decided to combine this commandment with our strange fascination of finding the graves of famous dead people. The result was a summer evening checking out the tombstones of as many of the past presidents of our church as possible.

Thanks to our trips to Nauvoo we've seen the grave of Joseph Smith Jr., the Church's first prophet. He's buried between his brother, Hyrum, and his wife, Emma in the same plot of land where his son Joseph Smith III and his mom, Lucy Mack and his dad Joseph Smith Sr. are also buried. There's a long story about the movement of his body after his horrible and untimely death, but I'm pretty certain this is his final resting place. We probably would have got ourselves in the picture as well, but we felt a little out of place there as we weren't sure if we were allowed in the cemetery.

Between State Street and A Street on First Avenue in Salt Lake lies the Church's second president, Brigham Young. This was the first stop in our presidential gravesite evening extravaganza! Its not very often that all of my siblings and I get out to do something, and this ended up being a super fun day. The statue we're surrounding is right at the feet of Brigham's grave, and out of some weird conicidence, the very next day a pair of drunken vandals actually stole the stone book out of his hand. I swear it wasn't us!

Here's Zoe and Emery still fresh with excitement for the grave hunt. I never knew that two little kids could have so much fun looking at fancy rocks for an entire evening. Brother Brigham's grave wasn't anything more than a cement slab with a fence and plaque on it, but I think it's pretty cool that it is only a few plats away from the living quarters of the current prophet. It was cool to look at all the flowers in the little cemetery in downtown Salt Lake, but we had to get moving, there were lots more to see. I've posted all these in prophetic order, so that is why some of the pictures have a bit darker background then others. We were in that cemetery until after dark trying to track all these guys down. Anyhow, John Talyor came next, you know, and here's Emery and Zoe and I hangin' out with him. A lot of the prophets have really cool obelisk headstones, but for some reason all our good pictures have the pointy top parts cut off. Use your imagination.

Here's Wilford Woodruff, another prophet buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. I've always felt a close relationship with Wilford, only because my great grandpa's name was Wilford Woodruff. I think that's a good reason. Wilford is my dad's middle name and I think we make fun of him too much about it. Or perhaps not enough. Does anyone think its weird that we had our little kids in the cemetery after dark. You gotta get all macabre with your kids sometimes.

Lorenzo Snow was a no show, as he is too busy being dead in Brigham City. Sara doesn't know about this yet, but we're going to track him down in August when we go on vacation to Utah. Next on the list is Joseph F. Smith, who is buried below the headstone that Zoe spilled her water on (sorry Joseph). His dad was Hyrum Smith who, like I mentioned above, is buried next to his brother Joseph in Nauvoo. The giant obelisk we're sitting beneath is a monument to Hyrum. I think the background on this picture is super pretty.

After Brigham Young, Heber J. Grant was the longest serving church president. He was president through all of the Roaring Twenties, The Great Depression, and World War II. Before he was church president, he worked to improve and develop The Avenues area of Salt Lake City, which is where he still spends most of his time.

It was getting mighty late when we finally found the grave of George Albert Smith. This is a summer night, so it must have been around 10:00. As we were on our way to his neck of the woods the gates of the cemetery were closing. During this picture I was getting a little nervous that we'd have to spend the night there since all the entrances we knew of had been locked shut. We couldn't just stop after all our work! Needless to say, we got outta there.

David O. McKay served as a general authority longer than any other person. He was in the job for 64 years, and that's a super long time. I thought the headstone for the McKay family was pretty cool, as it is nice and tall and easy to find. I was kinda surprised how hard it was to find some of these graves, even with the detailed maps we had found. I guess in a 120,000 plot cemetery it wouldn't be easy to find 11 specific people, but we did it...well, almost.

These Smith guys are easy to find, since they're right next to each other. Joseph Fielding Smith is the son of Joseph F. Smith, and thus the grandson of Hyrum Smith. George Albert Smith is not a direct relative of Joseph Smith, his grandfather was a cousin to Joseph so we had to actually search around for him.

I don't know much about Harold B. Lee, only that he wasn't president for long. I think the look on Zoe's face is pretty cute. This is the look of elation that can only be felt by a child on a prophetic grave quest.We all liked the big chunks of petrified wood on Spencer W. Kimball's headstone. Nice taste Spence! I also liked seeing that the W. is for Woolley. How do you pronounce that? I'm glad that Bryson put in a few minutes holding up the headstone, you know, giving President Kimball a break.

I've been to Whitney, Idaho, does that count as having seen Ezra Taft Benson's grave? Next time I'm in that part of Idaho I'll have to stop by and pay him some respects. The first grave we looked for in the Salt Lake Cemetery was that of Howard W. Hunter. We all looked and looked but couldn't find the guy, he's somewhere way in the back. It took everything in me to leave the cemetery without having seen his grave. We'll definitely be going back to find it in the near future.

The most visited plot in the Salt Lake Cemetery is Gordon B. Hinckley's grave. He was the prophet we kids grew up with, and this was the first time I've seen his final resting place. There were a few old canes left there by visitors, and lots of cars parked all around.

So there you have it, 15 dead modern prophets, and Sara and I have seen the graves of 12 of them. Once we track down the evasive three we'll be sure to post 'em up on the blog. That was a crazy fun Sunday evening activity. If you're ever bored in Salt Lake, you should go and seek the Holy Graves. Let me know if you need a map.

Slide Static

Zoe loves play grounds like fish love tartar sauce. I don't mind taking her there because its a lot of fun to see what the slide static does to her hair.

How's the View?

There were helicopters flying around the valley that morning. Helicopters! I have a terrible habit of filming helicopters and taking far too many pictures of them. I don't know what it is about those things that are so intriguing to me, maybe its the hoovering. If you look at the mountains on the far left of the picture above you can see six of them heading westward above the city. I reckon there was some sorta helicopter conference in town.

Up on the hilltop there's a giant rock tower to commemorate the Utah history up there. The memorial kinda reminds me of that scene from one of the final episodes of Little House on the Prairie when Pa builds that giant rock tower that somehow brings his kid back to life. That scene would have been much more powerful if there had been a shark to jump somewhere in the vicinity. Anyhow, we noticed that like 4 of the blocks had the names of cities on them, and outta some crazy coincidence, one of the cities was "Milwaukee". It's kinda hard to read, but that's definitely what the rock says. Strange.

I sure love the view from Ensign Peak. I like to see State Street and Redwood Road as it gets dark and all the tail lights start showing up and melting together like a big red lava flow. Any of my die hard blog fans (both of you) know of my love for state capital buildings, and Utah's is a super nice one. There's something really special about having your own beautiful place to share with your girl. I wonder if there's anyone else out there that has designated this very location as make-out hill? If so, get away! It's mine.

From Park to Peak

Many summer nights have seen Sara and I up on the hill above the Utah capital building looking out at the view of the valley. We'd go up there and plan out our lives while the mountains turned purple and the sun set just a few feet away. It was our make out hill. Actually we didn't do a whole lot of making out up there because we'd always pick up a pizza at The Pie on the way, and notta lotta mackin happens with pizza breath. Up on that hill I proposed to my little bride and subsequently locked my keys in the trunk. Genius.

Right next to our make out hill is the trailhead to Ensign Peak. Sara'd been up there before back in the day, but we'd never gone up together, even though we'd been to the trailhead so many times. Up we went on an early September Saturday morning, and it was absolutely gorgeous up there! We had the whole place all to ourselves and I never wanted to come back down. We took a whole mess o' pictures, but I'll just throw a few of them your way...pictures of views are never as good as the real thing. Unless you're like Claude Lorrain or something, and you're probably not.

The State Fair Freak Show

Is it morally sound to display living human beings at the same venue where pigs are being judged? I submit that it is not. Fortunately, the major infringement on human rights pictured above is justified by the subtitle on the plywood marquee, "West Indies Cultural Exhibit". If any of my readers are from the West Indies, you should take pride in knowing that your country and culture was well represented at the Utah State Fair. None of us were brave enough to fork out the dollar and actually see the tiny person, mostly because we didn't know what to say to her. Awkward! "So how are things in that box?" "Have you tried the deep fried cole slaw on a stick?"

Here's Mike and I posing in front of the finest in Utah's butter sculptury. I don't recall any butter carvings at the Wisconsin State Fair, there probably weren't any because all the butter in the state has been used to over-fatten the burgers at Culver's. Butter sculpting. Weird. I'd say that if you're going to make a sculpture using only refrigerated food stuffs, a better medium would be meatloaf.

When Mike and I were super geeky pre-pubescants, we went to a Weird Al Yankovic concert at the Utah State Fair Grounds. That night was probably the paramount of my middle school memories, mostly because our moms trusted us enough to just drop us off at the door. That, and we really liked Weird Al. I think it's pretty ironic that we experienced a major turn towards maturity while at a Weird Al Concert. That night we also took a small step towards becoming less bumpkiny Cache County boys, in that we had to spend a few minutes in the depths of the Salt Lake ghetto. We ended up meeting my mom at a 7-11 next door to the fair grounds, and we were completely sure we were going to get mugged and shoved into a Slurpee machine on our way to the gas station. It got even worse when some kid shot off a cap gun while we were walking by his house. Yipes. After our trek through the State Fair last summer, Mike and I went back to the 7-11 to encounter our fears, but it was no use. Once a bumpkin, always a bumpkin.

Blue Ribbon Beef. And Pork. And Goat.

No offense Utah, but your state fair is not the best state fair. One could miss it, or even be late. Or could they? Fact is, a state fair is fun no matter what, but in comparison to that of Wisconsin, the Utah State Fair only gets 3 out of 5 fried cheesecakes on a stick. I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the immense lack of beer being served per capita. We did enjoy the dancing bear show...at least the few hairs of it that we were able to see over the heads of the crowd. Also, I was a big fan of the upstairs exhibit of legume mosaics made by each of Utah's counties. Oh, and the goats were the happiest little goats in whole wide world. The reason they're so happy is because they know that of all the meat producing animals in the state, they have the least to worry about. Goat meat is really icky compared to the lardy glory that is bovinae and suidae.

Since state fair going is best done in herds, we invited Jennifer, Annie, and my good buddy Mike to come along with us. I'd say we all had a super great time walking about admiring the grown goods of our home state. I love hanging out with Mike. Since High School came to a quick end, we just haven't done much together, I assume that living a thousand miles apart has something to do with it. We've both been pretty busy, too. He just got done graduating from Law School for goodness sake! That's pretty cool. Anyhow, I really like looking at the best pigs and cows in the state. The only real difference between this and a beauty pageant is the actual encouragement to eat. That, and the animals wear much skimpier evening gowns.