A Veterans Day pup

Monday’s and Tuesday’s schooling began two hours late, due to snow. Karin delayed her Monday work to sit with Samuel in her heated car while he waited for the bus. Good thing, because otherwise I’d’ve stood by the curb with Samuel and Daniel and Abel, thirty minutes longer than usual, not knowing whether the bus would come at all. (The bus-tracking app was out of order.)

(Time was, people’d wait for buses in the cold, not having apps to reassure them. Ours is a softer time.)

Tuesday – yesterday – was Veterans Day, so Karin didn’t go to work. She put Samuel on the bus again. When he came home, he was carrying a drawing he’d made of a “Veterans Day pup”:

Daniel and Abel played in the snow. Mormon missionaries stood by our yard and invited our family to church. They were so winsome, I hated to say no. I should’ve invited them to church.

They knocked on doors on our street, then drove away in a Texas-plated ute (my preferred term for that car) (pun not intended).

Violence in Ecuador worsens

Ecuador is in an “internal state of war” after a spate of widespread, coordinated gang violence.

President Daniel Noboa has declared a sixty-day state of emergency.

The news is on Wikipedia’s main page. Whenever Ecuador is front-and-center there, I feel a twinge of pride, and then more often than not I weep (silently) because it’s because of something terrible. (Here is the Wikipedia article.)

There’s lots of official press coverage, of course.

Pray for Ecuador!

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In other news:

“BYU Offering New Taylor Swift-Inspired Philosophy Course.”

(“Philoswiftie” website.)

Move over, Immanuel Kant.

It turns out that, spiritually, I am Berkeleyan

We received our annual taste reports from Spotify (“Your 2023 Wrapped”). My listening habits were likened to those of the people of Berkeley, California; Karin’s, to those of the residents of Provo, Utah.

So, what do they listen to at BYU? Broadway tunes and Disney.

What do the liberal kids at UC Berkeley listen to? Evidently, Joe Hisaishi’s cartoon music. (Not so different from the Mormons, then.)

Other musicians who got lots of Spotify play from me in 2023: Boards of Canada, Stelvio Cipriani, Vangelis, Silver Convention, and Aphex Twin. And, too late to make the list, Enigma. I should note that it’s Samuel who asks to listen to much of this. “I want to hear Mix-Mad by Enigma,” he says (the album is MCXMD a.D.).

Cornish ambiance; two new Mormon missionaries; their predecessors, the raccoon killers; I join a reading group

Well, I finished reading Rebecca. The last hundred or so pages were very thrilling. Then I read the back matter: (i) an essay by Daphne du Maurier about how she wrote the novel; (ii) an essay about Menabilly, the real-life “Manderlay” (where du Maurier later resided); and (iii) a disused draft of the epilogue (it sucked so badly, I tore it out of the book).

Cornwall must be one of the best English counties in which to set a Gothic novel. It has the requisite desolation. Fittingly, Aphex Twin is the best-selling musician to hail from that county.

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Two new Mormon missionaries have moved in downstairs. Today, they made the rounds in our building, knocking on doors and introducing themselves. When they came to our apartment, I told them that I knew a great deal about missionary life; that Karin & I’d honeymooned in Utah; and that their predecessors, Elders Henderson and Parker, had neglected us, except to skin a raccoon under our window. (Yes, we now know that they did it: they fashioned the tail into an ornament for their car.)

I agreed to discuss the Book of Mormon with the new young “elders.” This, at last, will spur me to read it.

A visit to Indianapolis

Our anniversary is today. Karin & I were married two years ago.

On Saturday, we took a trip to Indianapolis. We stopped at the Dutch Café near Peru, Indiana, and ate several plates of food. This affected all the walking that we did at the Indianapolis Zoo.

It was a mediocre zoo on the whole. Some of the buildings were overly grand. They called attention to themselves rather than to the animals. The animals were minimally described by their placards, and many weren’t described at all. (I wistfully recalled the much humbler Austin Zoo, which gave heaps of information about each species, and, often, about an individual’s life history.)

Still, the zoo had four redeeming features:

(1) The parking lot design. Not all the lanes were parallel or perpendicular to each other. They seemed to be staggered diagonally.

(2) The elephants and rhinos. One male rhino, in particular, caused the ladies to blush.

(3) The suckling warthogs, whom Karin recorded:

(4) The pettable dog sharks. This, easily, was the best thing about the zoo. The sharks would swim around in a shallow tank. We visitors would reach in and pet them lightly with two fingers as they passed by. If a shark failed to receive a petting, it would make a u-turn and swim by again. The sharks seemed almost mammalian in their desire for affection. And their skins were wonderfully smooth; petting a shark felt like petting a loving, living hot dog.

Lest you worry that petting was forced upon the sharks, let me reassure you that there was a part of the tank where they could rest undisturbed.

Here’s a video from the Dodo about petting a somewhat larger shark:

Unfortunately, there was no traditional, farm-like petting section in the zoo. I guess the zoo could afford elephants but not goats.

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Afterward, we drove around downtown Indianapolis and saw the state capitol building. Without especially going out of our way, we have now seen the capitol buildings of the following states:

Utah
Wisconsin
Texas
Indiana

On the way home, we stopped at Half Price Books in Carmel, the ritzy suburb. We were one week too early. Next weekend, for Memorial Day, a sale will be held.

Salt Lake City; Lehi; South Bend

A song from Shrek.

At Temple Square we were spoken to by a nice, young, Taiwanese missionary.

Where have you come from?

Indiana.

What brings you to Salt Lake City?

Our honeymoon.

How exciting! – would it please you to be married to each other for all of eternity?

We don’t believe in that (I told her after an awkward pause).

What is your church?

The Missionary Church (said Karin).

Oh! The missionaries! Good! Did you talk to the missionaries?

Yes. We talked to the missionaries many times.

That’s good. That’s very good. Well, enjoy your visit to Salt Lake City.

Thank you.

We strolled upon the grounds; we peeked into the building where the famous pipe organ sits. The Temple itself cannot be accessed, but a 3-D model of its innards can be viewed in the South Visitors’ Center. In the North Visitors’ Center we looked at some religious art. I tried to photograph a scene of the Garden of Eden, but, no matter how I adjusted the camera, Eve & Adam came out blurry.

Was this a trick of the lighting? Was it something supernatural?

Wipe your camera lens, said Karin.

Oh.

The next day we rode the public transport out to the suburb of Lehi, where there’s a tourism complex called Thanksgiving Point. It has museums, gardens, and a petting zoo. We began with the Museum of Ancient Life, where we looked at dinosaur skeletons and browsed through a gift shop that had all sorts of plush and plastic dinosaurs. We viewed a video, from 1991, of the dinosaurs’ extinction. … Next we visited the petting zoo, which was rather crowded: there were numerous Mormon mothers, blond, thin, carefully made up, pregnant, with three or four small children in tow.

The real challenge was presented by the next site, a children’s museum/playground. Getting there required a couple of miles of walking in the harsh desert sunlight. We’d forgotten our sunscreen, and we’d already been on our feet for a long time. I was getting grumpy.

Walk, walk, walk. We passed office parks. The sun glinted off of the windows. SUVs full of children drove past us.

The mountains began to look rather different.

Are you sure you want to see this museum?, I asked Karin.

Yes. She was sure.

When we got there, I wasn’t thrilled. I felt like an adult at a Chuck-E-Cheese. There was an enormous jungle gym-type structure of mesh and slides and rope bridges. Due to my great fat, I had trouble extricating myself from the rope bridges. … What I did wish to try was the “wind room,” a small compartment through which blew gusts of up to 85 m.p.h. The children hogged the “wind room” for a long time. But when we did finally get to try it, it was truly refreshing. I decided that it atoned for the rest of the children’s museum/playground.

What remained to be visited was the garden, right next to the museum; but to enter it, we again had to walk and walk. We passed an entire golf course. It became clear that this garden was enormous, and that it didn’t have much shade. At the entrance there were golf-cart rentals of $30 for one hour. We decided to stay on foot and to see only two-thirds of the garden.

Afterward, I was very grumpy. But I told myself, this is one of the precious aspects of marriage. This is an experience with my spouse.

I looked over at Karin, and she was beautiful. “I’m tired and I’m cranky,” I admitted to her. “But this has been a lovely day with you.” We held hands. We now knew the route better, and so we cut across some parking lots.

On the train, I enjoyed looking at Karin while she listened to her audiobook.

The next day we rode out to a nearer suburb. We ate at In-N-Out Burger and bought things at a thrift shop. We returned early to Salt Lake City, did our laundry, and rested up for the following day’s journey back to South Bend.

Now we’ve had two straight nights at home. Jasper is happy to see us, though mostly he hides in cool places, because his coat is thick and it’s sweltering in our apartment.

I-15; Bryce Canyon; Hatch; Orderville; Zion

Here’s our first photo of Salt Lake City, taken near to the airport (we’d just gotten our rental car):

We headed southward on I-15. As she drove, Karin marveled at the scenery. First we passed snow-capped mountains which loomed over suburban sprawl (office parks; strip malls; gun shops; for-profit universities). Before long, the constructed things gave way to lush, green valleys with creeks and cattle in them. The mountains turned redder and smaller.

After some two hundred miles, we left the interstate and turned eastward, in the direction of Bryce Canyon National Park. The going was slower, and the hills rested nearer to the road.

Then came tourist town after tourist town, motel after motel. Bryce Canyon itself was swarming with tourists, many of them from such places as the Netherlands and Japan. Nearly all of these svelte persons were wearing hiking gear. With them, we rode shuttle buses to the vistas.

Proof that we were at Bryce Canyon:

Proof that we were at Bryce Canyon together:

(Karin thinks this picture is very funny.)

Worn out from riding the shuttle buses, we drove to the little town of Hatch, where we’d reserved our motel room. At first we had trouble finding the motel. We drove up and down what seemed to be Hatch’s only street. Karin pulled into a gas station to collect her wits.

I looked across the street. “That building is our motel,” I said.

This, too, was very funny to Karin. She laughed and laughed.

“It’ll be a fine motel,” I said.

Later, when we dined at the steakhouse there, we decided that it was a fine motel.

The next morning I made sure to photograph the motel:

And the carpet in our room:

Which I wouldn’t mind installing in my own house some day.

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The route between the town of Hatch and Zion National Park was perhaps the loveliest route of the whole trip. Much of it seemed to be permanently clouded over.

We stopped in the town of Orderville to buy supplies, and I picked up a free Spanish translation of the Book of Mormon. “It should be easier to read this version than to read the English version,” I told myself (Joseph Smith was no great prose stylist). The phrase And it came to pass mercifully was rendered in Spanish sometimes as Y sucedió, sometimes as Y ocurrió.

Also available: translations into Dutch, into Italian, into what may have been Bengali.

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Zion is a park for fatties. You can go through all of it in a car. (From what I could tell, there were more cars inside of Zion than anywhere else in Utah.) At Zion you needn’t pretend to be an outdoorsman: lots of people dress in regular clothes.

Karin & I performed a single hike, which wasn’t terribly strenuous. It took us to this vista:

Again, here’s proof that we were there together:

Much of the park resembled the scenery in Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Next blog entry: our return to Salt Lake City. But by the time I publish it we’ll have arrived back in South Bend.

The wedding; the honeymoon; Independiente del Valle

Amazing, how when a task is so carefully rehearsed, its execution is so simple. There were next-to-no problems during the wedding. Apparently one of Karin’s cousins showed up drunk, but he behaved himself. Slightly more annoying was one of Karin’s great-uncles, who, as he congratulated me, told me to keep my wife in line by beating her. “No, no, no,” I said. Then, during the reception, he accosted me a few more times and made other bizarre remarks.

“My mom detests that guy,” Karin told me. “And guess what his job is? He’s a pastor!”

Apart from that horrid person, all the guests were lovely, and the officiants and maids and men performed their duties, and many other people helped out in small ways so that Karin & I had only to say our vows and to receive our greetings.

Then we went home and ate Chinese food.

The next day we rode the train to Chicago. The day after that, we got up at 2:30 in the morning, trudged to the airport, and flew to Salt Lake City. The young man who sat next to us was determined not to acknowledge us. I offered to buy him a drink, but he kept his face glued to the window. He reminded me of Charlie Brown’s tentmate (click to enlarge):

In Salt Lake City, the air was a little thin. “Mountains!” Karin said, astonished. “One sees them in pictures, but look, those are really there!” Indeed, the scenery was stunning all during our drive to Southern Utah, to the national parks. (Later I’ll discuss that trip in greater detail.)

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Independiente del Valle have qualified for the semifinals of the Copa Libertadores. Here is their penalty shootout.

Looking forward

Karin & I’ll be married in one month and one week.

People ask me, have you any misgivings? No, I haven’t. Of the two of us, I’m clearly getting the better deal.

This doesn’t mean I never worry. I dreamed, last night, that we were at the church and that the ceremony was about to begin. I’d forgotten the suit I was meant to wear; and so I scurried from uncle to uncle, asking to swap outfits.

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My sweetie & I hoped to honeymoon in Scotland.

I was all set to take Lanark to read. We’d both been learning the poetry of William McGonagall.

The trip would cost us next to nothing: Karin’s grandpa would supply the airline miles. Alas, his travel agent tried to burden us with tours and hotels. The price became prohibitive.

We ended up booking the trip ourselves – to Utah – whose scenery is also lovely, but very different. This will be my chance to finally hunker down and study the Book of Mormon.