St. George with Jared and Merle

We didn't remember that there were so many fun things to see in St. George!  Our good friends, Jared Christopher and Merle, were at a conference in Vegas in mid-February.  They dropped by St. George to spend the nights of February 16 and 17, 2018, with us and to sight-see all day Saturday.

First stop was Silver Reef, a ghost town which produced $50 million in silver during the 1880s.  Back then, there were 10,000 residents and dozens of hotels, bars, and brothels.  Silver Reef has now been baked clean, with just a museum and a few antique buildings to mark its glory days.

 The scenery around Silver Reef is spectacular.

 The museum has treasures depicting the 1880s and 1890s, including a bronze statue of the stage which passed through Silver Reef, and the original bank safe and stage lockbox.

 There is a reconstructed mine shaft beneath the museum.  On our tour, the docent described the donkeys that pulled carts through the mine shaft and the miners who followed the silver lodes, hacking out rock rich in silver.

 The name of this restaurant is/was the "Cosmopolitan."  Not so appropriate anymore.

 The jail stood alone on the hill.

 St. George is home to many artists.  Silver Reef houses the studio of the creator of this Civil War statue.

 Next stop was the Johnson Farm Museum, where we saw the dinosaur footprints dug up by a developer as he put in a subdivision.  I love museum gift shops.  I brought home the book, "Your Inner Fish," about how our body mimics structures from earth's earliest creatures.

 Dinsoaurs like this fellow roamed St. George in the days when it was on the edge of a tropical, inland sea.

 The museum housed huge slabs of rock, with the dinosaur footprints ranging for many feet across them.

 Dave then gunned our SUV to the top of the cliff near his parents' old home, where a huge arrow guided the earliest airplanes, in the 1920s, on their way from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City.

 Dave's dad designed and placed this marker, explaining the huge arrow and its history.

 We also took Jared and Merle to the site of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where Mormon settlers in the late 1850s took their revenge against a wagon train of pioneers from Arkansas and Missouri, making their way to California.  The entire wagon train, other than children and babies, was massacred.  The Mormons had been abused in Missouri not too long before, and some of them could not forget.  Just a few years ago, the Mormon Church helped build the monument and made peace with and an apology to the descendants of those long-ago victims. 

Year of the Dog

Chinese yo-yos.  Fans and chopsticks.  Red and gold helium balloons.  The Spendloves celebrate Chinese New Year with as much passion as the residents of Hong Kong!  On February 11, 2018, Kirsten, Sophia, and Mia relaxed with their goodie bags and full plates of beef broccoli, potstickers, chicken cashew, ham fried rice, and barbecued pork.

 The is the Year of the Dog, according to the Chinese zodiac.  Tucked into each Spendlove goodie bag was a scribble pad with a dog's face on the front. 

We haul out some decorations year after year, such as this 10 foot dragon and the posters proclaiming "Happiness," "Luck" and other Chinese words of the season.  We adorned our two tables with our prized wood dragon statues.

Ezra and Mia asked if they could collect goodies from the bags other guests left behind.  The first treats to be pocketed were the milk chocolate "coins" in gold paper.

Mike and Heidi are game for any ethnic food.  Mike has always seen worse and stranger!

Alan Dale tells me I serve him the oddest food he's ever seen.  Shauna says the food is so good she calls her children as soon as she leaves, saying, "Guess what I had to eat for dinner?"

It is a treat to have Spencer and Naomi join us from Provo.

And it is a treat to include Camille and her family.  Camille deserves to have someone else cook for her.  As compassionate service leader for her ward, she cooked five dinners for ailing ward members this week.

Mark and Janice still act like the charming newly-weds they are.

The Year of the Dog was a perfect excuse for a holiday kiss.

Karl Rove and Kathy Loveless

I was a member of the 1966 Olympus High debate team, and so was Karl Rove.  Rove went on to become a top advisor to President George Bush, and a key strategist for the conservatives in the Republican Party. He came back to SLC on February 8, 2018, to accept an alumni award from Olympus High and to speak at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute.  My friends had told me Karl Rove was in the class behind ours and that he was the partner of star debater Keith Roark, whom I knew well in high school and who is a bit of a colorful character himself.  Roark missed our 50th Olympus reunion because he was defending a murder trial!  For the life of me, I couldn't remember Rove, so I went to his speech at the Hinckley Institute to see if he remembered me.  He didn't.  I didn't try to refresh his memory by pointing out that I was the debater that the team nicknamed "Squeaky."

   

There was another face from the past at the Rove speech.  Rove pointed out to the audience that his first foray into politics was acting as campaign manager for Kathy Loveless, who was running for a University of Utah student body office.  Kathy was in the audience and waved excitedly.  Kathy was the "girl who had it all" in my class in college, including being chosen as a Miss Utah.  She and I later worked together at Bonneville Pacific, where she developed power plants and I documented them, and we have been friends ever since.  Kathy is now a widow, after the death of her husband, Scott, another SLC lawyer.  It is odd how paths cross.

Go, Eagles!

Some came for the food.  Some came for the company.  Some came for the witty TV ads. And a few actually came for the football game.  Dave and I held a Superbowl party on Sunday, February 8, 2018, for Janice's  family, Alan and Shauna, Mike and Heidi, and the Flindt kids from BYU.  Lots of things are going on in the photo above besides football--chess, internet surfing, and aimless gazing.  The one guest who was a rapt game-watcher was Janice's husband, Mark McGrady.  Mark loves football so much that he proposed to Janice on the BYU football field before a game, as thousands of fans watched!

Food is a big part of a Superbowl party--the greasier, spicier, and more laden with calories the better!  True Superbowl cooks concoct meals in the shape of footballs or even stadiums like the one above, filled with Superbowl snacks.  I settled for barbecued ribs, wings (actually drumsticks) in hot sauce, seven layer dip, and root beer floats.  A green salad was a feeble afterthought!

The Eagles beat the Patriots in an upset.  Most of our crowd was cheering the underdog, and so was very happy.  The Patriots have won for the past few years.  We sympathized, though, with Jono and Ezra Ebert, who have adored the Patriots ever since the Eberts lived for five years in Boston.

It was a treat to have Daniel Moreland, the son of Dave's sister Janice, and his wife, Chelsea, join us.  Daniel and Chelsea just moved to SLC from Houston.  Daniel is a chef.  He managed a high end pizza place in Texas and now runs the popular Proper Burger in SLC.  Daniel puts together the gourmet specials.  I hesitate to feed someone who cooks for a living, but Janice and Daniel were both gracious.  Janice even praised my barbecued ribs.  "Hearing that from a former Texan, I'm very flattered," I said.

Chelsea has a science background and works with a pharmaceutical company here in SLC.  She and chemist Naomi had lots to talk about.

It was also a treat to host Janice's son, Ben, and his wife, Brittany.  Ben creates code for a software company, and Brittany has an MBA and does health care consulting.  Janice enjoyed just having Mark next to her--for the first six months of their marriage, he was an air traffic controller in Afghanistan.

Some football, and a lot of family--that makes a happy time for David.

Kirsten is the "mom" of her family home evening group at BYU.  She invited members of the group to come with her to Grandma's house, and four of them took her up on it.  We loved to see Cassie, Kirsten's roommate.

Kirsten and all four of her guests are studying to be scientists.  Kirsten is in microbiology, and the others are biologists and physicists.

Kirsten and her friends laughed, talked, and relaxed in our downstairs family room.

I broke out the red checked tablecloths and napkins for this folksy, all-American party.  The football was fine, but I was there for the friends, food, and, yes, the flowers!

Three Miles a Day

So what is it like, on all those mornings from 5:30 a.m. to 7 a.m., as David Spendlove prowls the countryside?  On the morning of Sunday, January 28, 2018, I tagged along to find out.  On Sundays, Dave starts later, but it was still quiet and dark, as we walked for nearly five miles along the Jordan Parkway, starting near 1300 South and 700 West. 

The winter sun finally arose, on this chilly, steel gray morning.  We walked across bridges along the river, merely a quiet creek in this drought year.  There were no transients sleeping in the International Peace Gardens, as they do in the summer.

All the world was still asleep, except for this gaggle of ducks, perfectly camouflaged in the dry grass.  The only colors were gray, brown, and white, until we arrived at our turning-around point, a wall brilliantly painted with graffiti.  Will I go again?  Of course...when I retire.