Tulip Time

Saturday I headed down to Thanksgiving Point for their annual Tulip Festival. It was beautiful blue sky day, and tulip nirvana for sure. I'd say more, but I think the pictures speak for themselves!

Wednesday evening hiking!

You know you are awfully luckily when you can head out after work with a bunch of friends, and hike to the top of the world. Tonight's hike was to the Twin Peaks of the Avenues. It was rainy and overcast all day,but lucky for us the weather cleared and gave us a lovely hiking evening. It wasn't a long hike, but the 1000 foot elevation gain made it a little work to get to the top. The views made it all worth while, and I was thrilled to see my first Indian Paintbrush of the year. Hiking season is off to a great start.

The Dog Ate My Homework...

This seems like an apropos post for tax day, the day that millions of people are posting very important mail, their tax returns, and expecting said mail to be delivered.
But... the postal service isn't always perfect. Things do indeed get "lost in the mail". Not that I've had many problems with the post office, but there are occasional screw ups. A couple of weeks ago I found this in my mailbox... a returned letter... now get this, it was postmarked Nov. 30th 2009!!!! It's now 2012!!! It was addressed to my son's then landlord, and contained a rent check. I vaguely remember a time when I had to send a second rent check, because somehow the landlord had not not received my paynemt. I think I assumed they had misplaced it, or that perhaps I had done something totally flakey and not really sent it off, that I'd someday find it behind some furniture or under the car seat. It never did turn up though. Definitely a "dog ate my homework" sort of moment. What I am curious about is... where has this letter been for two and a half years?

Hiking again... with Cheeseburgers!

The 'view' of the valley from the top of Mount Van Cott.... yes, the valley floor is really out there a few thousand feet down. Yeah we must crazy to be out hiking in the rain!

Yes it's that time of year, hiking season. "Hiking Buddies" my hiking group from the pottery studio has started it weekly Wednesday night hikes. The days are not yet really long so we we picked an a quick and easy Cheeseburger Hike or tonight.

What is a Cheeseburger Hike you ask? Friends of my friend Susan started the Summit Cheeseburger website... a site devoted to, well, consuming cheeseburgers on mountain peaks of course. Susan, has been bagging cheeseburger peaks for a few years now, and initiated the rest of us last year. We figured the early season, with shorter days and too much snow high on the mountains would be a good time to 'cheeseburger' some of the lower local peaks. It turns out that cheeseburger are good motivators... I'm not sure if we would have been as excited to hike to the top of Mount Van Cott in the rain tonight if it weren't for the promise of a Cheeseburger Summit. If you want to read about tonight's adventure, here is my Cheesburger Summit write up for Mount Van Cott You can poke around and look at my hikes, or hikes by people all over the world! It's also a great repository for list of peaks all over the world.

Back to my roots

A fun little weekend diversion...A trip to Red Butte Gardens for Utah Orchid Society show. Lucky for me my friend and pottery instructor Dave was displaying his magnificent ceramic planters at the show and invited us pottery peeps to attend. Not that you can tell by ragtag collection of house plants, but once upon a time ago I got few degrees in botany, so I am great appreciator of interesting plants and plant diversity.

Everyone loves orchids, right? Ok...Nerd alert here... the Orchidaceae family is a huge plant family, one of the 2 largest families of plants, the other being the Asteraceae (daisies etc.) Being such a big family, it is not too surprising that there's a great diversity of flowers types and colors, but since we are most often exposed to the handful of orchid types commonly sold in department stores and garden centers the rarer specialty varieties on display at an Orchid show were really quite a treat. There were plenty of varieties I was not at all familiar with, with interesting flowers, amazing vibrant colors, and in some cases amazing fragrances. As you can see, it was quite a feast for the eyes!!!








Dave's marvelous planters. You can see some better pictures of his work here.

Cold Season

A Pinex ad from Nov. 1960, a few weeks before I was born


Oh, lucky me, it was my turn to catch the bugaboo that has been going around. I guess I should complain as I can't even remember the last time I was sick, but this lousy head cold hit me hard, I've certainly been coughing my head off. So what to do for a cold? I hate cold medicine, it makes me feel lousy, so I only use it when I'm desperate, as I was this week. I've been putting myself to sleep with Nyquil, then suffering the Nyquil fog for half of the next day.

All this coughing and hacking got me thinking about a better cure, and I decided to see if you could still get the cough medicine of my childhood - Pinex. Pinex was an old fashioned medicine, a concentrate that mom mixed with a bottle of Karo Syrup. A spoonful of Pinex was sure stop your cough and tasted yummy too, kind of fresh and, well, piney. I remember it being a bit of a treat to get a dose of Pinex.

So I googled for Pinex and found it has long been unavailable, and I'm apparently not the only who misses it. I did find lots of old advertisements and some auctions, like this auction for an unopened antique bottle.(I hope they don't mind my stealing their picture for my blog - thanks!)

I also found the ingredients list: Alcohol, Chloroform, Oil of Pine Tar, Potassium Guaiacol Sulphonate, Oil of Eucalyptus, Extract Grindelia and Glycerine - Not sure what ingredients do what, and wonder if it would still be considered safe and effective but my childhood memory is that it really worked.

I also found another interesting bit of interesting to me history. The Pinex Co. was started in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in 1905 by William Noll, to sell through his families drug store. My birth name was Noll. I have no reason to think we are related, as I am a New York Noll, my great-grand father Henry having immigrated from Germany to New York City in the late 1800's, but I think it is a fun coincidence that my favorite childhood medicine came from a namesake.


Click on the picture to see a bigger, readable version!

Tales from chairlift II

My little bit of leopard love!

Ok, I'm lying, not really tales from the chairlift, but from lodge this time. It has been a bleak winter snow-wise, not the year for powderhounds, especially weekend powder hounds like me. But finally, we had a big storm this weekend, and lucky for me a skier friend was in town and we had plans to ski Snowbird. 15 inches of glorious fresh powder, my first real powder of the season, probably the last. It was snowing and overcast, the light was flat so the terrain was difficult to see and assess. "Sking by braille" is quite a good workout. After many runs from Gadzoom and a long run down from the top of Peruvian, we decided our hammered legs needed a break and we headed to Snowbird Center cafeteria.

As I sat down with my cocoa (my tired legs were sceaming for sugar!) I looked around at the handful f patrons in the cafeteria, most interstingly the leopard man, who was sitting with the zebra woman. His ski suit was yellow and covered with leopard spots, her ski suit in zebra stipes. Their matching helmets sat on the table. I think we'd stumbled across some real ski animals! I love people with a sense of style, ok, humor, so I had to go say hello.

I asked them if they were a pair, and of course they were. Judging by their accents, a pair of New Yorkers, somehow I was not surprised they weren't Utahns. Utahns are, on average, kinda conservative, this couple obviously was not. I told the leopard man that I really liked his leopard suit. He reached in to his pocket and then handed me a little swatch of leopard print fabric, and told me that he had to "share the leopard love". What more could a gal want from a ski day? Fresh powder, happy legs, not cocoa, and leopard love. My day was pretty great.

At the end of the day as we skied up the parking lot, guess who skied up behind us? Yup, leopard man and zebra woman, and it turns out they have hand painted animal print skis too! And capes! What a hoot! I love meeting random interesting people!

End of an Era...

Ok I admit it, I am not exactly heartbroken about this, but it's a little neighborhood trivia my faraway kids might find interesting. They are demolishing and rebuilding the McDonalds 2 blocks from my house. I'm not a big Mcdonalds fan, or fast food fan in general, but regardless, I have been in the local McD's on more than one occasion. What parent didn't induldge their kids desire for a "Happy Meal" and toy now and then?

If kids desire for McNuggets and toys was not enough, when my kids were preschoolers they added one of those huge playplaces to "our" McDonalds. Talk about having an attractive nuisance in the neighborhood. Our first trip there, for the grand opening, was a disaster. One of the playthings was a computer game. A CRT and computer equipment in a box, kids excitedly hovering around, checking out the game. 18 or so years ago computer games were still pretty new and excinting. Next thing you know my son is crying. The door hiding the computer equipment was not locked, and some kid fidgiting with the door slammed Matts finger in it. Bad enough that I had to take him to the doctor, because I thought he needed stitches. Which he did, but they didn't do because it would have required them pulling off his fingernail. Eek. Of course I was livid, and from the doctors office went straight back to McDonalds, toting my boy with hugely bandaged mitten of hand, so I could speak the manager. I demanded that they lock up that box, as I did not any other child to get hurt. The box was locked, and Matt got an ice cream cone. I suppose most people would have sued McDonalds, or at least gotten the doctor bill paid for, but I'm not that kind of person, and all these year later I still joke about how I'd be rich if I'd only sued McDonalds when I had the chance.

Unfortunately, that small misfortune did not deter my kids desire to visit the McDonalds playplace. Judging from the size of the box of Happy Meal toys that still takes up space in my storage room, my kids may have been overindulged. This all ended with an incident a few years later. Matt came out of the ball pit with a question - "Mommy, what is this brown stuff on my leg?" Well, it didn't take rocket science to figure out what that brown stuff was... and he, as well as the rest of the family, was pretty disgusted. In some ways that was the best day of my life, because after that the kids never asked to go back the play place again.

I wish that totally ended my McDonald patronage, but I have to admit that there were quite a few "bad mother moments" where a schoolday breakfast for the kids was quick trip thought the drive through for a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit. That was also forever ago, as I don't think I've set foot in McDonalds in 8 or 10 years. I doubt the kids have either, because despite the fast food indulgences of their childhood, both became young adults who only want healthy, organic, and in Sarah's case, vegetarian food. I do wonder though if they will be a bit nostalgic about the destruction of the McDonalds of their childhood.

And so it begins....

Yesterday, the first of my children got married. OK, not one of my biological kids, but my son Matt's good friend Kory, one of my "kids" for sure. I feel blessed, that as my kids were growing up, we were one of the "hang out" houses. I always joked about running the "Morrison Home for Wayward Children" as we always seemed to have a full house. I even hung a Beware of the Children sign on my door. Kory was one of those boys that was always here, watching skateboard videos, doing rails and jumps out on the street, staying for dinner and now he is the first of the gang to get married. It's hard to believe my little skateboarder dude kids are all growing up.

Andrea, his new bride, is a sweet girl, who seems to have a lot of personal style. They were married in the mormon temple so we could not attend the ceremony, but they had a reception at the ward house that evening. They picked a "vintage theme" and had the room decorated with antique treasures collected from family and friends. The guest book was an old book we were invited to write in, antique trunks contained photos of the wedding couple, it was all rather sweet. And yeah I admit it, I cried.


The gang! It was not long ago the were all in front of the house skateboarding!





My baby Matt, I'm glad the wedding gave him an excuse to come home for a weekend. Don't you love his smile?

Tales from the Chairlift...

Skied a lovely bluebird day at Brighton today. Blue skies, crisp air and even the surprise of a little fresh snow! I had a solo day, since my regular ski buddy could not join me. As much as I enjoy skiing with friends, I do enjoy my 'alone' ski days too, as it's always interesting to meet random people and chat on the lifts.

On one trip up Great Western today I rode with 3 guys. The one fellow had apparently bumped into friends and was happy to be joining them on the slopes. He has mostly been skiing Solitude this year, likes the mountain, but was lamenting that he rarely ran into friends there, like he did at Brighton today. (Apparenty the cool people are all at Brighton) Then he started talking about the people he had met and become friendly with at Solitude, like the parking lot guys, and the "Fogs".

Fog's??? I had to ask what Fog's where. Turns out Fog's, should be F.O.G.'s.... which stands for "Fucking Old Guys". The old guys who come up to ski every day then hang around in the parking lot drinking beers and whatnot. So then I had to ask... "How old are these F.O.G.'s?" Turns out these guys were pretty old .... like ***gasp***, 50!!!

Being an old gal of 51 I about busted a gut laughing to find out that "F'ing Old Guys" are in their 50's. I think the guy realized that I was a bit taken back that guys age 50 were considered that "old", and he added... "But these guys have lived hard." To which I responded... "I guess we'll have to see if you are still skiing when you are 50", though I do imagine these guys will, as it turns out that the guy who was telling the story of the F.O.G.'s was already 45. The whole conversation made me laugh, because I realized that if 50 year old guys partying in the parking lot are Fucking Old Guys, are 51 year old women up on the slopes "Fucking Old Gals"?

This got me thinking. I'm not only a 51 year old gal, but a single 51 year old gal... One of the (as best I can tell, useless) bits of dating advice I always hear is to "Do the the things you love, and that's how you will meet someone". Now I love to ski, and have to admit, that along those lines, I do have this secret fantasy of meeting someone interesting on the ski lift someday. But now I realize maybe I'm doing this all wrong... because when I go skiing... I spend my day skiing...."ride and glide, ride and glide". It has never occured to me to hang around in the parking lots where all the F.O.G.'s hang out....

And on another note... aren't these tracks beautiful? I wish they were mine, cause it would mean I was a really good skier...

Light time..

Am I becoming the "Daffy Dog Dame", or do all single women take their dogs to the bar? Ok, I didn't really take her to the bar, but when I head downtown to play bar trivia with some friends after our Wednesday night run, Daisy often comes along with me. Since Christmas season is upon us I decided that after trivia I should take Daisy for the four block walk up Main Street to see the Christmas lights on Temple Square.

I have walked Daisy many places, but I think this was the first time in her 11 years that I've walked her through the heart of the city. She was quite curious about the chirping sound the crosswalk signal made, and she was momentarily frightened when the Trax train rumbled up the street. I don't think that she realized that it was kind of tacky to try to beg food from a homeless guy who was sitting on a planter eating a snack...Oops.

I'm not sure when I last went downtown to see the Christmas lights. It was a favorite thing to do an snowy December night when I was a married person, but since becoming single I haven't bothered. Judging by all the young couples walking the square, it is still the romantic December thing to do. I have to say I felt a little dorky that my hot date for Christmas light stroll was my four legged pal, but hey, she is the one in my life who is happiest to join me.

My big amusement was finding baby Jesus in the water. The most unusual nativity that I have ever seen - Joseph, Mary and Jesus in middle of the big reflecting pond on Main street surrounded by pretty floating lights... made me wonder if that is when he started walking on water?