Skip to main content

Posts

Florence Day 2: All of the tourist things

I started the day with one of my favorite pastimes- snarking on Renaissance art at the Uffizi. So many ugly baby Jesuses!  (Why is the pope hanging out with baby Jesus??) (The angel Gabriel is doing the annunciation via telepathy) (Receding hairline!) (Jesus got into his mom’s eye makeup!) I loved seeing the Birth of Venus! And they had this cool old map that showed monsters in the ocean. And you have to always remember to look up because the ceilings are spectacular! It’s also just amazing to think about how old this place is. (Built in 1560!) But these statues made me laugh… they look like they’re doing disco moves. This was unexpected exciting. Wandering through a random room, and I stopped and almost said out loud, “I know that guy!” Growing up Lutheran, these pictures of Martin Luther were everywhere; it was awesome to stumble across the originals! Last thing I saw/loved- Medusa’s death. Next, I walked across the Ponte Vecchio and (very) briefly considered buying a piece of gold j
Post a Comment
Read more
Recent posts

Day 1 in Florence

I’ve made it to Florence and I’m in a cute little apartment, but the heat is killing me. It’s making it hard to motivate myself to go out, and I have no appetite. But there are 1 million things to see here, and I am going to try to be diligent about blogging so I remember the names of what I’ve done. For better or worse, I’ll keep track of it all here.  I chose to walk from the train station to my apartment last night which was a good call; it was so cool to come around a corner and see this:  After a long day of travel yesterday, I got a late start today. I walked over to il Mercato Céntrale and had a slice of pizza. It reminded me of La Boqueria in Barcelona- too crowded, hot, and nothing I was really interested in. It’s just not fun to eat lunch when there’s sweat dripping down your legs, just like when I used to do bikram yoga.  I stopped at an English bookstore near the duomo that had a very disappointing selection. Then I stopped at the supermarket and was actually very impressed
Post a Comment
Read more

Leaving Barcelona

I promised myself I would blog daily. Ha! To be fair, I did write some stuff down, just didn’t follow through. I’ll try to go back and fill it in. For now, I’ll just summarize Barcelona.  This experience has been both easy and difficult. We’ll start with the good stuff. Barcelona is easy to get around, and the city feels very comfortable. I love how historic it is, the windy narrow complicated roads, the buildings that look uninteresting until you step inside to a beautiful spacious restaurant, the balconies and modernista architecture… it’s such an interesting place. I love the fact that everything is in Catalan here, including public school instruction, because they understand that if the language dies, so does the culture. Sadly, I have not picked up much Catalan… sortida, espere, and si us plau is pretty much it.  I love that climate change doesn’t seem to be up for debate here. Cab drivers drive Priuses and Teslas. Public transportation is widely used. People walk everywhere (in m
Post a Comment
Read more

Nevada Hot Springs

Not too much to say about this day trip! Just good times with good people. I drank my first ever White Claw (okay, now I get what the fuss is about), and we had fun taking thirst trap photos. There were other people there, but no one was drunk/loud/obnoxious/listening to loud music. It was just a nice vibe.  Lisa takes the best pictures!!!
Post a Comment
Read more

Boojums and Toadstools

Omicron spiked, and we hit our Test to Stay threshold. Unfortunately, so did everyone else, and they had to suspend the program. We were told we could send kids home for a week while we waited for things to die down. We don't have enough devices to be a 1:1 school, so we just sent kids home with packets and enjoyed a week off.  I immediately got in the car and headed south. My first stop was Kanab, where I did half of a hike to some toadstools. It felt so good to be in Phoenix and just talk and talk to Denise and Hannah and Amanda and Rachel and Abby. I did not love Phoenix, but most of my favorite people are there and sometimes I wish life would take me back there. Denise was kind enough to come to the arboretum with me to see the boojum trees, and then we stopped at Pita Jungle on the way home and I had the best quinoa hummus salad of my whole life.  On the way back to SLC, I finished the hike from the previous weekend. It started out with hiking up a boring wash: And then it sta
Post a Comment
Read more

The Worst Christmas Ever

Christmas break had a very pleasant beginning- Fiery Furnace at Arches. Unpopular opinion- the technical canyoneering aspect wasn’t that great. I think I’d like to go back and just hike and wander.  Then I started the two day drive home, stopping in Denver to visit the Tattered Cover. (The bookstore was in a cool space, but I wasn’t that impressed with their collection.) Everything was smooth sailing. I arrived home the night of the 20th and spent the day with my family on the 21st. That night, my brother tested positive for Covid. This changed everything. Plans had to be canceled… people did not want to be around me when it was likely I would also get sick. No Christmas Eve brunch with the girls, no recording studio… I decided to limit my time at my parents’ house and wear a mask when I was around my aunt and uncle. I spent the next few days hanging out in my aunt’s basement. Christmas Eve was unusually warm, so Nina and I went for a hike at Starved Rock.  The next morning, my Dad cal
Post a Comment
Read more