Tag: idaho

I’ve Missed a Couple of Days

I applied for a couple of jobs on a whim and actually ended up with one job interview. I won’t know how I did until sometime next week, but it’s been hard to focus on pretty much anything besides that interview (particularly since I went out and bought a whole new outfit — shoes and everything — for it) in the last few days.

I’ve been thinking about the before and after of our trip to Yellowstone.  My checklist included:

  1. Find my ancestor’s baptismal record;
  2. Visiting Temple Square
  3. Seeing the Great Salt Lake
  4. Visiting Golden Spike National Monument
  5. Seeing a bison
  6. Seeing a bear
  7. Walking at least 100 yards from a paved road at Yellowstone
  8. Leaving the path entirely at Yellowstone
  9. Seeing Old Faithful erupt (and recording it if possible)
  10. Visiting the Old Faithful Inn (and eating there if possible)
  11. Visiting Dinosaur National Monument
  12. Seeing the petroglyphs at Dinosaur National Monument
  13. Visiting five different states

And I may have done the first. The record I found was for the correct date and the surname starts with the correct three letters. Unfortunately, as helpful as the people at the Family History Library were, no one there that day spoke Russian.

I did the 7th as a technicality. The park ranger directed us to a path that was fairly well traveled (and thus not terribly likely to end up with us disappearing without a trace or anything) and, as it turned out, 212 yards of it were unpaved. As a result, for 12 yards in the middle of the path, we were technically 100 yards from a paved road. We also made a sharp left into the woods and walked for a total of about a hundred yards, but we had to turn right to get around an obstacle, so we ended up less than 100 yards from the path.

And we got four of our five states in. We never made it to Colorado, since it was really late when we got to our hotel in Vernal and I just didn’t have the energy to drive any longer that night, even if Colorado was only a half hour away. And the next day, we got a later start than I would have liked, so we had to head back to Salt Lake City and didn’t get to go to Colorado that day. But I still got to visit Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, so four out of five isn’t bad.

Alex and I leave for Chicago early Monday morning, so I’m going to type up my next National Geographic post tonight or tomorrow and perhaps write up Golden Spike National Monument as well. Those will be my posts for August 8 and 10, and by the 12th we’ll be home.

Our Big 2016 Vacation is Now Booked

And tomorrow the credit card payment should clear and I can pay it off.

In 2016, Alex and I will be adding five new states to our collection:  Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado.  Not that we’ll be doing any of them in too much detail. We’ll be traveling to Pando (never pass up the opportunity to visit the world’s most massive single organism (as opposed to the largest, which is a fungus in Oregon)), Salt Lake City, Golden Spike National Historic Site, Yellowstone National Park, and Dinosaur National Monument.

I’ll be getting my city fix in August when Alex and I are planning a four-day trip to Chicago. Hopefully I’ll be able to take some pictures to spruce up my Northern Illinois Destinations posts while there.

National Geographic September 2014

I know that I should probably be doing October of 2014, since I’m sort of working my way outward from January of 2015.  This issue has an article on Nero in it, though, and I went to Rome in July of 2014, so I’m skipping ahead a bit.  Also, October of 2014 is probably somewhere in my son’s bedroom.  I’ll get to it once I find it. (note: I found it later, in between two Nature Conservancy magazines.)

The Evolution of Diet, by Ann Gibbons, photographs by Matthieu Paley

The Evolution of Diet talks about the “Paleo diet,” which posits that people should be eating a meat-based diet that limits, or eliminates, beans, grains, and dairy products. The theory is that the human genome hasn’t evolved in the last ten thousand or so years.  It starts out speaking kind of positively about the Paleo diet, arguing that the hunter-gatherers’ inclusion of meat in the diet is part of what allowed us to develop advanced brains.  However, as the article progresses, we get farther from this argument.  Gibbons quotes Amanda Henry, who has found evidence that humans have been eating grains and tubers for at least the last hundred thousand years.  Gibbons also quotes Sarah Tishkoff, who makes the point that humans did not stop evolving ten thousand years ago.  We are still evolving and many populations have evolved to digest lactose and starches that others have not.  Oneof the quotes that is highlighted is “The real hallmark of being human isn’t our taste for meat but our ability to adapt to many habitats and to create many healthy diets.” Continue reading “National Geographic September 2014”