Festival Time

In two short days it will be June, my favorite month of the year. It's not my favorite just because the weather is lovely or because so many things are flowering. I also love it because it's Festival time. All kinds of festivals are going on around Utah and I plan to go to many of them. Here's a list of what I want to go to this June.

Art City Days-June 7-14th! This is Springville's time to shine. There is a carnival and other activities, including a hot air balloon festival and a Children's Art Festival (June 13th) at the Museum, leading up to the "big" parade on Sat the 14th. As kids we'd always sit in front of the Museum and watch the parade go by. We made sure to always sit in the front row so we could catch any candy that people would throw from the floats passing by. It was great!

http://www.springville.org/calendarevents/events/artcitydays/

Utah Scottish Festival and Highland Games-also June 13-14th at Thanksgiving Point. Ah there is nothing like a man in a kilt. I've never been to this festival before so I can't wait to see what it is going to be all about. Plus I am partly Scottish so that should bump up my enjoyment of the activities as well

Ok this photo was mostly for my benefit, isn't Gerald Butler dreamy?

Swedish Midsummer's Festival-June 21st at the International Peace Park 1060 S. 900 W. in Salt Lake. This is a celebration of the Summer Solstice. You put flowers in your hair and dance around a maypole, correction midsummer's pole, and then gorge yourself on a Swedish smorgåsbord. It's delightful.

Picture pages

So I realized this weekend that I dare not call myself a "photographer." Although I do love to take photos and do it quite regularly, I just don't have the right equipment or technical skill to call myself a photographer. At the end of last year I did have one of my photos published in a calendar that was printed and distributed by the University, so I was beginning to think maybe I was some sort of photographer, but now I think I was letting it go to my head.

This weekend my friend invited me to the Salt Lake Photo Safari. Sounds cool no? We didn't really know what it was, but once we got there I realized I was way out of my league. Everyone had really nice big cameras with telephoto lens and tripods, etc. and I had my little dinky point-n-shoot digital camera. We didn't end of staying very long needless to say. It was all a bit over our heads. I also was a bridesmaid this weekend for my now former roommate and she had a photographer there all day as well and I asked him a little about photography and began to realize that to get "good" would take many hundreds of dollars and a lot of time.

So until I get more money and a good teacher, I will have to be content with my my little Panasonic digital and rely on my own ingenuity to take good pictures. What I love to take photos of are nature/plants and architecture, especially interesting textures and shapes. So without further adieu here are some selected photos from this week by a wanna be:

And here is the winning picture that I talked about before. It was taken in Buesa, Spain.

Could a rose by any other name...

If you know me well, you know I love names. I know the names of a lot of plants and a lot of artists. There is not much I love more than walking through a garden or a museum and knowing the name of everything I see. I don't know why I have that passion but I do. What I also find fascinating is how people name their children. What I like to look at most are the trends and see what they say about society and people. Yesterday the U.S. Social Security organization released the top 1000 names of 2007. Good reading!

So go to http://www.socialsecurity.gov/OACT/babynames/. There is a wealth of information on this site, including tops names of every decade back to 1880 and you can trace the popularity of a name back 100 years! For example, my name has been in the top 1000 since 1945 and reached its pinnacle in in 1986 at 13th most popular name of the year. It's popularity has been falling ever since but it still holds strong at 146th in 2007.

But back to the top names of 2007- Emily, Isabella, Emma, Ava and Madison top the list for girls and Jacob, Michael, Ethan, Joshua and Daniel top the list for boys. So what does this mean to America. Well I think it shows that for the majority of people they want girls to be girls and boys to be boys. All the top girl names are very feminine and all the top boys names are decidedly male. Transgender names like Taylor and Jordan are dropping in popularity. And some names are duking it out for rights to be either male or female, like the name Jayden is now most decidely male now although some still girls have it. I think it shows that most people want a return to traditional values. Emily and Jacob ae both very old, very traditional names. Jacob, Daniel, Joshua are also all biblical, as is Hannah (no. 9 for girls) and Elizabeth (no. 10).

People are getting very creative as well though, especially with spelling. The name Jayden has at least five spelling variations and the name Caitlyn has at least 8 variations. Also different, rare names are becoming popular like Nevaeh (heaven spelled backwards) is no. 31 and Serenity is no. 126. Esmeralda is at no. 194, before Kendra or Chelsea. As for Boys they are quite a bit more conservative. From the top 100 you can also see that there is a large Hispanic population in the U.S. The traditional hispanic names: Angel, Jose, Diego, Luis, Juan, Xavier, Carlos, Jesus, Miguel and Antonio are all in the top 100 for boys names.

Anyway, it's all very fascinating so take a look at look up your own name. Maybe you will be suprised.

To Blog or not to Blog...

So one of my favorite new activities is blog surfing. At least that is what I am calling it. At the top of every Blogger blog on the left side is a link that says Next Blog. I just click that and it takes me to a random blog that was just updated in cyberspace. I have found a vast array of blogs ranging from family blogs to art and photography blogs to business blogs to very strange and undescribable blogs. It's so interesting. And there is a suprising number of LDS blogs out there as well, I mean considering how few mormons there are in the world-they like their blogging. So what I think I'm going to start doing is adding a link to a blog of the week that I've "discovered" blog surfing, so you can enjoy them too.

So why do I like looking at strangers blogs? I don't know- I just find people fascinating. Like C.S. Lewis, the most quoted non-Mormon general authority, said, "We read to know we're not alone." I think that is true. We also blog to know we aren't alone. We write in hopes of people reading our blogs and responding to them. It's human nature. And what did people do before blogs? Well of course there have been books for a long time, but for the less educated it started with cave wall painting, then grafitti and then writing on bathroom stalls, a legacy that continues today. Oh I've read a lot of interesting (and suprisingly mostly non -perverted) stuff on the stalls in the Marriott Library. Stall 3 is like a 3D blog with people making comments about other people's "posts".

So to wrap this up, I've really enjoyed my blog and the feedback I've gotten from it. I'm most definitely not alone!

Resolved

Forget New Year's resolutions, I never keep them and I've stopped making them, what it's really all about is Spring and Summer resolutions! I mean who has the drive during the long and dreary winter to keep a cumbersome list of goals, ah, but with the Spring comes a renewing that just makes you want to start afresh. Plus there are more sunlight hours during the day to accomplish what you want to do and school is out (at least for me). So I am now ready to make a list of goals that I might actually be able to keep or at least plan a few good projects to do. So without further ado here is my list in no particular order:

tend my garden

organize my room and make it look "pretty"

go on a road trip

get to the gym a few times a week

work on my genealogy/do some temple work

lose a few pounds
do some volunteer work
get a facial

stop eating so much sugar (except gelato)

improve the appearance of my blog

work on my photography skills-maybe take a class

do my visiting teaching regularly

read a literary classic or some non-school related book-maybe Twilight ;)

edit my photos and organize them

practice my Italian!

Hmm, maybe this list is too long, but some of these things are related so it really shouldn't be all that daunting right? Well as they say shoot for the stars and mabe you'll hit the moon.