"It's all Utah"

Then: Us/me with a new baby girl in the land where people shopped at Wal-mart with many children and seagulls frequented the parking lot. Also available nearby, the dollar theater and See's candy. All in all, a pretty nice place to be; even the heat could be tolerable, since it was dry heat (as evidenced by the very brown lawns all about). Did I mention I'm doing grad school at BYU?

Now: Us/me with a new baby girl plus three older siblings, one of the parents shopping at Wal-mart with multiple children. The next-to-youngest, age 16 months, was just the right age to appreciate the seagulls that came to scavenge the last bits of his snack that he'd thrown down on the parking lot before we headed home. It was hot today, and the lawns are showing it (or rather showing the lack of rain for who knows how long). However, even though the temperature sign we passed on the way home said 97 (and that was around 6 p.m.), it didn't really feel to bad, since it was dry heat. Besides, if we want to beat the heat, we can always go to the dollar theater. Or, better yet, I can hide in the basement with my box of See's candy. So nice to have just finished up with grad school at BYU; got my degree on my transcript now to prove it.

A couple of decades ago, before he became, shall we say, a little more sensitive to salt, one of my father's favorite things to tease me with was his "Utah time" clock, a clock that was perpetually set to Utah time, even though we lived neither in Utah nor even in the same time zone as Utah. Whenever any "just like Utah" things came up in our area, he would grin and exclaim "It's all Utah!" ("Utah" with the "yew" emphasized, by the way).

Well, despite all my annoyance back then, it seems to have rubbed off on me. In the "then" section related above, we lived in Utah. Now, however, we don't. Nevertheless, it seems as though at least today, "It's all Utah!"

One last thought: "Cottage cheese solves nothing; Chocolate can do it all!"