Hiking "A" Mountain

Just a few pictures from hiking "A" Mountain in Tempe, Arizona. I believe the formal name is Hayden Butte. It's very close to Tempe Town Lake.

For those of you from out of town, "A" Mountain is roughly 3 times the height of Mount Everest.

Yet I somehow made it to the summit!

It would have been more exciting if a few little kids hadn't been running around the lookout point like they weren't even out of breath. Or if a couple men in business clothes hadn't just climbed up the whole thing. Whatever.

OK, it's really just a little hike; I can't find my record of how long it took to get to the top but it couldn't have been more than 20 minutes or so. The first maybe 2/3 is paved but steep and the rest is a trail with stairsteps and handrails. I'm so wimpy I had to use the handrail when offered, but no one mocked me. Aloud, anyway.

Going down the mountain on the paved road was so steep, I preferred to take the longer gravel/trail route around, which was more scenic anyway.

Thank you, Blogger, for being awful

So tonight I discovered that my automatically scheduled blog post on the Kinyn Chronicles blog (review on Tom Pawlik's Beckon) actually didn't publish as scheduled. Frustrated, I told it to publish.

An hour later I decided to actually LOOK at the blog. I know, waiting to check is a rookie mistake, but in the Compose screen, it looked fine.

Look how great it looked on the website!

Yes, the book is THAT EXCITING!  But I didn't mean to write the review in all caps. So anyway, the post had only been up for about an hour before I fixed it.  The problem seems to have developed by pasting from Google Docs into Blogger.  To fix it, my co-author Maggie suggested I paste everything into the HTML field.  Which worked...except it killed all the formatting.

As an aside, did you know Blogger considers returns to be formatting, exactly as important as italics or bold? And in Firefox, at least, it doesn't automatically add the "<br />" code they require for a new paragraph? So I was left with a 1200 word paragraph of unformatted text to break into paragraphs and format and such. (Maggie says paragraphs work better in Chrome. Note to self, try Blogger in Chrome.)

So anyway, why am I thanking Blogger for being awful? Well, if it had been much less awful, it would have published properly the first time. But if it had been slightly less awful, it would have published the EXCITING ALL CAPS review at 8 AM!

Why didn't it publish? I actually had it scheduled. Like a reasonable American, I set it to publish on the third day of the week, which on almost every calendar I've seen, is Tuesday.

I'm not sure what country Blogger considers its homeland. Does California use a different calendar than the rest of America? Anyway, they use a Monday - Sunday calendar. (Is there any way to fix that? It still throws me.)

So thanks for being awful, Blogger. I think. I'm excited to see if I still want to throw my computer out the window when I try you in Chrome.

Daily Bathing in the 1920s

So I was thinking that daily bathing was a hot-topic or interesting issue in the 1920s, since a high school student won an essay contest writing about it.  Then I see it was a contest "instituted by M. S. Lott, Plumbing and Heating establishment for the purpose of bettering health conditions in Lehi by interesting pupils in seeking and writing on the subject."  An interesting read by Margaret F. Thurman, though I am not keen on the thought of a cold bath, even for a minute.  (Then again, in 1920s terms, I'm middle-aged.  How sad.)

--American Fork Citizen, American Fork, Utah, May 20, 1922

I always thought it was "Cleanliness is next to godliness" but either "goodliness" is a standard variant (the phrase came up nearly 10,000 times on Google) or maybe it was a Utah thing.

CostumeCon 30

I've gotta say, this one photograph pretty much sums up the point of CostumeCon.  It's primarily about sewing and making costumes! It is an annual event that goes to a different city each year...it was Tuesday that I found out it was happening in my state.  :P

The first panel I went to was on blocking a 1920s hat, by Mela Hoyt-Heydon, who is quite the milliner.  She made Rose's giant hat from Titanic. Using a tortilla bowl as the hat block!

Here are 2 of her less famous hats.

Some people were in costume (I'm guessing more as night came; it was about 100 degrees outside). Here are some costumes that were on display.

I had plans that evening (it being around Mother's Day and all) so I wasn't able to stay for the masquerade, so I missed a substantial amount of the experience, since I just saw a few panels, the display, the con suite (which was serving Mexican food right as I got there!) and the vendor's room.  Size-wise it felt pretty similar to Tus-con. Definitely worth a visit if you're local and have any interest in costumes!

I don't know about going next year (Denver) or even the year after that (Ontario, I think?) but 2015 is in Charleston, South Carolina, which could be interesting. (In their promotion to try to get people to vote for them, they said something about flappers and pirates...1920s and pirate costumes are two of my VERY FAVORITES...I wonder if I should start saving...)

Cat at Hayden Flour Mill in Tempe, Arizona

 

Hayden Flour Mill is one of the oldest buildings in Tempe. It's rather dilapidated now (though the silos look OK). 

It is not completely abandoned.

ADORABLE STRAY KITTY!

It liked to look at me but got shy and ran off if I reached for it. I went away and came back and someone had evidently given it some canned cat food. I could smell it on the kitty, and you can see the can!

Yup; no better way to eat up a blog entry than to post a cute kitty picture. Even if it's not your kitty.