Snowbird

The University of Utah Neuroscience program puts on a symposium at Snowbird every year. This year, the symposium was the day after my birthday, so I elected to stay over at the resort where in years past I would have just gone up for the day and come home in the evenings. Maren came in time for dinner. The picture is from our hike the next morning in Little Cottonwood Canyon above Alta. It was a perfect autumn day (even with the snow on the ground).

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Brain cupcakes

For my birthday, one of my grad students brought brain cupcakes to lab meeting. What you can’t see is that they had roll-o’s in the middle. Mmmm…roll-o’s.

Sunflower Seeds

This year we participated in a community garden for the second year in a row. It’s in an empty lot in the neighborhood. We didn’t get much out of the garden besides zucchini last year, so we didn’t hold much hope for anything doing well this year. It’s just not the greatest piece of dirt. The girl thought it would be fun to have sunflowers, so we planted a packet of seeds. To our surprise, they turned out great. We had about 9 flowers grow to 7 or so feet each. Here’s L holding the largest of the bunch:

We harvested and roasted them this last week. I’m not sure Maren was too happy with me leaving a huge bowl of sunflower seeds soaking in saltwater overnight. Here are some of them drying:

And here’s the finished product. They’re pretty tasty–we made plain salted, garlic salt, and seasoning salt (seasoning salt is the most popular).

Autumnal Hiking

A couple of weeks ago, we went hiking with some friends to Upper Silver Lake in American Fork Canyon. Well, we set out to hike to Upper Silver Lake. We only got about a mile down the trail before kids started to fall apart. So instead we had lunch by the trail (pictured below) and played around by Lower Silver Lake. We came home via the Alpine Loop, which was gorgeous.

Posted without comment

Ok, so I will comment that she climbed up there herself and brought all that stuff with her. And yes, that’s my toothbrush she’s test driving.

Do you see what I have to put up with?

Funny cat video

We’ve had requests here at the blog headquarters for new posts. So, here is how we’ve been spending our time for the last week or so.