What, you don’t have a penguin at the top of your tree?

Even the guest bedroom looks festive.

Tiffany sent me the best gifts ever for the birds, she made Conner and Trevor little stockings!!!

I was really obsessed with getting the right stocking stuffers for the humans and now I’ll have to find gifts for the birds.  Thank you Tiffany!

The other side has a giant brush and dustpan.

The museum is also next to some really stylish apartments.  I had a brief fantasy about living in an apartment next to the art museum.

The Denver Art Museum is next to the most beautiful library I’ve ever seen.

From the fourth floor you could see the capital.  If you look in the lower left-hand corner of the picture, there is a crowd of people.

Police showed up and started putting yellow tape around the museum.  Police cars were everywhere!  The tape was possibly to prevent homeless people from taking over the museum.  A security guard told us that there is an underground tunnel that connects the two art buildings and homeless people were trying to use it as a shelter.  The tape also could have been about Occupy Denver, though, because that crowd was pretty rowdy.

After the museum we went to see what the Occupy Denver crowd was doing.  If you’re at all unsure about their beliefs, they had a lot of signs to make it clear.

“Are you a proud slave?”

“If not now then when?  If not us then who?”

This flag is backwards in the first picture so it’s a little hard to tell what’s going on, but it’s an American Flag with the stars replaced by the names of large companies such as Microsoft and GE.

I felt really bad for the police who had to stand and have people yell and preach to them about corporate greed.  Dear protesters: you shouldn’t blame the police for instituting limits.  They might even like your cause, but they’re paid to prevent the scene from becoming violent.  And if your demonstration is in part a reaction to a poor economy with high unemployment, perhaps you could be more sympathetic to people who are trying trying to keep their jobs.

The police maintained a barricade by lining up their bicycles.  That’s pretty awesome and is emblematic of Denver.

Anyways, I support the right to protest but I’m not sure what they expect to accomplish.  I rather doubt that the 1% care about the protesters.  In fact, some of them are quite willing to mock the movement.  I will point out, however, that the couple that were using this day to take wedding photos from less than a block away from the protest were pretty brave because I would worry about the protesters turning on me and my opulent wedding party.

Weird!  There was also a bleeding heart that looks like it lights up at night.

Unfortunately the inside was unimpressive.  The entire exhibit was rooms filled with yarn.

And I’m not saying it was a complete disaster.  The yarn was used to illustrate how we perceive dimensions.  But seriously, every room had yarn.

After going to the second floor and seeing even more yarn, I went to the front desk and said, “Am I to understand that the entire museum only contains yarn?”  One of the people said, “Well, the building is also art.”  And then blah, blah, this is one exhibit that is being featured…  But really, the whole building was filled with yarn!

Jon couldn’t stop laughing, I was so annoyed by the setup.  When you go into the elevator, they even have pictures of the different string exhibits.

Fortunately, there was another exhibit on the roof.  The museum has carrier pigeons and if you live within thirty miles of the museum you can take a pigeon home and release him.  Here’s the box they travel in.

I wasn’t able to take a pigeon home to Salt Lake, but the pigeon keeper did let me pet one.

She was very unhappy at first until I started scratching her head.  Then she discovered the joys of human contact.

The carrier pigeons were so much smarter than your average street pigeon.  They responded quickly and they were much sleeker.  Sometimes I feel like I might step on street pigeons, they move so slowly.  But these guys were clearly thinking about things and they’re so beautiful.

The top of both of them swings open and there is storage space inside so I’m using them to store jewelry.  We had to introduce the cockatiels to the wooden birds of course.

Audrey was all in.  He’ll get excited about anything that you bring up and down.  Conner was somewhat suspicious but was willing to play along because Audrey was excited.  Trevor thought that the birds would bring death.

But they’re all okay with the birds being on my nightstand so I consider the experiment a success.

Now there are several interesting things about this painting.  First, the painting is next to Gallenson’s paintball and gun store.  I don’t think I ever posted the pictures here, but Gallenson’s was one of the first things that caught my eye in Salt Lake City because of the idea of selling guns and paintball in the same store seemed so crazy.

So Gallenson’s is interesting because they have a painting on the side of their building that depicts soldiers, the year 1911 and a gun.  Now, I don’t know anything about guns but there is one called the M1911 that looks kind of like the one in the picture.  If someone actually knows about guns, please enlighten me.

The other interesting thing is that I caught a nice juxtaposition of the gun on the Gallenson’s sign and the Madonna.

The mural was painted by El Mac and Retna.  They were commissioned by an owner of Fice who felt that Salt Lake City has too many patriarchal figures and could benefit from a maternal figure.  She’s really beautiful.  If we could only get rid of the guns…

Inside the cemetery, it looks like a different world.  But on the outskirts, it’s still a very urban area.  You can see the University of Utah stadium from the entrance.  I could hear the band practicing.

But inside the cemetery it looks like a different world.  There are beautiful mausoleums.

And more modern looking tombstones in the newer sections.

this girl was only 16 when she died

If you can’t make out the words on the right, this has a quote from the Wizard of Oz.  The wife is buried here and a tombstone for her husband is already in the ground.

I liked this one because of all the different symbols.  He had a lot of interests!

The main reason that I came to the cemetery was not for the tombstones but for wildlife.  People have found birds in here and there is a family of deer that walks around eating grass between tombstones.  I love the idea of deer guarding the tombs.

These are Mule Deer, which are named after their giant ears that move independently.

The pictures above are of the younger deer.  I believe the deer below is one of the parents.

There was a squirrel who was so incredibly mad at me.  He chastised me for five minutes.  Do you see how his mouth is open?  Yeah, that’s because he was yelling.

There weren’t too many birds in the cemetery.  I saw a robin, three magpies, two Eurasian Collared Doves and a chickadee.  I think this magpie was a nice addition since he’s having a molt so severe that his head looks like a skeleton.

This is the end of the tubing path.  You park here, they take you up the river about five miles and you float down the river.  We had 30 minutes before the van came to take us tubing, so we made tomato sandwiches with homegrown tomatoes.

It’s so nice having a cooler that you can take everywhere so you’re never hungry.  It’s especially helpful in Utah where things aren’t open on Sundays and vegetarian food can be hard to find.  I don’t have any pictures of us tubing because I didn’t want to risk my camera.  That wound up being the smart decision because at one point I flipped the tube over and became completely soaked and banged up.  And let me tell you, mountain water is cold!

I saw a lot of birds during the tubing.

female waxwing

Waxwings were everywhere.  And along the banks you could see dippers in the brush, which is really cool.  I’ve never been that close to dippers before.  After tubing, we took a trip on the chairlifts at Sundance.

The views from the top are gorgeous.  Utah is much more lush in the summer, the rest of the year looking very grey.

I’m trying to soak up all the activities in the warm days because winter is coming.

From the top you can see quite a view.

The caves were amazing.  First, a story of their discovery.  Martin Hansen discovered the cave when he was 74 years old and tracking a cougar.  Hansen estimated that the drop into the cave was 70 feet so he and his friends brought a 70 ft rope.  Well, it turns out that the drop was 110 ft and Hansen had to fall the 40 feet, resulting in a twisted ankle.  So this 74 year old man had to sit in a cave in the dark until his friends got a bigger rope.  That is hardcore.

Before going into the cave I knew that stalactites came from the top of the caves and stalagmites are deposits on the bottom.  Now I know so much more!  First off, minerals combine with water and drip off of the caves, creating deposits.  Cave formations are referred to as speleothems.

The mineral deposits can form different shapes and have different colors depending upon the type of mineral.  My favorite shape was called a helictitie, which simply refers to a type of speleothem (i.e. cave formation) where the axis changes from vertical to another direction during formation.  The Timpanogos Cave has one of the largest collections of helictites.  This shape is called a curly fry.

The guide referred to this section as looking like coral, i.e. a coral reef.

She called this part cave popcorn.

With regard to color, this deposit has copper.

And this one has iron.

The guide said that this one looked like burnt marshmellows.

The tour was great.  They offer a more intensive tour where you crawl around with a head lamp.  We’ll do that next year.  I can’t wait!

I love how Salt Lake City has a mix of old original buildings with new modern structures.  In the picture above you can see the eagle entrance to the Beehive House, which is on the left.  The Beehive House used to be Brigham Young’s headquarters and they still give tours inside.  Across the street are condos.

Salt Lake City seems like our own little secret.  The capital only has 186,440 people in 110 square miles compared with San Francisco, which has over 800,000 people in 47 square miles.  And yet we have everything.  If you want food we have vegan (Sage’s, Vertical Diner), sushi (Takashi), Mediterranean (Aristos, Cafe Med), Middle Eastern (Mazza’s), Thai (Sawadee), Vietnamese (Indochine) and Italian (Faustina).  If you want outdoor activities you can go hiking, skiing, birding, we have a great symphony, anything you want.

For the past two months I’ve averaged about 20 bike rides to work each month.  I really love it because you get to learn so much more about a city when you look at the same stuff slowly every day.  What I remember about the Bay area the most are the beaches and the parks because the trip to work was just a long boring trip in a car.  But on the beaches and in the parks I took my time.  In SLC I can tell you about the man who feeds the pigeons so much corn and bread that the pigeons live on the wires above his house.  I can also tell you about the family of quails that lives a few streets from me that like to explore early in the morning.  And I can go on and on about the light cycles of various streets and exactly how to time your bike ride to beat the lights.

This house was built in 1895.  We took a tour of the inside, which was fascinating.  The bricks on the outside were purchased and assembled to make the house look like a modern Victorian house.  The bricks on the inside were made by the Wheelers out of baked clay.  To use the same bricks that were used on the outside would have been prohibitively expensive.

The farm has a lot of animals.  My favorite were the goats.  Here’s a wise goat.

This is a rasta goat.

And here is a vicious goat that bit Jon.

The goat was actually very sweet but Jon rested his arm on the fence and when he wasn’t looking the goat snuck up and bit him.  The goat drew blood!

Next to the vicious goat was a baby pygmy goat.

Twice a day they hold milking sessions at the Wheeler House.  Although I think I’ve probably milked a cow before, I didn’t remember how it felt.  It’s like squeezing a deflated balloon.  I had expected it to be filled with so much milk that it would be tense with pressure.

I will go back soon.