A walk in Zion

The highlight of this week has definitely been the weekend (sidenote: we started watching the new BBC series Downton Abbey last week--so far, I love it! It's the kind of period drama that I adore--and one of the upper-class characters, played by Maggie Smith, asks another character in some bafflement, "What is a week-end?" Because, of course, to those who live a permanent life of leisure the demarcation between the work week and a week end is meaningless).

Bubby and Poppy kindly agreed to take our kids for a night and Dan and I skipped town (this is my early birthday present). We had dinner at a restaurant--by ourselves! I can't remember the last time we did that--then went back to the condo, watched Inception, and slept in. At least, I slept in. I think Dan's body is too hard wired to let him sleep much past six.

We got up, dressed, and went hiking in Zion National Park (this weekend is one of the no-fee weekends). It was lovely. A little chilly, and the trail was a bit muddy in spots, but the air was clean, the park was pretty sparsely populated, and we had the luxury of a couple of hours to ourselves.

After our hike, we stopped in Springdale for lunch. There were only a few places open this time of year, so we settled on a family meal type restaurant. We placed our order and waited. And waited. And waited. We watched people who had come in 15 minutes after us get their food. And we waited some more. I was getting upset (those of you who know me well know that I do NOT do well when I'm hungry); Dan was laughing at me. I was just about to say something to the waitress, when she stopped by our table and said, "It'll be just a minute. She had to reassemble the grill."

Um, what? So, clearly they weren't deliberately ignoring us, but couldn't the waitress have told us there was something wrong with the grill before we waited an hour (yes, you read that right) for our food. The food was decent, but definitely not worth the long wait.

Still, that was a small fly in our ointment. We came back, picked up our kids, and spent the rest of Saturday fairly leisurely. (Translation: I took a nap with Evelyn--for over two hours--while Dan presumably wrestled Andrew). Poor Dan--I think he definitely got the brunt of the day. In my defense, I hadn't expected to sleep that long!

I substituted in Gospel Doctrine today. I wasn't too nervous until I got up to the front of the room and realized how big it was (our ward holds the class in the gym, because it's so big). There were easily 60-70 people there. But the lesson seemed to go okay--no one could tell that I was nervous, and even though the material was familiar (the nativity story from Luke 2 and Matthew 2), people had plenty of interesting things to contribute. Several people even made a point of stopping me afterward to thank me for the lesson, and to say that I'd done well. My favorite comment was from one older gentleman who said he'd been talking with Michael Benson (the president of our local university) and said that he suspected I must do some kind of teaching for a career. And of course, President Benson confirmed that I taught at the university. My second favorite comment was from a visitor, who said that they'd have called me to the be the teacher inservice leader if I was in his ward . . . (which I suppose means he thought I did well?)

Right now, we're looking forward to a brief visit from my parents and a day off of work tomorrow. How about you?