Cakes, Tomatoes and Salt Lake

I hope you are all feeling rested after your three day weekend.

Becca and I invited Dad, Garit and Lorena over to our house for dessert on Sunday night. Becca made the cake you see above just for this occasion. It was delicious! So were the cookies that Dad brought over. We've been making lots of food lately and giving a lot of it away to family and friends. Becca has made TONS of apple sauce and several apple crisps.

I go out and pick tomatoes every morning while I water them. Since the bugs tend to get them once they ripen, I have begun to pick them when they are just about ripe. I take them in the house and pile them underneath the ripe ones that I use for making salsas and picos de gallo.

This last batch that I made here will burn your mouth off. I've been having fun experimenting with different chilli peppers. I've used arbol, huajillo, California and morita chillis. This last batch was with morita chillis. Moritas give a great smokey taste but they are spicy and didn't need much help from the six arbol chillis I stuck in as well.

Becca and I wanted a change of scenery yesterday so we decided to spend Labor Day in Salt Lake. We walked around the mall and the gardens on and around Temple Square.

We realized that we had mentioned taking a tour of the Conference Center several times but we had never done it. I've attended several conference sessions and Christmas and Easter programs in the Conference Center since 2004 but I was always in a rush to get to my seat and never had much time to look around. We decided to take a tour.

The general assembly hall looks big with 20,000+ people in it but it looks even bigger when it's empty.  It's the only assembly hall of its kind in the world with amazing acoustics, two stories underground and no support beams obstructing people's view. The organ has thousands of individual pieces. I learned that, when they use the hall for cultural and other religious events, they take out the stands and chairs in front and cover the organ with a screen. The pulpit is hydraulically lowered under the stage.

The most significant part of the tour for me was seeing so many original paintings. I didn't take very many good pictures of them, sadly but this one, above, came out okay. I have been moved by the story of Abinadi ever since about 2001 when I realized how significant he became in Nephite history, despite the fact that he died without any indication of success. I think that he is a shining example of integrity and submission to God.

Both the painting of Abinadi and the one of George Washington were done by Arnold Friberg. What I learned on the tour was that there was not much art work done depicting scenes from the Book of Mormon so the General Primary President of the Church commissioned Arnold Friberg to make paintings of Book of Mormon scenes for $1,000 a painting. She paid for them out of pocket but died before they were completed. These paintings teach and inspire people all over the world and I am grateful to that sister for making such a sacrifice.

I have seen hundreds of reproductions of this painting and had no idea that it was originally a mural!

Latter-Day Saints love this painting and use it often. Many assume it was done by an LDS painter (like most of the art work we use) but it was actually made by the Seventh-Day Adventist painter Harry Anderson. Again, I've seen this painting reproduced hundreds of times and it was really cool to see the original.

This was one of my lousy shots but I decided to include it anyway. The inscription says, And this Gospel shall be preached unto every nation, and kindred, and tongue and people. I love the universality of Christianity. I love belonging to a world-wide church. I truly believe that Christ's teachings are for everyone.