Eat the Cat

Hello dear Ty! It was great to talk to you on Sunday night. I’m sorry you’ve been sick, and hope the medicine works and you are feeling better soon. Please tell the sister who made you go to the doctor thank you from me! I appreciate her looking out for you and taking care of you. The city of Kuala Lumpur looks so beautiful. It must be cool to ride the elevated train around and get a good view of the city. I’m glad you had a good time at zone conference and had the opportunity to go out finding in an area with a lot of people to talk to! I hope you are able to contact that guy who lives is Sibu again! I’m really happy to hear that your friend is ready to be baptized this week. I hope everything goes really smoothly for that. The branch party and mid-autumn festival sounds like a lot of fun. I love hearing when you have opportunities to be out contacting a lot of people, and I love to hear when people are so kind for no reason (like the lady who gave you cheesecake!). Isn’t it so cool to see how other people and cultures live and celebrate traditions?

I hope you have another awesome week. My update contains a lot of political rambling, so you may need to skim through a bit! This is what we've been up to. 

1. It was a busy week, bust mostly just more of the same. Football, basketball, volleyball & soccer. Skill sets, biz town, physical therapy, PTA meetings, bookclub. 

2. Blake’s team beat Mountain Ridge 17-3 at home! First win of the season, and first win at home in over 2 years. The student body was super excited to rush the field and congratulate the team!

3. Jett’s team beat Viewmont by several touchdowns. It was great to finally have a winning weekend!

4. Spencer Griffin got married on Friday. Dad and Michael went to the reception while I taxied kids around town.

5. We had an awesome lightning storm on Tuesday night. Unfortunately it sparked a fire in Farmington Canyon. We woke up Wednesday to really bad air quality. It was so smokey and nasty outside. Then a cold front moved in and the air cleared miraculously on Thursday. Luckily the fire is now out and didn’t cause too much damage. 

6. Dad and Ethan floated the Ogden river for mutual. I stayed home to taxi kids around. But also I really didn’t want to get in the cold water or be outside in the smoke, so I didn’t mind staying home. 

7. There was a lot of political drama this week. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump had their first presidential debate. Kamala absolutely wiped the floor with Trump. She made digs at him all night that completely derailed his ability to answer the debate questions. It was glorious. The microphones were turned off depending on whose turn it was to speak so that they couldn’t interrupt or talk over each other. So instead of interrupting, Kamala used her facial expressions to react to what Trump was saying, and she did it perfectly. Some would have liked Kamala to talk more about policy, and I can’t disagree, but overall the debate was a win for her and it’s giving her more good momentum. It’s still a tight race though. After the debate Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris and encouraged people to register to vote. That night over 400,000 people clicked through Taylor’s post to the voter registration website. Amazing. Yesterday Trump tweeted out “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Okay then.

8. Before the debate Trump’s running mate JD Vance was spreading a rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio were kidnapping and eating people’s pets. This is so absurd. Even after a decade of Trump’s ridiculous and outrageous claims and actions, I still can’t believe I just typed that sentence. Vance was interviewed and fact checked on multiple news programs. Immigrants are NOT in fact, eating people’s pets. Vance keeps doubling down claiming that this needs to be investigated, and people should keep sharing the story because it “sounds true.” So what does Trump do during the debate? He claims that Haitian immigrants are eating your cats and dogs. Debate moderators immediately stepped in to fact check and say that this is not happening. Trump doubled down and basically said it was true because “someone said it on tv.” Well that someone was his idiotic running mate. Could it get more stupid? Of course the internet is flooded with hilarious cat and dog memes. Someone wrote a song--- “Eat the cat, eat, eat, the cat,” and there’s TikTok dance to go along. The internet is a beautiful place sometimes. All of this is super funny and super stupid, but these claims are also racist, and causing harm to the Haitians in Springfield Ohio where they are living and working legally. There’s been more than 30 bomb threats at schools and hospitals, and the city has had to cancel events for security reasons. And still JD Vance won’t drop the claim. Unbelievable.

9. Wednesday was the debate for Utah’s governor. Spencer Cox is running for reelection and Brian King is running as a democrat against him. But there was a lot of drama about this too. Phil Lyman is a far-right conspiracy theorist kinda guy who won the Republican nomination for governor at the party’s state convention. He beat Cox by a lot. Those voting at the convention were delegates selected at neighborhood caucus meetings. The Republican Party loyalists think that all nominations should come through the caucus/convention process. But 10 years ago they were forced to allow another way for candidates to get the nomination—the signature route. That’s why you were out knocking doors for candidates trying to collect enough signatures for their names to qualify to be on the ballot. So even though Spencer Cox lost the nomination at convention, he collected enough signatures to put his name on the primary ballot. The primary election was held, and Spencer Cox beat Phil Lyman—securing his position as the official Republican Party nominee. Caucus/convention voters are always more extreme than the average primary voter. They think they should be able to choose who leads their party and they have been fighting the signature process for a decade. So now they are BIG MAD because Lyman won the convention in a landslide but lost on the primary ballot. Confusing, I know. Lyman supporters can’t stand Spencer Cox, and they are not giving up. So now they are running a write-in campaign. Which means that when we vote in the general election in November, they want people to not check the box for Cox or Brian King. They want them to write in Lyman’s name on the ballot. It’s obviously hard to win an election this way, but it happens sometimes. So anyone writing in Lyman or something really similar will have their votes counted for Phil Lyman. But wait—there’s more drama. Last minute a mother and her son decided to file to run for governor as write-in candidates as well.  Their names are Richard and Carol Lyman. That’s right. Now there will be 3 candidates named Lyman eligible to receive votes. So now voters will have to write in the full name if they want their votes counted. Most people won’t know this, and that is bad news for crazy Phil Lyman. Now Phil Lyman is accusing Spencer Cox of bribing the other two Lyman’s to enter the race. There’s no evidence of that, but facts will never get in the way of Phil Lyman. 

10. And finally one more political drama that kept me smiling all week. In the Utah Constitution citizens are granted the right to pass laws through the initiative process. They have to jump through a lot of hoops and gather a gazillion signatures in order to put the initiative on the ballot for people to vote on. I think in the history of Utah there have only been 7 successful initiatives that have passed on a ballot vote. But 3 of those initiatives have been passed in the last 10 years or so. The legislature does NOT like when the people go around them and pass bills they don’t like. So, rather than implement the new laws that have been approved by voters, they have made major changes to them. Six years ago voters pass a bill requiring an independent commission create fair redistricting boundaries. The legislature did not like the boundaries proposed by the independent commission, so they ignored them and drew their own boundaries. This is called gerrymandering—when politicians draw their own boundaries to make it more advantageous for themselves and their party to be reelected. Of course the people supporting the fair redistricting bill sued the legislature for ignoring the bill that was passed by voters. After years of fighting in court, The Utah Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the legislature has to honor the intent of the laws that are passed by voters. The legislators freaked out and called themselves into an emergency session. They voted to put a new law on the ballot to basically overturn the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling. The new law would give them the right to completely repeal and ignore anything the citizens passed on the ballot. But the way they worded the question on the ballot it was going to say something like, “Do you want to STRENGTHEN the ballot initiative process?” Lies. They were flat out lying about what the new law would do. So of course they got sued again. And on Thursday morning the judge basically ruled—sorry liars, but you can’t do that. The legislature is still freaking out and lying about it all, but for now their dishonest ballot question will not be counted on the ballot in November. And I can’t stop smiling about it.

Oh man, I rambled on and on about things that you probably don’t care at all about. Maybe I just needed to get it all out of my head?!

Have a great week Ty! Get some rest and start feeling better! 

Love you, Mom

Ps. Adding the photos to Google Photos