This has been a FUN long President's Day weekend! Because of my work schedule, I usually never even get two days off in a row (including weekends), but thanks to the President's Day holiday, I got a three-day weekend. Yesterday I had a very fun day visiting Tuscola, Illinois with my good friend Laura Atkins. We had lunch at the best restaurant in the whole world: Flesor's Candy Kitchen. And we of course ate the most delicious thing on their menu: the Reuben! It was as tasty as ever. Then we had a fun afternoon visiting the outlet mall. It was a great day!
Today Greg had to attend a class in Alton, Illinois (close to St. Louis), so I decided to tag along and go exploring. I have always wanted to visit Alton and see the Elijah P. Lovejoy Monument at the Alton Cemetery, so that was my first stop after dropping Greg off. Mom, Dad, and I first learned about Elijah Lovejoy when we were visiting St. Charles, Missouri in 2004. Lovejoy's wife's family lived in St. Charles, and we saw a plaque about him when we were walking downtown one day. He was an abolitionist newspaper editor who was killed by an angry mob in Alton in 1837--just seven years before Joseph Smith was killed by an angry mob in Carthage (Illinois was a rough place if you had ideas that went against society's norm!).
I wrote a paper about Elijah Lovejoy in college and was interested to find many similarities between his and Joseph Smith's families. (I realized that a lot of my cool college paper ideas came from things I first learned about on trips with Mom and Dad--Elijah Lovejoy, Sterling Price, etc.) Lovejoy's murder inspired people like John Brown and Abraham Lincoln to stand up against slavery. Lincoln even went so far as to say, "Lovejoy's tragic death for freedom in every sense marked his sad ending as the most important single event that ever happened in the new world." So it was really cool to visit the Lovejoy monument today!
Elijah Lovejoy is buried at the Alton Cemetery, but when I realized that his grave was not at the monument, I wasn't sure how I would find it. But after driving around the cemetery for a few minutes, I only saw one plot with a fence around it--and sure enough, it was his. When I got back into the car after visiting his grave, I typed my next destination into the GPS, but then the GPS just turned off for no reason. This happened several times, and I thought it must be Elijah Lovejoy trying to contact me from beyond the grave . . . until it happened again later in the day :)
My next stop was the Lincoln-Douglas Debate site. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas had seven debates throughout Illinois when they were both campaigning for the senate in 1858, and today there is a statue on the site of the debate in Alton. The Stephen Douglas statue looks super mean and scary!
Stop #3 was the site of a Confederate prison during the Civil War. Unfortunately there is only a small portion of the prison left, and it stands in the middle of a parking lot across the street from a grainery, but at least there's a remnant of the prison. 11,764 Confederate soldiers were imprisoned here during the war, and 1,534 of them died from sickness and exposure to weather--yikes!
Next I visited the National Great Rivers Museum, located next to this lock, the Melvin Price Lock and Dam, on the Mississippi River. I arrived at the museum just in time to join a tour of the lock. It was SO COOL!
We went up to the top of the lock, and it was REALLY windy. Being up so high, we had a nice view of Alton and the very wide Mississippi River.
We got to watch a barge come through the lock, which was really neat to see. Here is the barge first entering the lock. It took about 20 minutes for the barge to get completely inside, and then it took about 10 minutes for them to fill the lock with water.
This was the point at which the water inside the lock reached the same depth as the water level outside the lock, so they could lower the gate . . .
. . . and the barge could be on its way. It was really cool to see the entire process! I remember that one time in Clarksville, Missouri, Mom, Dad, and I watched a boat go through a lock, so it was neat to see it up close again today. I am totally fascinated by the Mississippi River!
The museum was also really cool. My favorite part was their fish tank full of different types of fish that live in the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. This guy with the long nose was really funny. He was very intrigued by my camera and kept wanting me to take pictures of him (at least I think that's what he wanted). After three hours of non-stop adventures, it was time to go pick Greg up. What a fun day I had exploring Alton!
It has certainly been a strange winter here! The other day it snowed, and this was the most snow we've had on the ground since our one-and-only blizzard back in January on the day I flew home to Utah. After our Snowpocalypse last winter, I certainly am not complaining about the lack of snow this year! The view out of our bedroom window on Monday morning was very pretty though. But with the temperatures already warming up, and with the horrible storms in the midwest and south last week, I'm afraid it is going to be a very long tornado season.
Last night at our church Young Men/Young Women activity for dessert the Bishop dumped a few gallons of ice cream into a giant tub, and then the kids dumped every imaginable topping into the tub. Then they all got giant serving spoons, and dug in! It looked kind of gross, but it was so funny. There had to be at least five billion calories in that tub :) I did not partake of the ice cream madness, but the kids loved it. Hopefully they don't all end up with mono or something like that. 
Next month is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic! As many of you know, I became obsessed with the Titanic when I was younger after watching the movie "The Unsinkable Molly Brown." I read and watched every imaginable Titanic-related movie or book, and I looked forward to the day when I would be able to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disaster. Well the time is almost here, and so I have already started planning my Titanic party. This is the front of the invitation I created. 
And this is the inside of the invitation (although I decided it would be best to erase our contact info. in this picture--who knows who reads my blog!) :) I found this stuff at Hobby Lobby the other day called Distress Ink that you can use to make paper look old. Isn't it cool? Greg and I ordered a Titanic cookbook, so we're going to try our hand at making some fancy dishes for the party. We're also going to watch the 1953 "Titanic" movie and tell Titanic stories. It should be a good time. Too bad it's over a month away! But it will be fun to look forward to.
Someone I've been doing some research about lately is a woman mentioned in Elder Cook's talk at the October 2011 General Conference. Her name was Irene Colvin Corbett, and she is the only person from Utah and the only Mormon to die on the Titanic. Her story is really interesting and sad. She was a nurse from Provo who was married and had three little kids. She went to London for six months to study midwifery and booked passage back to America on the Titanic because she had heard that six Mormon missionaries would also be traveling home on the Titanic. However, the missionaries were delayed and had to book passage on a different ship. She was one of only 14 second class women to die on the Titanic--most of the women in first and second class were able to get onto the lifeboats. Many people assume that Irene purposely stayed onboard the ship to help people until the very end. More about the Titanic to come in the future . . . 
