Just spent the last week or so in Denali National Park, taking students on a pretty amazing experience through an absolutely unbelievable place. I had encounters with fox, grizzly bear, wolves, caribou, moose, bald eagles, golden eagles, Dall's sheep, and the mountain itself.
I'll post something more fully about the trip later. It was full of sublimity and absurdity, often at the same time.
What started with a lens and camera calibration check is turning out to be a full fledged family portrait project. I think these photographs really capture personality as well as the look of each person at this point in our lives. Here's the five-year-old, Ike. Next will be to catch the elusive critter, Zoë Ingrid.
Put the camera on my lovely wife and got this. Ten years this coming January.
I've been toying with making some changes to the beard, which has gone basically unaltered for more than a decade, actually for almost twenty years. So, after buying some Doobie Brothers vinyl yesterday, I decided to grab my clippers and carve a little 70s out of my face.
I went about my business today, and a really curious thing happened. Tons of people in town and up at the reservoir and all over started talking to me about fishing and cars and guy stuff. It's like this new look is professor camo. I might keep it.
For those of you who haven't been following my recent exploits, early summer is when I start doing my Partners in the Parks projects. Partners is a program I run with my colleague Matt Nickerson, the Southern Utah University honors director. The gist of it is this: we take college honors students to national parks for a week at a time. They hike, learn from professors and rangers about park management and resources, and really get a deep experience instead of a four hour drive through, which is common for most Americans. We're funded through a National Parks Service grant, and we get some pretty amazing access. This summer I'll be leading or advising projects in Zion National Park, Grand Canyon-Parashant (in the remote NW section of the Grand Canyon, and Denali National Park in Alaska. We'll also be exploring new possibilities for projects in Olympic National Park in Washington, Great Basin, King's Canyon, and Sequoia. We also have projects that I am not directly overseeing in Cape Hatteras and Manhattan (many are unaware of the many, many urban NPS sites).
For the last two days I've been hiking through an upper section of Zion National Park, called Kolob Canyons. This morning we awoke to snow. We knew it was coming, but we sort of hoped we'd be wrong about that. It made for a miserable slog: lots of mud and being cold, but it was spellbindingly beautiful.
I kept expecting to see Chinese warriors flying overhead with spears and flowing silk robes, engaging in silent battle between the sandstone ramparts and the mist.
Today was hard going, but it was very beautiful. It was a good day, all in all, because I had good gear, I was in pretty good shape, and I was at work.
I'm planning to read like a monster this summer. The idea is one book a week, netting me 16 books before I have to jump back into things. Some of them will be school books, but most of them will be things I've been collecting, as well as some new things coming out. This list isn't in any particular order.
I'd also do Brady Udall's The Lonely Polygamist, but it is 700 pages. I'm buying it today, but I'll be reading it this fall, I think. I'm really excited about this book.
So, it seems I've started a movement. My friend Rae English has started her own list and a challenge to others. So, I'm issuing the same challenge to you all: what kind of reading can you squeeze out of the summer at the rate of one book a week?
The other day we found this drawing in the house. It was done by our four-year-old son, Ike. At first glance it might seem that our sweet little boy is a little bit fixated on—let's just call them "lady parts."
But you'd be wrong. Dead wrong, actually. After a little questioning we discovered that these are actually the young artist's rendering of a pair of Cylon Raiders.
Innocence restored, for a season.
In the spirit of my friend Scott Rogers, I will post the end of the semester to do list. This is pretty much in the order of stuff what I got to do first.
Here's a panel from a project I'm working on for a special edition of Sunstone Magazine. It's a special comix issue, for which I was invited to contribute. I am writing and drawing the piece, which has been great because I used to eat, sleep, and breathe, comic books when I was in high school. I've dabbled a little since, but this is really letting me get the rust out of my joints.
I'm not going to give away the whole farm, but I thought I'd throw this out to answer the question I've been getting a lot lately: "What are you working on?"
On Superbowl Sunday, we made all the game day food (wings, guacamole, etc.) and then Alisa watched Masterpiece Theater. I read Proust. And, oh, yay, without any help from the Petersen family, Manning took a dive so New Orleans could win, selflessly healing the country, just like Sandra Bullock.
Sorry, America. Football is boring.
Zoë has astounded everyone with her announcement that she would very much like to audition for a local production of Seussical: The Musical. This comes from a kid who is pretty close to winning the Oscar for shyest person in the universe. Here's a secret video of her song rehearsals. She chose Priscilla Ahn's song "Wallflower," which isn't really a Broadway hit, but we don't listen to many Broadway hits around here. In this respect, Alisa and I are useless to her budding career in musical theater.
Zoë's Audition Practice from Todd Robert Petersen on Vimeo.
We're proud of her. She auditions at 5:15 on Monday. Wish her luck.
This snippet from an excellent argument on Mormon Artist.
We Mormons have the same expectations of Church members in almost all other professions. We expect, for instance, that dentists will favor dentistry over promoting religious orthodoxy while they are at work. To illustrate, we don’t expect dentists to give the missionary discussions to clients strapped, mouths agape, in the dentist chair. Nor do we expect accountants to slip copies of their testimonies in with their client’s tax returns. Dentists and accountants may be inspired in certain instances to share their beliefs, but we generally don’t expect such acts to be a mainstay of their professions. We shouldn’t expect it from artists either.
This saves me a blog post, really. What's more important, though, is why so many assume that artists should be doing more evangelical work than a dentist, because they do. My wife's Uncle Joe has been making this same argument about "uplifting work" for a long time.