Today Mom and I spent the morning here in the Salt Lake Valley. I had a few ‘errands’ I wanted to run…the first was to pickup my Thrive food from the distribution center in American Fork.
  So, my friend Amanda has a home business selling freeze-dried food; I went to her party last week and decided to pickup my order instead of paying shipping!  It was great.  The business is very neat – and it was a bonus for mom that they had a big store area where she could try out all the food.  Sold.  Our next stop was to visit my old office at the Cityworks building.  It was super fun to see Russ and David again.  We rehashed the “old days”, laughed at the old tricks we’d play, and shared pics of our kids.  It was fun!  The business has grown so much now.

Down here in Salt Lake it was very overcast all morning, but as we drove up to Park City it became apparent it was just the inversion keeping the clouds down in the valley.  Up at the Sundance Film Festival the sun was shiny and warm!  Mom and I decided to just get lunch at the Whole Foods market near the freeway, and then parked the car in the adjacent Redstone shopping area.  It’s free to park there – this has been the challenge for the whole festival – so we rode the bus into Park City from there.  Easy peesy. We met up with Tyler down town Park City and wandered about.  It was nice to spend the afternoon just milling around in the shops, picking up souveniors, and watching people.  Park City is a super cute little mountain town. We also visited the ticket center to trade out some tickets we were no longer going to use…new plans for the evening!  Tyler was able to use them to get tickets for showings later in the week.  Stopped at a place called Pizza and Noodle for some pizza before wandering to the transportation center for our bus to the MARC.

This theater was big!  Tyler’s film How to Survive a Plague is showing here later in the week and I hope they get a big crowd, too.  The film we saw was called Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry.  It was a documentary about Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei – his art and his unusual methods of demonstrating against the Chinese government. It was super interesting.  I knew very little about Ai Wei Wei, and now I do.  This is a film in competition with Tyler’s.  I think Tyler’s is better.  of course.  It was fun to watch, especially since Tyler was able to join us.

When this was over the three of us took a bus and another bus back to the car and then drove to the mansion.  oh, yes, the mansion.  So, most of the How to Survive a Plague production folks and guests who were in the film were staying at this gigantic rental mansion on the back side of Park City.  It was huge…super huge and fancy.  Fireplaces, 3 dishwashers, elevator, all-suite bedrooms, bathrooms to numerous to count, and a film screening room.  It was amazing; something none of these folks are accustomed too either.  Well we were invited for dinner, which was so nice.  We had such a wonderful time visiting with everyone, eating homemade chicken parm, and simply enjoying being a part.  The entire crew has been so kind to mom and I; they really drew us in like part of the fam.  I will really treasure that.

Eventually it got late and we had to go. Our back to Salt Lake was tiring – I think we got to bed at 1am.