Voices singing let's be jolly

Old Work sent me an actual physical letter. It turns out that in the process of sending out W-2s, they made a mistake sending out the W-2s. We should disregard the ones they'd sent out (easy enough as we haven't had the time or energy to deal with those yet) except for scanning and sending copies to them so they can work out what they should have sent? I guess it was sent by physical mail so this would sound less like phishing. I'm not clear what they need the old for, really; seems like issuing a replacement ought to be enough.

The letter carries along a curious bit of information: it says that Multinational bought Local Company in September 2021. This although they told us it was sold in March and they took over paying employees in April and health insurance and all in May and had us doing training videos and all that from April onward. I understand that the date one company ``buys'' another is a vague thing, with an official date denoting things often not meaning much more than declaring what date the Roman Empire of the West ``fell'', but ... September 2021. So, right as they laid me off, you say? That's interesting but I don't know if I should see significance there.

Here's a bit more wandering around the State Tree. Not depicted: how it was about 10 degrees Fahrenheit or less. Which is seasonally appropriate, yes, although it was immediately after another warm December so it felt the colder and less welcome.

Some of the tree lights hung down and loose from the branches. Here, someone put a candy cane on a fallen strand.

A look at the shims and props that the tree relied on for stability. It looks less ad hoc than 2020's tree did.

And here's a view showing off the electrical cables leading to the many lights.

Here strands hang loose in order to frame a lantern and also create a smiling face. It's cheery!

The back of the capitol's statue to Austin Blair, the state governor during the Civil War, containing Blair's message of how the Civil War and all the bloodshed of it and tragedy from it had the one cause: ``slavery, the greatest, vilest criminal of the world; it must perish'' (and two other quotations from his term in office).

Pretty nice view of Blair looking over the State Tree.

Trivia: After Salt Lake City won the bid to host the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, Snowbasin owner and Salt Lake Olympic Committee member Earl Holding successfully appealed to Congress to give the club 1,377 acres of National Forest Service preserves (in exchange for 11,737 acres elsewhere in northern Utah, of roughly equal assessed value, if not environmental interest). The Federal government also paid $15 million for an access road to Snowbasin.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle. Yes, Holding skipped the normal land-exchange process in so doing.

Currently Reading: Sucker's Progress: An Informal History of Gambling in America, Herbert Asbury. Oh, I long to feel the certainty in anything that Asbury expresses in declaring which of the poorly-documented origins of words like ``Dixie'' is correct. Also he opens with descriptions of how to play various games of chance which I read with difficulty and then not understand and I'm not sure how much of that is that he was writing in like 1923 when everything was wordier and vaguer and how much is just I have trouble understanding a game from the rule sheet and do better with a play-through. (Also Asbury seems to like tossing in as many pieces of jargon as possible at once, I guess to slow down the reader until they've parsed it all, which is a good method for someone who is less comfortable than I am skimming what amounts to technobabble.)