June 13, 2022 Update

I hope you had a great weekend.  As predicted, we spent a lot of time working in the yard and garden, helping Julie’s mom move into assisted living, and trying to rest up in between and keep cool!  But we did take a little break and visit the Butterfly Biosphere at Thanksgiving Point with two of our grandchildren and their parents.  It was a lot of fun to be there with them and get some fun photos of the grands interacting with the butterflies.  

I also came in for an hour or so over the weekend to make some progress in preparation for the move to the new building.  So my walls, shelves and about half my file drawers are cleaned out and boxed up.  I’m still amazed at how much stuff I still have to deal with and how little time there is to try to fit it all in.    

UPCOMING CITY EVENTS

Movies in the Park: Sing 2 I June 13 8:00 pm

Wasatch Ballet Presents "Princess" I June 17 - June 18

Movies in the Park: Hercules I June 20 8:00 pm

Provo Market I July 23 10:00 am

The Tom Proctor Band I June 24 7:30 pm

Movies in the Park: Spider-Man No Way Home I June 24 8:00 pm

Ammon and Liahona I June 25 6:00 pm

Motown & More I July 1 7:30 pm

YOUR VOICE

Have any exciting news? Birthdays, babies, weddings, fur-babies, graduations? Share about it in the section on the right --> and upload pics below!

UPLOAD PICTURES HERE!

NEWS YOU CAN USE

• The $20K treasure hidden in Utah's mountains has been found. For those treasure hunters among us, here's to hoping next year is your year!
• “A Strange Loop” was named best musical at the 75th Tony Awards on Sunday, while “The Lehman Trilogy” captured the prize for best play. “Company” won best revival of a musical and “Take Me Out” nabbed the award for best revival of a play.
• A community project has turned into a permanent work of art in downtown Pleasant Grove. Meant to commemorate the city’s history –and the ongoing, annual, week-long celebration — is a new wall of strawberries.
• More than 80 million Americans were under heat advisories over the weekend as a stalled heat wave scorched much of the US Southwest. Phoenix and Las Vegas matched daily records Saturday at 114 and 109 degrees, respectively, while California's Death Valley saw temperatures reach 120 degrees. 
• Lawmakers have reached a tentative agreement on a package of gun reform measures, a group of bipartisan senators announced yesterday.

PROVO SOCIAL MEDIA

HOT-BUTTON ITEMS IN PROVO\

Today, let’s talk about the daily update.  Tomorrow will be the 400th episode of the daily update.  For those who weren’t here when the daily update began, it really was started to help our employees who were working from home in the early days of the pandemic connect with their fellow employees and with the City’s leadership team.  Things were moving fast and furious as we were working to better understand and respond to the pandemic, and we thought the daily update would help employees see all that was happening.

I appreciate that the update has been a positive for many employees and it has been a great thing for me personally to be involved with.  But, as the pandemic has become less serious, we have also seen readership for the daily update begin to tail off a bit.  So, we have determined to shift the focus of the update to a weekly format, and to broaden and strengthen the content to make it more relevant for you.  

The new update will come from the Mayor’s Office staff and will probably replace some segments of the daily update like “news you can use” and “social media” with more details about what is happening in city departments, more topics of interest to more employees, and an opportunity to hear from others in the Mayor’s Office besides just me.  I think you will be excited to see some of these changes, and to help decide what we include and don’t include going forward.

So, later this week we will request your feedback in a poll about what kinds of content you would like to see and also about what we should call the new weekly e-newsletter.  I am planning for next Thursday to be the last edition of the daily update, and the new newsletter to debut the following week.  

Thanks for reading my musings four times a week for the last two plus years, and for indulging my strange sense of humor, my musical tastes and my favorite sports and teams.  

FUN STUFF

I suspect we have all seen the "gender reveal gone wrong" videos.  But this one from Studio C shows what can happen when it really gets out of control.

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Hope you have a great day!

Wayne