As promised in my National Parks Month blog, I said I’d be posting from my vacation to tour just a few of our national treasures. We finished a great time at Mount Rushmore, and then we visited Zion National Park.

The Oxford Dictionary defines "breathtaking" as: astonishing or awe-inspiring in quality, so as to take one's breath away.

To say Zion National Park is breathtaking is an understatement. Words just cannot describe and pictures just don't do it justice. I’ll try with a few, though – sublime, magnificent, glorious, mind-blowing , splendid, and my favorite – divine!

Do you know what a Hedonometer is? Yeah, me neither until just recently. No, it’s not another ancient surveying tool – it’s actually an analysis that determines how happy people are by their tweets.

The Vermont Complex Systems Center analyzes 50 million tweets per day, scoring happiness based on the categories of words that people use. It turns out that the pandemic produced the deepest and longest period of national malaise since the Hedonometer started in 2008. Fortunately, things are trending up as the pandemic is easing in most parts of the country.