I’m a blessed guy. I don’t know know why. I certainly haven’t done anything to deserve it. But its true. Not only am I married to the best Wife a man could have and am honored to be the Father to a Son that is the best Son in the world, but I get great parking spots. Ask Sweetie, I have parking place mojo. When I pull up to the front, somebody just pulled out, We almost always park near the front door. Legally; Not always, but often enough.

I’m blessed in other ways also. My employer in the last year decided to give everybody vacation commensurate with their years of experience in the energy industry, not just years with the company. Wow, I have 32 years in the energy industry so they handed me 5 weeks of vacation. It has just floored me. I don’t take it for granted. It is going to go mainly toward spending more time with the family, but who knows what else. Our church, like a great many others, has mission trips availble year round. You can do them here in Oklahoma, or the States, or elsewhere from Mexico, to Lithuania, to Tanzania. Who knows? I have been handed a gift I didn’t deserve,I have to figure out how to give something back.

The other thing my employer did was give us the option of a 9/80 work schedule. In other words we can work our 80 hour two week schedule in 9 days and get every other Friday off. That was just handed to us. It makes for long days for nine days, but it is worth it. Yesterday I had one of those days off. We dropped SuperPizzaBoy off at school, ate breakfast together, ran a couple errands and then loaded up the bikes to Tulsa’s Mohawk Park.

Mohawk Park is on the north side of town next to the airport. We parked at the Mary K. Oxley Nature Center in Mowhawk Park.

We rode down to Lake Yahola where I took a picture of Sweetie. Note the golf course in the background.

Some of the waterfowl on Lake Yahola. We didn’t ride there too long. Too darn windy!! Plus the geocaches I thought we could get were not reachable from the dam.

We got off the dam and went meandering around the park. We came upon an area where beavers had been active.

Oh, oh, the dweeb himself.

Stylistically a disaster right? You know what drives Sweetie crazy? The little bell near his right hand. That’s what. He comes upon people, he goes ding, ding with the bell. If he yells, “On your left!” then they move to the left. The ding dong likes the bell, what do you think is best? I listen to my readers. Especially those who leave comments!

Here you go, here is Sweetie again. It has finally dawned her the last few years that Yogi got a far better deal in this marriage than she did. You agree? – Hey, its a rhetorical question. You don’t need to answer!

We got off into some wild and wooly parts of Mowhawk. I hadn’t been here since the middle 1990’s during a Corporate Challenge Marathon Relay. Narrow roads. Abandoned roads.

The course went down this way and back. I was a little cranky because they didn’t have any water stops. I had a little “attitude.” Hey if you are going to put on a race then do it right!!!!! There was a race crew out there putting up barricades early in the morning and they got behind me in their truck. I was running down the center of the road and they were following me and I knew they wanted around me so I stayed in the center. They followed me at my extremely slow pace and after a while couldn’t stand it any more so they gave me a little honk of the horn. I guess to tell me that I was doing a good job. So I gave them a middle fingered salute without looking back to let them know I appreciated their hard work.

They gave me a long loud blast of the horn to encourage me even more, so I gave them a a two handed salute in appreciation. This went on for some time. Turkeys!

Hey, can you tell I have issues? Got any advice? Sweetie does, its along the lines of “Get over yourself. You have been talking about that for years.”

Hey, we got to the end of our ride. I saw a tree with leaves on it where I thought the sunlight reflecting on the leavds would really pop out.

The leaves reflect fine and I could enhance it in Corel but I think the best pictures are the ones right out of the camera. What I liked about the ppic looking at it now is the tree’s shadows on the road. I didn;t even notice it before.

Anyway, that was our ride Friday and some of my blessings. Tell me a blessing you had.