I went for a little hike the other day at a local park. I noticed a little used trail and decided to see where it went. It turns out that it went to some property owned by a local private school. The property was not posted and there were no students or anybody else out and about so I explored some more and found their football field. You can tell it is not a big school. It is a school with a very good reputation. I’ve met the headmaster and he is a fellow geocacher.
Last week my sister, Ellen, and her husband, Irv, came down from Colorado to visit us.
While here we joined our brother Bob at his residence. Management was throwing an Oktoberfest, food, drink, desert, entertainment! We were all up for that.
Music was provided by a local accordion band. I didn’t even know that accordion bands were a thing. These folks were great. They all played together, you know, like they were a band! It was jam packed with residents and guests and I think everyone had a good time.
The next day I showed off Turkey Mountain. They were very polite. They live on some acreage where they have a front row seat to Pikes Peak at 14,114 feet. Turkey Mountain is 804 feet. They did not snicker, not even once!! Hey you know, we in Tulsa are proud of 804 foot tall hill. We can call it a mountain if we want.
Irv is a fellow geocacher and he found one on the moutain.
Ellen made friends with Sasquatch.
We went by Pepsi Lake. They didn’t ask why the ponds on the Turkey Mountain hill are called lakes. I don’t know!!
We ended up going about 4.5 miles or so. I was worn out.
My sister and her husband were in town recently to visit and attend the National Arabian Horse Show here in Tulsa. She and he were heavily involved in youth horse judging community in Colorado Springs and attended the horse show regularly for several years.
Heather and I attended the final night of the show with them and the show was amazing. Beautiful Arabian horses being ridden by people that know what they are doing. They had several different classes or style of riding.
The horses are gorgeous, groomed beautifully. The riders are dressed very well also. They ride their horses around the ring in various trots, walks, canters and hand gallops all the while scrutinized by a team of judges.
The audience is raucous during the competition cheering their favorites on loudly during the competition and judging. They also cheered the winners loudly. Great sportsmanship, not a boo heard the entire evening.
The horses have a distinctive gait. I’m told that they have to be trained to do it as it doesn’t come naturally.
Hopefully we can attend next year. It had been 2013 and 2014 when we last made the show.
I was reading a short article in Wired magazine about Artificial Intelligence generated images. There are programs out there that have learned gazillions of photographs and their captions and will take text prompts to generate images. This has caused lots of anger among digital artists. So of course I had to try it.
It looks like almost all of these image generators are very robust and won’t run on a laptop. So being cheap I found a website “FreeImageGenerator.Com” that will do the job for you. You enter a prompt and it generates an image that you can use however you like. It will even polish your text prompt for you to make it better. It generates png images and you are limited to 15 per hour or something like that.
So I tried various things and got various results. The two images above were the ones I liked the best. I have to say that I find the technology absolutely fascinating. I have no idea about it’s affect on the art world. But you know you cannot put toothpaste back in the tube. I suspect that artists will be fine. They will end up using such tools that leave the rest of us way behind.
Have you ever heard of AI generated Art? Have you tried it out? What do you think.
I like to go to the Tulsa State Fair every year. I only spend about a couple hours.
All I do basically is take photographs.
As you can tell I like Ferris Wheels.
And I love this two story merry go round. They have had it for years.
Some of the ride parts are amusing, or scary. If I was a kid this would scare me to death. I don’t ride any of the rides. Nope, not a ride person.
At least this guy is smiling. Not for me though.
And I like taking photos of the food stands. I love this faux corner brick pizza place. Nope, not going to touch it.
Not tempted by Chicken City either. I love the design though.
Another Chicken place.
You know, I don’t even know what a funnel cake is. Nor do I want to find out. I generally get a corn dog. Kind of hard to mess that up. I only get one corn dog per year.
I like all the 4H and FFA projects on display. Someone restored this beautiful tractor.
So at the end of my 2.5 mile wibble wobble of the Tulsa State Fair I found the German Beer tent and had me a wheat beer, or two. Later on I got a corn dog.
For a more traditional skywatch photo, here is a crescent moon from a week or so ago.
Thanks for sticking with me. I’m linking with Skywatch Friday.
Another week where I don’t have much in the way of Skywatch Photos. Amond other things I have been riding with Logan so he can get his drivers license soon. He’s doing pretty well. We’ve done lots of country roads and today we did some heavily tracked streets and soon we’ll get him on the freeway.
I stole the idea for the blog title from my cousin Patty who commented with the song lyric on facebook. I thought it was ZZ Top who sang the song. Nope, it was the Doors, Roadhouse Blues. I knew that. Or at least I used to know it when I had more brain cells. Anyway, who knew the Doors had solid driving advice?
A powerline on Turkey Mountain passing over the Monarch Waystation.
And I found cool wagon at a mall with a strange name here in Tulsa. It’s the mini-Mall. What!?
NASA Photo, click to see the terms of use.
And this is Hurricane Ian on September 26 as seen from the International Space Station. I think literally somebody shot the scene through a window with their Nikon D5. I’m thinking about all the victims from the Caribbean, including Cuba, and the Florida. Lots of destruction the past few days.
I’m linking with Skywatch Friday. Come check it out, join in!!
Heather and I had our 33rd Anniversary the other day. We didn’t feel like celebrating much because our dog Rascal was not doing very well at all and we ended up putting him to sleep the next day. So things were not very happy at our house. Last night though we went to the Michael Buble concert here in Tulsa.
We’re glad we went. We love the guy and he always puts on a great show. This was the fourth time we’ve seen him. He sings an updated “Great American Songbook,” standards from people like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and others. One of my favorite songs is, “I’m Feeling Good.”
Another favorite is “Home.”
Over the years, he has mellowed quite a bit. He used to have kind of a bad boy persona and his shows could be quite raunchy. He’s now married and has four children and seems to be quite the family man but he still looks has that playful smile.
And we were happy. That is about as smiling as it gets for me. We had a good time.
Twelve years ago a very social, very well behaved, Pomeranian puppy showed up at our house and introduced himself. We took him in and tried to find his owner but no luck so he was ours. We named him Rascal.
We all fell in love with him. Very smart, and loved people and very in tune with everybody in the family
We called him the dog that goes. He loved going places and his walks.
He was a good sport, even if it involved dressing up for the occasion.
We called him a Diva. He loved getting groomed and kind of showed off a little bit. He was quite the flirt.
He was a beautiful dog was fully engaged in his world.
He started having multiple health issues. We did all sorts of things. He loved accupuncture and physcal therapy.
He was still active and loved going to see his friends in the neighborhood.
We took him on a trip earlier this year and he loved it.
He got to where he couldn’t walk very far so we got him a dog stroller. He got to where he liked that as well.
Anyway we lost him today. He was a trooper right up to the end. He’s in a much better place and we sure do miss him. Our pets just don’t live long enough.
I’m linking with Saturday’s Critters. Check it out, lots of people who love animals link there.
