Oklahoma History Center

Last week I stopped in at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City. Their big centerpiece display is the Winnie Mae, a replica of the Lockheed 5C Vega aircraft that Oklahoma aviation pioneer, Wiley Post, flew solo around the world in 1933. He subsequently flew the plywood framed Winnie Mae to 50,000 feet using a homemade pressurization suit. In 1935 Post and another Oklahoma legend, Will Rogers died in an airplane crash near Point Barrow, Alaska.

Now back down to earth, I had a symmetrical shadow in my back yard.

I’ve started running again. Didn’t realize how much I missed it. Here is a mesh shadow of some temporary fencing.

And of a pedestrian bridge.

And speaking of pedestrian. Heather and I went to a local brewery and had a couple of their beers. As a bonus, the glass had some interesting shadows. I guess it was time to head home.

I’m linking with Shadow Shot Sunday 2. Come check it out!

I took the kid back to college on Wednesday. He got a sprained ankle last week so Heather and I did an evacuation to back home and got him in to see a doctor, fed him, did his laundry and got him rested up to go back. It’s just a sprain says the doc so we got him a brace and some ibuprofen and so back to school he goes. On the way back from dropping him off I stopped at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City. I had not been there in ages. Turns out that they have a lot of new stuff to show and I’ll post about that later. Today I am showing what they had outside, underneath a big blue Oklahoma Sky with some wind. (If it is Oklahoma, the wind is always blowing.)

I looked at a bunch of oil and gas stuff. This is known as a “Christmas Tree” with valves installed on a oil or gas well to control and regulate the flow. I have never actually seen a stack this high. Usually they are about only two or three valves. I’m guessing what happened is that somebody wanted to donate the tree and so they got all the junk valves they could round up, bolted them together, slapped a coat of paint on it and said “Here you are!” Makes for an impressive sight but I wouldn’t stand near it in a lightning storm.

This is a pump jack used for pumping oil out of the ground. They are also used on natural gas wells to pump the water out that impedes from natural gas well. There is a technical name for those kind of gas wells. They are called “sorry ass gas wells.”