On a recent trip to the Tulsa Botanic Garden they displayed a Lego Lawnmower in a Shadow!! It would be nice if it worked but it would probably shake itself into thousands of pieces.
Happy Easter to you and your family. Also, Lego Easter Bunnies!
AAAAnnnnndddd! As part of Music Moves Me, I bring you a Chris Isaak Song. Check out RamblinWithAM to check out other entries.
A momma goose sitting on a nest on a sandbar in a creek flowing the through the grounds of Philbrook Museum of Art. Her mate was busy chasing people away, including us.
A little chubby squirrel snacking on the grounds of Philbrook.
Another squirrel perturbed by us sitting out on our patio.
Kodi the Pomeranian loves laying out in the sun.
A grackle getting a drink.
Kodi loves finding sticks. He exchanges them for a treat. Is that a spoiled brat looking face or what!
Lizzy the Cat gets kind of talkative every now and then. Critters are a hoot.
Another Lego critter from our trip to the Tulsa Botanic Garden. This one is a dodo bird. Which is extinct.
I’m linking with Saturday’s Critters. Check it out!!
I have been busy. I love being busy. Especially being retired and doing the things I want to do.
I went out to Turkey Mountain and checked out the new board walk they installed over the western rock faces of the mountain. This is an area called Rock City and I love how they put the walk right in and over the boulders using cedar that was cut on the mountain.
It is a small network of new trails interconnecting with two trails, one on top of the rock faces and one below. I bet it would be fun on a bicycle. It looks like they put a mesh on top of the cedar to add a little traction for the bikes. You slip off the wood on a bike it would ruin your whole day. Me and gravity are not friends these days so I will never take my bike across this.
I ventured back to the parking lot on the Tiger Muffin trail. It’s the trail name for a friend of mine.
Last Saturday I put my cold weather gear on and joined a bunch of people from the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition and Bike Club to clean up a trail called Mooser Creek Greenway. It had a lot of tree falls from Tulsa’s Father’s Day windstorm last year. The trails were cleared back then but a lot of the downed were a little unsightly. Plus there is a never ending chore of repairing erosion and wet spots on trails.
So I helped clear the limbs and trunks that were being cut up by people with chain saws.
I love the trail work days. Tulsa really responds to stuff like that and all sorts of people show up to help. I got a promotion with the Wilderness Coalition. I am now the Vice President of Government Affairs. My trail job didn’t change much. Moving limbs and cut up trunks off the trail is what I do along with whatever else needs doing.
Later that day Heather and I went out to the Tulsa Botanic Garden to check out the flowers and new projects.
They have added an event space in the middle of the pond. They are also converting some wild land they had into an arboretum. They have done a good job adding onto the gardens and it is getting more and more settled as time goes on.
The tulips put on a quite a show. Last year when we went some deer had gone into the gardens ate a bunch of the tulips and other plants.
They also had Lego animals scattered around the garden. I love this woodpecker.
And I always love redbuds. The Eastern Redbud is the State Tree of Oklahoma.
The Daffodils were putting on a show even though their time is short.
This was my favorite tulip. It looked black in the sun but is actually a deep purple. This one is the only one I spotted.
And to end up, we had an almost full moon the other day. I captured the image in the late afternoon so it was almost a daytime moon. I love the moon in all its presentations but I especially love a good daytime moon.
So what have you been up to?
I am linking with Skywatch Friday and My Corner of the World.
My wife and I were taking our dog for a walk the other day and we came upon this guy/gal. INaturalist says it is a Ruddy Shelduck. It had three friends nearby and they had a very cool vocalization that I did not capture. I come to find out that a neighboring subdivision owns them and they escape quite frequently.
My wife put up bird feeders and the grackles really appreciate it. Talk about loud and noisy though.
Lizzy gave me a big yawn when I was trying to get a portrait.
Here is a sculpture at a nearby park of a dog flushing some bobwhite quail.
We visited Tulsa’s Botanic Gardens today and in addition to the beautiful flowers, shrubs, and other plantings they had an exhibit of animals made out of Legos by an artist. This is a spiny anteater.
That’s a wrap for this week. I am linking with Eileen’s Saturday’s Critters. Check it out.
At the treehouse at the Tulsa Botanic Garden there are several yarn bombs hidden away in the shadows.
Yarn Bombs are my favorite form of graffiti. It’s not vandalism and can be very colorful.
And if they get a little aged, sagging, or miscolored, a pair of scissors removes them.
I’m linking with Shadow Shot Sunday 2. Check it out!!
Saturday, we all three loaded up in the car and ventured to the Tulsa Botanic Garden to check out the butterflies.
It is butterfly mania up there. I wondered where all the monarch butterflies were in Tulsa. They are at the Botanic Garden.
Butterflies make me happy!
They looked pretty happy as well.
There were several humming birds as well. I didn’t bring the right lens to capture them so I have these two highly cropped photos.
I’m linking with Saturday’s Critters. Check them out.
Last week, Heather, Logan and I loaded up and went to the Tulsa Botanic Garden north of town in the Osage Hills.
They have thousands of flowers there, lots of daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths.
All different colors!!
And a bunch of trees including this redbud variant.
Heather taking a break during our wanderings.
It was a nice sunny day and the flowers were beautiful.
We spent a couple hours wandering around
Purple and White (with purple stripes) was my favorite, maybe.
They had some variant of cherry trees with their subtle coloring.
And an agave cactus plant. I had to try my lensball on that.
All in all a great outing!!
And a bonus!! I finished another jigsaw puzzle on my ipad. I am addicted.
Saturday Heather and I decided to go up to the Tulsa Botanic Garden. It has been at least a couple years since we have been which nowadays is like a lifetime.
The previous day, we were overwhelmed by what happened on the way home. In fact, about a block from where we live. To prevent pest breed, hire pest control near me, from here.
Almost home and we came upon a scene that was hard to compute. Cars stopped in the road. People out and about and a man down on the ground.
We stopped, got out of the car to see what is going on. The man down on the ground threw himself out of the car his wife said. She had a grandson on the spectrum in her car. Heather went to check him out and calm him down.
So I stayed with the woman who was trying to calm her husband down. He was moving here and there, wanting to know what happened and begging for help. Two different cars of people were stopped, calling 911, reporting the incident.
Most people were just sliding by in their cars. Not stopping but getting a good look.
The lady told me that he fell out of the car. I didn’t know why, I didn’t really care. He had a sharp crease on his scalp and was bleeding profusely. Also it looked to me like he broke a couple fingers. I kept trying to calm him, telling him help was on its way.
I knew help was coming, but it seemed like it took forever. Meanwhile the guy was inconsolable and moving here and there. His wife was talking to him and I kept telling him that help is on its way. I felt like yelling at him, but you know, people in this situation don’t suffer from hearing loss.
Finally, the ambulance showed up and and a fire truck. I was really impressed with the teamwork between the two groups of guys. You could tell they knew they had a serious situation and they moved quickly and urgently but in control.
The police showed up and and also moved quickly, efficiently, and calmly, finding out what happened. The firemen had a stuffed bear for the child in the car.
So Heather was with the child, who was on the spectrum, in the car. I went up there and hung out and let the wife talk to the police in private about what happened. There was a lady who was asked to stay because she saw the whole thing from the beginning.
So hug your kids close and pray for those who are not so lucky.
I am linking with Our World Tuesday and with Mosaic Monday. Come join the parties!
A blue sky with fluffy clouds over the children’s garden. I think that is the scariest feature I’ve even seen in a children’s garden. It looks like it eats children!!
We are having some typical Oklahoma Spring Weather this year. Freezing one minute, roasting the next, bone dry, and then soaking. After a few nice days it has turned cold. I did get a chance to get to the Tulsa Botanic Garden during some sunny yet windy weather. It was so windy it was making the tulips bob one way and me and my camera the other way.
From the sky to the ground. There were thousands of tulips blooming. It almost made for retina burn there were so many.
And so many colors. With the bright sun it made the petals translucent. I love that look.
How about you,? Do you have anything blooming where you live?
I am all excited!! I did a one day Nature Photography class by Tulsa Community College. We met early in the morning and then headed off to several venues, the Linnaeus Gardens, Tulsa Garden Center, Tulsa Botanic Gardens, and Oxley Nature Center.
So the over a dozen of us, clicked and snapped away and we walked, and walked. My little garmin wrist device tells me that I walked 7.76 miles today. I believe it. My dogs are barking, you know what I mean. I do trail running, and this was about the same except I had a camera and was clicking happily away.
This is at Wooward Park, before the class really even started. So what do you like best, pink tulips in front, with yellow in back?
Or the other way around? Without cars in the background. Ignore the cars in the background.
Or how about the Redbud Trees.
How about some ancient stone steps.
At Oxley, do you like the little snake my fellow students found?
Or do you like the bigger snake a few hundred yards away. They said, don’t worry, no triangular head, and the eyes are round so it is not venomous. Like I even cared. Who is going to get close enough to snakes to figure out the roundness of its eyes?
I forget where this is from. It is pretty is all I know.
I love this also. No idea what it is.
Anyway, the more I learn about this photography thing, the more ignorant I get. I am firmy entrenched into manual mode, and metering the photos and all that but the complicated things get me. Like the above. Sunny on one side, shady on the other, overeposed on one side, under on the other. Who you going to call? Nobody, suck it up big guy, figure it out.
Or focus on the blossoms. The yin and the yang. Big picture, small picture. I am so confused.
Here is a redbud up close.
Linnaeus Gardens
How about a flag reflection. The reflection looks okay, but the sky is blown out. No editing done anywhere on this post by the way. Haha you say, we could tell that.
That is all for now. I took over 200 photos and I store them all in cloud and it is painfully slow to get them there. I used to store them on an external hard drive. Big, huge mistake. It cratered.
I really enjoyed the class. Kudos to my fellow students who really got into it, the various venues, who welcomed us with welcome arms and the instructors, Larry and Natalie who spent a considerable amount of time scheduling us into the various places, and led us around making sure that everybody had a fun time. I’ll be taking more classes from them again.
I am calling this Chapter One because I have so many photos to upload and don’t want to wait until they are all uploaded before I post something. Call me impatient.