Here’s our pugnacious pomeranian Kodi after a recent hairdo. He sure looks dapper with the cute cut and the halloween cat themed tie.
And another Gulf Fritillary in the backyard.
And a squirrel on a recent evening. It has been hot lately.
I love catching birds in the act of landing or taking off like this one coming in for a landing.
Or this one getting ready to land on a suet feeder not pictured.
Every once in a while I catch critters of all types staring right at the camera even though there is no flash, click or other indication. Somehow they know!!
That’s all this for this week. I’m linking with Eileen’s Saturday’s Critters.
Recently I posted some sunset photos from my drone. I had forgotten that I made a 360 video of the same thing. A video from my drone at 150 meters over my backyard.
It’s only 35 seconds long.
I start out looking straight west and then go to the right. Not often you get color everywhere one looks at sunset.
Last Monday, I finished my morning reading tutoring at an elementary school here in Tulsa and decided by gum I was going to go kayaking.
So I ventured to the Arkansas River, upstream of Zink Lake Dam and rented a kayak for a couple of hours from the vendor there. I helped her carry it down to the new kayak launch that the city of Tulsa had installed. It was pretty cool. You put your kayak in slot where it is partly in the water and then you push against the handrails and you are launched!! No wading in the murk to get going.
I’ve been kind of in a funk lately. One knee is giving me problems and I got a steroid injection a month ago. It worked great for a week or so and then it started aching again. So think I do too much but then I don’t do anything which is not good. Well Kayaking is very knee friendly!!
I cruised past some redone murals on the river shore.
21st street bridge.
I thought the kayaking was cool. I’ve been running, walking, and bicycling both banks of the Arkansas River and Zink Lake for over 30 years. Now I was in the water and seeing things I’ve never seen before. A completely different perspective.
I love this view. It is cathedral like. A cathedral with graffiti.
There was hardly a breeze, the temperature was slightly on the cool side and the sky is beautiful.
The new Williams Crossing pedestrian bridge.
Headed back north with a view of downtown Tulsa where I worked for 30 years. I was waving at my former coworkers.
The very beginning of the vegetation changing color.
One of the two boat ramps on the west side of the lake (or river.)
Headed back under the 21st street bridge.
Checking out the RiverWest Festival Park. RiverParks is having their annual Oktoberfest soon.
And now back to the Kayak dock. I had a great time!!
Appeal to the Great Spirit sculpture by Cyrus Dallin.
The sculpture has an interesting history. Their are lots of copies out in the world. The original is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Read the Wikipedia Article.
I have 27 photos of this sculpture in my archives. I feel drawn to it whenever I visit Woodward Park. These photos are from 2014.
I was geocaching at Tulsa’s Crow Creek Meadow when I happened across this butterfly. I do believe it is a Monarch.
Here is a video of it.
I was hiking on Turkey Mountain when I came across this bush with some sort of fritillary on it. My photo is too fuzzy for the online image searches to work properly.
Here is my wife Heather with our dog Kodi on an outing.
He is beginning to settle down after our roofing project. Here is expressing his displeasure with me. He’s a mess but we love him and are working with somebody help reduce his anxiety.
The other day the sky looked promising for a decent sunset. It seems the best conditions are high thin clouds. If they are too thick they kind of smother the sun and you get no color. And the thing is the colors don’t last so you have to be ready to go or the opportunity is gone. So I was home, my drone batteries were charged up so I launched it from the back yard.
If you are lucky, and I was that day, you get opposite sunsets which is where you get colors in any direction. So this is looking north.
And this is looking south.
And this was the west, the day before.
And this is looking down. You can see my orange landing pad. I do think that is my new roof. We color matched it to the old roof so there it looks the same. I do only periscope flights. I go straight up from the backyard and look around and then come back down. I don’t fly the drone over other people’s property or anywhere where I can’t just legally walk over and pick it up if something goes wrong. That’s just me though.
The Tulsa suburb of Broken Arrow had their 2024 edition of the “Chalk It Up Art Festival” on their Main Street last weekend. Artists who entered got a designated space on the blocked-in street to create a work of art with chalk. We try and go every year. Lots of people enter and they are quite talented. The theme this year was “In My Own Back Yard” The following were my favorites.
Lots of entries featured pets.
Some had kind of a fantasy thing going.
This reminded us of our dear departed Rascal. He was such a good dog.
As a kid who couldn’t stay inside the lines on my grade school art projects, I appreciate people who bend the rules a little bit.
And I loved this. Who doesn’t love blowing dandelion seeds in the wind.
I think this won the “People’s Choice” award.
I think this had best in show. I love the deep rich colors of the work.
Another dog, Mango has his own swimming pool.
I think there were over fifty entries including those from children to adult artists. A talented group of artists for sure. They have Chalk It Up on the weekend of the September every year.
Sad thing is that the artists can’t dig up their huge pieces of pavement and take them home. Late Saturday afternoon, the police take up the barricades blocking traffic and people waste no time driving on this art. Oh well, that the nature of it.
So I used to be a runner. Not much of a runner but still I entered races. My big race of the year was the Tulsa Run 15K. I loved it, 9.3 miles from downtown Tulsa through midtown and then back in late October, Tulsa’s best season. It was like a meditation to me. I ran along and just took it all in, the sun and wind in my face, the beautiful fall foliage, the other runners, the bystanders and all the bands. It was a big event in Tulsa, thousands of runners, lots of spectators. Beer and candy bars at the finish. I think I ran something like 20 or more in a row. I was a very slow runner. I always finished in the slowest 10 or 20% of the field. My goal was to just enjoy it and finish. So this is a brief story of my blazing finish at the 2004 version of the race.
I was running along, enjoying myself, zoning out and like I said before just enjoying the sun and wind on my face. I was going along at a pretty good pace for me and I was getting close to the finish and there were these two women in front running together but I wasn’t paying attention to them. Now oftentimes at the finish, there is the finish line and just before is another line with a sensor that makes your name pop up and you can get your name called out. Well I was focused on the finish line but the two women stopped running hard at the line before the finish line and I didn’t notice that so I ran in between them almost knocking them over. They were good sports and everything and no boyfriend came over and punched me in the nose or anything but it wasn’t really a good look for me.
But, you will notice that I beat both of them by a toe! So maybe it was worth it. Instead of finishing 9,373rd in the race, I finished 9,371st. (I’m making those numbers up.)
The other thing is that may be the only running photo of me with at least one foot in the air. This is one of the thousands of photos I have recently found that I thought were lost forever.
Our big thing this week is our new roof. It was supposed to take two days but it will end up being four because of our steep pitch. I know one thing, it is not the workers. They are amazing. They show up early and work hard until 6 pm or so with only about 30 minutes for lunch and then they clean up everything really well before they leave. I think they are amazing. They are loud though!
Our poor little Kodi did not like it one bit! He’s kind of anxious anyway so he had a hard time of it.
Lizzy the cat dealt with it by taking over Kodi’s crate.
We are almost done now. We just have to get the new guttering on Monday morning.
On another front we have had some visitors in our backyard. I was told by a professional naturalist that this is a Red Spotted Purple Butterfly. I think it is beautiful.
Google images told me that this is a Gulf Fritillary. It is also beautiful.
Tuesday I noticed that there was a hole in the sky so I took a photo of the hole.
I love power plants, especially those powered by natural gas and if they light up really good and have a cool sign then so much the better. This is Public Service Company’s Tulsa Power Station located on the Arkansas River in Tulsa.
This is a backyard sunrise shot from earlier this week.
And a shot of my neighbor’s sprinkler reflecting the sunset one day against a cool sky. Hey I’m opportunist and don’t apologize for it.
And this is from back in 2012 when our family went to Seattle for our vacation. We took a day trip to Mount Rainier National Park. I tried to take this photo but we were blacked out because the sky and the mountain was so bright. I figured out how to correct that on the iphone Lightroom app using their new masking capability, and I was able to bring us out from the dark. You can tell that I didn’t do that good a job on the masking but you know sometimes enough is enough.
