Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain is not that big, two miles north to south and a mile, maybe, east to west. You can generally hear traffic in most areas but there are lots of trails and if the weather is a little hot, or a little cold, or a little wet or whatever the number of people on the trails plunges, especially a quarter mile down the trail (I am not exagerating..) And if one gets to the little visited areas like the northwest segment it is easy not to see anybody.
I was on such a blissful trek last Wednesday when I happened on this vista that made it look like the mountain went on forever. I love the feeling of feeling lost and depth in the photo. Even though I know I had been up and down that trail many times before.
I love Turkey Mountain, I have been there dozens of times and still find something new every time I am there. I can get up there and just cruise along and don’t worry about a thing. Except snakes, lots of people have encountered lots of snakes, especially copperheads, and I worry about them a little but I don’t let them stop me.
So what about you? Where is your favorite place to get away from it all.
Earlier this week I sneaked back up to my old work area on the 17th floor to take a late afternoon pic of the sky to the west along with the Arkansas River. Of course me being me had to try out a few filters on the photo to give a little more character than what it had originally.
It turns out okay but I wish I could get the Aloft Hotel chain that bought our old City Hall and converted it to a loft hotel (whatever that is) to take their sign down. I can’t imagine that an old office building would make a very good hotel but what do I know? I mean besides nothing.
The clock continues to tick on Logan’s time in High School until he graduates. Tick, tick, tick. It is getting louder and louder for both him and his parents.
Tuesday night a few more ticks went by. His school had their Spring Choir Concert. Choir is a class and this concert is their final. How is that for getting the kids to show up. It was all good though. The kids did great.
The Senior and Middle School both participated in this concert and it featured a varied selection of music from Hymns to Musical tunes to more modern music by Billy Joel and Elvis Presley or like the opera.
Logan didn’t have any solos or anything, he just sang and that is what he loves doing. Standing on the risers for such a long time was kind of hard on him. I don’t know how people do it actually.
The teacher put everybody through their paces and there was lots of singing for everybody.
The Middle School ladies did a great job with “You’re Going to Miss Me” otherwise known as “The Cup Song.”
At the end they had the parents of the seniors go up on the stage while the Benediction was sung. (This is a Christian School so of course there was a prayer before the performance began.) I appreciated the benediction but I hate being up on stage. With the lights it is so disconcerting. Logan loves the stage. He didn’t get that DNA from me. I am perfectly happy being in the audience, in the shadows.
It was a great seeing the kids performing and showing off their talent and not plugged into their so called “devices.”
So I continue to be an infrequent blogger and a lousy blogger friend. Sorry but we are counting down until Graduation and things are not going to change very much until then.
This is the building where I work. The building is polished granite and glass and its modern exterior stands out in Tulsa’s mostly art deco style buildings. I took this shot from the parking garage across the street. I liked how the building reflected the sky to the east, and another high rise.
The building started out as Cities Service Oil Company’s new headquarters at 52 floors but before construction could get very far there was first an oil bust and then Boone PIckens who drove Cities into the arms of Occidental Petroleum who decided to make it 37 floors and then they decided to sell it to my employer who capped it at 17 floors. So it is “hell for stout” as we say in Oklahoma. A 17 story building with foundations and steel structure designed for 52. Plus we have lots of elevators! We can still feel the earthquakes we are having in Oklahoma.
I like old Christmas pictures from years ago. This is my Dad’s family in Del Rapids, South Dakota in the late 1950’s. I’m the the kid looking back. I’m sitting on my grandmother’s lap. The lady in blue to the far left is my great grandmother. My brother, Bob, is in the red shirt on the floor.
I love the tree with all the tinsel. My Dad was a forest ranger in New Mexico. He got a permit and cut the tree on the Santa Fe National Forest and hauled it all the way to South Dakota on top of our station wagon.
I am really excited about Barbarian Days. Talk about a great read. It is a memoir by New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan and his life told through surfing. He learned to surf at a very young age in southern California and then later in Hawaii when he was about middle school age. He was born in 1952 so his early years were in the 60’s when life of course was a lot different than it is now.
In Hawaii he talks about getting up every morning before school and paddling his board out to surf before going to school. Nobody went with him, no safety gear no nothing. At that time I was in Price, Utah and Eagar, Arizona and although far from the surf, on weekends, when we were not doing chores, my brother and ranged far and wide on our bicycles and got into and out of scrapes that my parents never heard about. Such parents would make the headline news now days as they managed a perpwalk with handcuffs led by deputies. Back then, kids were on their own much of the time.
Anyways, Finnegan’s account of the social pitfalls of school and staying out of the way of the bullies really resonated with me.
From there the story takes off on his adulthood as a surf bum going around the world, cadging cash and money as he could in search of desolate beautiful waves. I’ve never been surfing and never will go surfing but he sure makes it sound fun and terrifying at the same time. He talks about being pulled down to the bottom of the ocean and held there by powerful waves, sometimes two waves in a row ( a double wave hold down he calls it.)
He writes about the social pecking order out on the “Lineup” waiting for the waves. The big dog locals get first pick, visiting kooks (newbies) get the crumbs.
He gets a little older and finds a calling as a journalist and not a reporter who reports on the latest zoning fight at the board of adjustment. He reports on Apartheid in South Africa and Latin American revolutionary wars. He goes where the action is and sometimes where he can find a wave.
He gets a job at the New Yorker but still finds waves in the Atlantic and he is getting older but he still enjoys them backs off a little bit from the big ones.
This in one of the best books I’ve ever read and recommend it highly. It is still $14.99 for the Kindle version. I got my copy at the library. It took me longer than two weeks to read it and I’ll get it back to them today because I am getting daily emails about all sorts of terrible things are going to happen to me if I don’t return it soon.
Morten Storm is a Dane who had troubles growing up. A rough and tumble household led to him being involved in gangs and drugs and lots of fights and even more chaos. As he tells it, he happened upon a book about the prophet Mohammed and liked what he found. He jumped into this with both feet and got involved in the growing Danish Muslim community and converted and then sent to Yemen for further study.
He tells about his growing radicalism and brings up many of the things that I’ve heard over the years but you hardly hear anything about in the USA. The resentment that many Muslims have over the US military being on Saudi Arabian soil is chief among them. Radical Muslims have a world view, according to Storm, that is totally alien to western views. Democracy for example is a big no no because that is man acting like Allah. Storm become more and more radicalized after he returns to Europe and then of course we have the attacks on the American Homeland on 9/11.
He is repulsed at first by the huge loss in innocent lives in direct contradiction of the Koran but is slowly brought about by the viewpoints of the radical mullahs who now say killing innocent people is God’s will. All during this time he is traveling throughout the Mideast and Europe meeting with various terrorists and raising money to support them. He has increasing doubts however about the killing of innocent civilians and then later has religious doubts about Islam, especially their concept of predestination and realizes that he can’t believe in a religion that predestined the murders of so many thousands of people.
He ends up offering his services to the Danish version of the CIA, the PET who get him involved him with the two British versions of the CIA (MI5 for internal affairs, and MI6 for overseas threats) and eventually the American CIA. His disclosures about these various agencies is hardly flattering to them. He talks about the briefings and debriefings done a very expensive hotels by these agencies and the debauchery of the PET in particular. The British agencies get a little break because they are very ethical and very reluctant to put innocent civilians in harms way.
The CIA he portrays as having very sophisticated technology but are very arrogant and also very willing to kill innocent people if necessary. He spent a lot of time with the CIA and feels that screwed him out of some major cash for tracking down some major bad guys but not paying him. Where he decides to leave his life as a double agent is when he is helping track down an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, and is tipped by somebody else that he doesn’t want to be sitting by him ever because the Americans will fire off their hellfire missiles from drones or helicopters whenever they are sure of his exact position and don’t really care who else may be around at the time.
So he gets out and goes rogue, writes a book, and gets interviews on 60 Minutes. The book reads like a spy thriller but seems very believable. Storm has had an adventurous life meeting with many of the middle eastern bad guys and even finding a third wife for Anwar al-Awlaki on facebook and taking her to him in Yemen.
The book is a great read and I highly recommend it. Not only does he tell a heck of story about his life as a double agent but he also talks about the grievances that many Muslims have against the US and many of the countries in the Arab world that are seen as lackeys to America. Couter terrorism is a messy business. Our enemies are very smart and adaptable and are very committed. What struck me is the ease that terrorists can move around the world. They fight in Yemen, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Chechnya, and then go home and spend some time with the family in England or Denmark or wherever until they decide to go and fight somewhere else. It is also remarkable how dogged and determined the US and allied military and intelligence agencies are going after the bad guys.
This is a heck of read. I’ve been trying to figure out if Storm is legitimate or not. Who knows with a double agent. I hadn’t seen much in the way of people discrediting him besides the usual conspiracy lovers who point out things that don’t really matter. So sure he is gaming us a little bit but a lot of what he claims rings true.
Here is a 60 Minutes segment featuring Morten Storm and his claims.
Hey, I bought my book in the Kindle format on Amazon for about $3. I have put my Goodreads list on my Amazon wish list and check it regularly. Every now and then Amazon will cut the price of a book drastically for a short while. So I check my wish list regularly and grab books when they get cheap. The price for the book is back up around $10. I also download books for free from library but in these tea party crazed days, libraries here in Oklahoma have less and less money available.
I had my 9/80 day off on Friday and Heather and I went to see “Learning to Drive” with Ben Kinglsley and Patricia Clarkson. Clarkson plays Wendy a woman who gets dumped by her weasel of a husband just as the movie opens. The little turd decided to tell her that he was leaving her in a restaurant, hoping that she wouldn’t make a scene. That didn’t work out so they took their fight to a cab driven by a Sikh named Darwan, played by Kingsley. Darwan gets the weasel to his girlfriend’s house and Wendy to her house. Darwan finds out the next day that Wendy left something in his car and he delivers it back to her and she takes his card.
In the meantime Wendy has promised her daughter, Tasha (played by Grace Gummer, who is also Meryl Streep’s daughter) that she would learn how to drive so she could visit her in out in the sticks way up in Vermont or somewhere. So she calls Darwan and he proceeds to teach her how to drive. While she is learning to drive she is also learning how to live her life without the weasel.
Meanwhile Darwan has his own issues. He is single and and is planning on marrying somebody he doesn’t know from his village in India arranged by his sister. He doesn’t really know how to deal with her and so he and Wendy kind of muddle along teaching each other about life as the driving lessons proceed. Then Darwan’s wife Jasleen shows up and she and Darwan get married the next day and start their life together in Queens and she is so unhappy because she doesn’t understand why her new husband is never home and he doesn’t understand because she just won’t adjust to life in her new place.
Anyways I’m not going to tell you about the whole danged movie but I loved this because it is about growing and changing and adapting and picking yourself up and moving forward and making a life for yourself. I loved this movie.
Clarkson is a marvel. She is so expressive and when she is frowning and sad, we are sad also and when she is happy, she is radiant and we feel great. Kingsley does his thing where just subtle changes in expression really multiplies the emotional effect. He is also a definite solid guy in counterpoint to the weasel.
I thought this was a completely satisfying movie and give it two thumbs up. It is R rated mainly because we get a really good view of Clarkson’s breasts bouncing around as she has a sex with a guy she met. I mean I like looking a breasts as much as any guy but this was totally gratuitous and didn’t have much to do with the movie before or after the viewing.Not that I am complaining.
I took Wednesday off because it was Heather and I’s anniversary and one of the things we did was go see “A Walk in the Woods” a movie with Robert Redford and Robert Deniro based on the book of the same name by Bill Bryson.
The movie opens with Bill Bryson, played by Robert Redford, being interviewed on television and then attending the funeral of a friend. We can tell that he is fumbling looking around for a new adventure and then he finds out about the Appalachian Trail. Over 2000 miles long from Maine to Georgia and by gum he decides to tackle that but his wife forbids him to do it unless he gets a partner. Finally he finds an old scruffy acquaintance, “Katz,” played by Nick Nolte who shows up and off they go.
These guys were buddies 40 years and ago and they have a rough start on their new adventure. Neither one of them is in good enough shape at the start but they get in the groove. They have different outlooks on life. Bryson is a nerd who knows facts that only nerds care about and Katz just wants to take things as he finds them and concentrate on the “big picture.” They have some comic adventures and become even closer during their trek.
So, yep it is buddy movie but it is a good buddy movie. They are buddies who are physically way past their prime but they don’t back down from anything. Redford does his typical underplaying the role and Nolte is bigger than life. I’d give this flick two thumbs up.
It is R rated because of the language. Lots of cuss words in here but everybody keeps their clothes on.
It is time to celebrate. Heather and I have been married twenty six years!!! She is the life of the party in my book. She has stood by me this whole time.
And just keeps looking better the whole time.
She manages to keep me grounded from time to time.
She is a devoted and loving mother. Just ask the kid.
She is willing to go down to City Hall and stand up for what is right.
She is first in line for any adventure.
>She loves critters of all kinds from little yappy dogs.
