Mount Kilauea on a nice sunny day a couple weeks ago. I love the dagger shaped cloud pointing right at the volcano.
According to our good friends at Wikepedia, Kilauea may be the most active volcano on earth. I tell you what, visiting the area made me realize just how alive this planet is. There is a definitely a fire down below so to speak.
Topaz Labs “Impressions” software, “Photo Painting III” filter
The Spotlight Theater on Riverside Drive in Tulsa is one of my favorite subjects. It is an Art Deco building designed by Bruce Goff and built in 1928 as a private residence but since the early 1950’s has been the home of Spotlight Theater. I think that it is a beautiful, timeless building.
The Spotlight puts on America’s longest running play. Weekly since November 14, 1953 they put on “The Drunkard.” More than 3000 Tulsan’s have been in the cast and over a quarter million people have seen it. I have to admit that I haven’t but I intend to!!
Some of the things I’ve been doing lately.
I came upon this yarn bomb just outside Elote’s in downtown Tulsa. I think Yarn Bomb’s are friendly graffiti. I mean they don’t age well but they don’t vandalize property either and they are kind of cute. I think Yarn Bomb’s are getting more prevalent. I’ve seen several around Tulsa.
Monday at the Gas Company we had our annual team building exercise. We go a daytime Tulsa Drillers AA baseball game. They feed us and we get to spend the afternoon watching the game. And then we have to go back to work cuz I work until 6. It is a very nice break in the middle of the day especially on a beautiful day like we had today. The Drillers lost one to nothing. It’s like cmon guys. You can’t score one run??
We have had a lot of rain the last week and lots of storms and in central Oklahoma some tornadoes. One day we had flooding and tornadoes and some big cats got loose at one of those low rent ripoff private zoos. We even had a tragic accident where somebody died in their tornado shelter. I’m telling you Oklahoma weather is pretty wild plus now we have earthquakes. The reason I’m telling you this is because on Wednesday instead of going for my regular long run on Turkey Mountain or the river I went on a short run of only about three miles. For part of the run I went where I wasn’t supposed to and got a good picture of one of our local refineries. Being the chemical engineer that I am I just love refineries and I think they are beautiful. What do you think?
While I was over where I shouldn’t have been I checked out the new not opened pedestrian bridge across the Arkansas River. I thought about running down there and seeing what I could see but I didn’t like the big curve that hides the end. I mean, who is just around the curve. Bridges are creepy enough already. So I will delay my run across the bridge until I know that it is open. I’ll let you know.
Next, here I am at the barbers. Rozetta and Billie at Antonio’s in the Petroleum Club Building have been cutting my hair, or what is left of it anyway, for 23 years. Anyway, I was getting my hair cut because it was picture taking day at work. My official picture was taken fifteen years ago when I started work and I hated it. So I needed to make the most of it and so here is the new pic.
So here it is!! In case you are wondering, that is my smile, thank you very much.
And my job has changed. I am now helping develop projects and am less involved in the commercial area. it’s a good change for me. I had the job as Director of Gas Supply for Oklahoma (and for several years Kansas) for about 13 years and although I loved it, I’ve been ready for a change. I’ll be working with many of the same people I was before helping develop projects to achieve our commercial goals. Projects like pipelines, compressor stations, natural gas processing plants and all that other fun stuff.
Hey, have you had any changes lately? Tell us!
Son at his new school had to take a foreign language and he ended up taking American Sign Language. Boy was that a chore. He has worked very hard and so has his mother. We are nearing the end of the year (Yahoo!!) and he had to learn how to do “The Gum Story”. I thought he did pretty good at it (not like I would know) but he agreed to let me film him doing it.
I thought he was going to translate while he did it but he didn’t and he is a one take and done kind of guy. Below is a translation of the Gum Story.
![preview[1]](https://yogisden.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/preview1.jpg)
We are proud of Logan of his hard work in the Signing Class and the other courses he has taken this year.
I took two years of Spanish and don’t have much to show for it. What about you? Do you know more than one language?
One of Tulsa’s best attractions is the Arkansas River that runs through it. It is beautiful and Tulsa and suburbs have enhanced it by putting in miles of trails and parks on both sides of the river.
The River also separates the urban east side and the industrial west side of town. The east side has downtown, museums, nice subdivisions and such. The west side has two refineries, a power plant, concrete plants and a bunch of other industries. I like both sides actually.
The only thing is that the river is most attractive where it has water in it dependably and that is only upstream of Zink Dam which was built in the last century and is showing its age plus the dam is beginning to build up silt behind it. The city has an engineering report now and it describes a project to renovate the Zink Lake Dam and add three other dams to the river. The total cost is just over $300 million bucks. It is a lot of money but I think it may be a bargain.
The new dams will feature “Obermeyer Gates” which is a kind of hinged dam that raises and lowers by means of an air bladder. So when the gate is lowered, silt and sand can move downstream and fish can move upstream. I am not sure how often they would cycle the gates but it does sound like an interesting technology.
Check here to see a video of how the Obermeyer Gate works. I had the video embedded but it autostarted and drives everybody crazey.
All I know is that communities are either growing or dying, their isn’t too much room in between and if cities want to grow they have to invest in themselves. I’ll be watching this and seeing if we can pass a bond issue to address the river.
This is my employer’s fancy new plaza. I think they did a good job. The old landscaping had all sorts of nooks and and shadowy crannies that were okay during the day but kind of creepy when I walked across the plaza to the parking garage across the way. The new plaza is lots more open and very well lighted.
The building across the way is the old headquarters building for Cities Service Company. At one time it was one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world. The industry downturn in the early 1980’s and then Boone Pickens drove them into arms of Armand Hammer’s Occidental Oil and Gas company. The refineries and gasoline retail arm ended up as Citgo, now owned by the government of Venezuela. The employees ended up scattered to the four corners of the world. As far as I know they all did okay. I call them the Cities Service mafia. They sure bond together.
Their story is echoed in lots of other companies and people, including my career. Such is capitalism and creative destruction and all the other buzz words. And all sorts of other industries have been through similar things. I am not sure whether it is good or bad but fully understand the short term pain and misery it can cause. It does seem that the managed economies of the world have the effect of spreading misery.
Check the widgets on my sidebar for the prices. It is good news to many and not so good news to others.I am starting to hear again the old saw about how the energy companies control the price of oil and natural gas and products such as gasoline. All I have to say is that if that is true then:
We are doing a piss poor job of it.
In fact it has been kind of like a roller coaster. Sometimes I feel like the blonde girl in the video below:
I don’t like roller coasters, do you?
A Skywatch Photo from my front porch. I processed the photo through Topaz Impressions.
Linking with Skywatch Friday
From Our Family to You and your family, we wish you a very happy and prosperous New Year!!
I’m addicted to Instagram. I like creating and uploading pictures and I like looking at photographs of the people I follow. It is crazy the number of photos out there. Every once in a while a company will repost a picture of mine. (After asking permission of course.) That is great because they typically have a lot more followers than I do and the pics get more recognition. Below are two such examples.
Quik Trip is a Tulsa based convenience store chain that IMHO beats the crap out of any other convenience store I have ever seen. One rainy morning I was filling my car with gas and thought that the store with the wet parking lot and ominous clouds might make a decent pic. It did and I got a few dozen “likes” (Likes are like crack to us Instagram addicts). Quik Trip asked permission a couple months later to repost it and it got a pretty good response.
This pic is kind of grainy. I was downtown yesterday morning and noticed that the colored drunk-driver-proof fountain and the blue Christmas lights make a decent pic. So I went up there and tried to get an interesting pic somehow. These guys came walking by headed off I think to the Iron Gate ministry to get some breakfast and I took a pic of them walking by the fountain and then cropped it close. (That is why it is so grainy. NewsOK, the online arm of the Daily Oklahoman reposted the pic
I have about two thousand pics on Instagram, some good, many bad, and a whole bunch in the muddling middle. I find it a lot of fun.
At work I am on a 9/80 schedule which means that I work 80 hours over nine days and get every other Friday off. I live for those every other Fridays. It’s the day Heather and I get to hang around with each other.
So yesterday we dropped the kid off at school, grabbed a quick bite at Einstein’s Bagels and then Heather treated me to a pedicure. I kind of like them especially when they don’t get too rough with the bottoms of my feet. I hate the cheese grater they use.
We ran some Christmas errands and had lunch at an Antique Mall and then browsed. I like browsing and taking pics of the merchandise. I never feel led to buy anything though. I guess that I’m cheap or maybe we have too much stuff already. Most people I know have way too much stuff.
I know that the owners of the booths are in it to make money but I think it has to be a passion for many of them. Many of the booths are laid out very well and you can tell that a lot of thought went into the merchandise on sale. I like it when I see passion and what one does for a check aligned. Unless the passion is making money then it often turns ugly.
Later on we took Logan to his play that he is in, Clark Theater’s The Best Christmas Pageant Ever (or “BCPE” to the old pros). They have two casts and they are doing lots of performances and it ends tomorrow. Last week the Director came to talk to me. Apparently Logan had been doing a little improvisation on his lines and singing and she wanted him to stick to the script. He has been doing Improv for years and this is his first play so we had to convince him that the character he plays, “The Reverand” is not supposed to be funny. He bought into it and from all reports he is back on track with the latest performance.
He is on tonight and tomorrow afternoon when the production ends. It has been quite an experience for him juggling a heavy performance schedule and finals but he is doing fine. He and us are stressed but we’ll get through it.
Anyways we are proud of the kid. He is doing great.
