Brilliant Blue Sky and and even more Blue Audi (I keep wanting to write Bluer, but I am not sure that is a word.) I’m kind of in a holding pattern because of upcoming knee replacement.
The only bit of green on Tulsa RiverParks right now. Ironically, I am spending more time than ever in the gym now. The surgeon has exercises that he wants me to do to speed up the healing time afterwar the procedure. Plus, the encourage you continue what you were doing before.
Sharing a truffle latte with my wife after an exercise class. So yoga, weights, water classes, stationary bike, and a little bit of walking. Walking is what really hurts now.
A little bit of ice and snow Wednesday morning. So not too many adventures right but I am eager to get on with it and start recovery.
Last Thursday it rained and then late in the day the sun came out and I happened to be driving by to see this church with some great golden hour light so I stopped and got a photo.
Earlier last week during a cold wet miserable day I was on the RiverParks Trails here in Tulsa and captured this image of downtown Tulsa. It’s kind of grainy but I like it.
At local park on a sunny day I got this pond and skies.
I went to the Tulsa Boat Show last Friday. On nice days the Tulsa Driller is always a must do photograph.
Expo Square is where the Golden Driller is, right on Route 66. The county has made some improvements
And a backyard skywatch photo looking east.
And again in the backyard looking northwest.
And from the front driveway looking down the road to the west.
I went looking for a geocache last week that was supposed to be near the site of a former World War II era prisoner of war camp near the Tulsa suburb of Bixby. There is no trace of the camp left, nor was there any trace of a geocache. Bixby has some of the most expensive land in Oklahoma. It is Arkansas River bottomland, flat as a pancake. Used to be huge vegetable and grass farms here but they are pretty much gone and real estate development is taking over. You can see to the right of the photo that there is a new subdivision is going in there. Flat is good for both agriculture and subdivisions I guess. Just between you and me though, I wouldn’t live in a flood plain. I think here in the USA that climate change can jump up and bite you in the rear end.
Coming home I came across this building close to the house. I have always loved this structure. Very clean lines and lots of glass. I love the little sunshades they have on the south side (to the left).
I was picking up pizza at rush hour the other night. I loved the light in this photo plus a big dark cloud was hanging out over town. It was ominous.
This is from the parking lot of the pizza place. I love the cloud and the cars in traffic and the whole thing. I have the technology to take the sign down and the power lines but you know, doing that just causes more problems in my opinion. I am sorry the photo is so grainy. I shot it in RAW on my iphone using the Halide app.
And another jigsaw puzzle. This one of an arch somewhere in the high desert. This one was harder than I anticipated by I “got-r-done.”
So that is it for this week in my unexciting, waiting on knee replacement surgery, life.
Monday, January 20th was a huge day for America. An historic day that all Americans honored.
Martin Luther King Day!! Of course and many of celebrated by participating in or watching the Parade for the day in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, just north of downtown.
It was bitterly cold but that didn’t stop neither the participants nor the watchers.
Lots of civic organizations, city government, the University of Tulsa
And Oklahoma State University were represented.
My former employer, ONEOK, Inc has been a sponsor and participant for years. They had a nice float,
and a ton of marchers braving the cold. One thing that was missing that I was looking forward to was their drill team. I participated as a marcher in 2019, not in the drill team. I made a video back then of them practicing before the parade.
I think they are pretty good. They should come back!!
And here is ONEGAS, our sister company, they broke apart years ago.
And Williams Corporation, another huge employer and growing, headquartered in Houston. I expect one of these days a merger between ONEOK and Williams. When that happens they’ll probably move their headquarters to Houston. Houston is the center of the energy universe and has been that way for over a half century.
And here is our District Attorney walking with Tulsa Police officers.
And QuikTrip, a big convenience store chain headquartered in Tulsa. I got a couple of gift certificates for coffee.
They floats and marchers just kept on coming. After an hour I left. I was freezing.
Watching the Tulsa community turn out in force to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King was definitely the high point for me on Monday.
With the cold and my bum knee I have not had too many adventures yet.
I got up the morning of January 9 and this is what the sky was like. I didn’t use a filter. It was amazing.
And then this is what the snow brought. I actually liked it. We had enough to where it made everything pretty but it melted fast enough to not be a problem.
And on January 11 I captured the Wolf Moon a little early. You can tell by the fuzzy lower left corner that it was still waxing. I think January 13 was the night of the actual full moon.
I worked another jigsaw puzzle. I did the google images on this photo and I got no hits so it must be AI or some other made-up thing. This wasn’t too hard. I did the edge pieces simultaneously the edges of the two sky sections A great way to spend the evening. My favorite parts were the mesa to the left and the galvanized roof to the right.
Icing my knee
Be thinking of me. Tomorrow my wife and I are visiting my surgeon to find out about scheduling a knee replacement. I’m kind of dreading it but things are continuing to hurt more and more so something has to give.
One day back in early December I was a little early picking son up from work. So I ventured over to nearby Woodward Park and took some photos.
It’s a small park but it is loaded with trees, ponds, and other interesting things to explore.
Still lots of Fall Color back then and they had a pond that made for some good reflections.
The sun was low, so much the better for the light.
Plus it was still warm in the late afternoon.
And I was shooting RAW using the Halide App for my iphone. Shooting RAW eats up memory and the plain photos are awful to look at but you can run it through Lightroom or Snapseed and since to get them looking better.
So i had me a ball taking photos for about 15 minute before I had to go fetch the kid.
I ran one photo through my DynamicAutoPainter Program.
And this is a jigsaw puzzle that I recently completed of the Canyonlands area of the Southwest USA. I didn’t take the photo so I don’t own the copyright but I am sure somebody does. It was a lot easier to do than I thought it was going to be. First I did all the edge pieces then I did the edge of sky vs land and then the no cloud vs clear sky andthen there were all sorts of horizontal lines to work on. It was fun.
I hope that everyone had a great New Year’s. 2024 was a year of blessings and also trials and tribulation for us and we got through it. Back when I started blogging, there was a friend of mine who also started and quit because she said people only put the positive parts of their life online so it was dishonest. So I guess I am dishonest. Sorry about that and I don’t feel bad about it all. I’m a blessed man, what can I say. I have this irritating trait that no matter what the situation, I think things will be okay. I couple that with a sense of realism about what okay looks like.
I have always loved New Year’s. It’s like a fresh start every year. We didn’t do much, stayed home, had a nice dinner, watched some television.
In late December after weeks of monotonous gray skies I saw that things were shaping up for maybe a good sunset so I got my drone in the air and captured a bunch of images. I put them in a video and here it is. It is only twenty seconds long so do not panic!
New Year’s Day morning I went with Heather to a class she is starting at a nearby YMCA. It is cardio drumming and twenty people showed up to take it. Not bad for a brand new class. She is already teaching it weekly at another YMCA here in town and monthly at our “home gym.” It is lots of fun, you have drumsticks and you drum on an exercise ball in time to music. She leads the different moves. It is lots of fun, she loves upbeat music and so do her students. She also teaches Zumba at two different gyms, and a couple water classes, aquazumba and aquastrength. I take both of those classes. She stays pretty busy. She has been teaching for years and is very good at “reading the room” providing alternative moves for those who need them.
Afterwards, I took off and found a geocache and hiked a short distance. If you are a geocacher, New Year’s Day is an important day to find one and if you are a hiker you should go on a First Day’s Hike. So I did both. Yeah me, hah!
And then we went home and had our New Year’s Day meal featuring chicken quarters and baby back ribs that I smoked on the day before New Year’s Eve. That red stuff on the meat is a very spicy rub use. It brings the heat.
Meanwhile, I did another jigsaw puzzle on my ipad. Great way to stay busy while we watch our streaming shows. The one I am working on now is a Canyonlands scene with lots of tan colored desert and skies. Very challenging.
Again, I wish everyone a Happy, Heathy, and Prosperous 2025!
We had a nice surprise for Christmas this year. My sister, Ellen, came down from Colorado to visit us. (She is also a blogger, check out “Life on the High Plains“)That’s her on the right. We had a great visit.
We went to see our brother, Bob at his residence and had a meal with him and a little pre-Christmas celebration.
Ellen is a lover of all animals. Our Pomeranian Kodi loves her and even let her pick him up, for a little bit. He doesn’t let me even touch him. Our cat Lizzie loves Ellen as well.
We took her to the Tulsa suburb of Sapulpa to check out the Christmas Chute. We love the Chute. Talk about an extravagant display.
They block off a long section of their main street and put these steel frameworks in which they stuff with lights and decorations.
They have all sorts of various themes.
They provide a list of things to look for. They are hard to find but it gets you to looking hard at the decorations. The main one this year was Christmas Pickles. I had never heard of such a thing. We found a few of them. Check out the Christmas Chute web site for more info.
(Photo by Ellen)
Here’s my bride, Heather, and I looking for the items. I’m holding the checklist.
It just goes on and on. The crowd had a great casual fun energy to it. They have all sorts of opportunities to shop or get snacks.
We spent quite a lot of time there.
All good things come to an end. Ellen returned to her home in Colorado. We all miss her.
Earlier this month a nice cold, sunny, windy day, I went to Tulsa’s RiverParks trails to look for an Adventure Lab Geocache. Adventure Labs are a specialty cache where you have to visit a site and find information there. No physical cache is involved so it is appropriate for areas where they don’t really want you hiding stuff. Check out geocaching.com for more information. So this Adventure Lab involved going to several sculptures and getting information from the sculpture or accompanying plaque.
I ended up walking about two or three miles and had the parks trails to myself. At the end of the Adventure Lab you get coordinates to a “real” geocache and I found it as well.
And I took photos of all sorts of other stuff. We still had lots of fall color and the skies were really blue.
These are some sort of infrastructure and artists had painted murals on them and I really liked them.
And RiverParks installed this little musical drum for little kids and immature 69 year olds geocachers.
And I got this certificate!! I am not sure what you do with certificates. I am now up to 2287 geocache finds. But who is counting, right?
As described previously I got a chance to tour the new Gilcrease Museum last month. The building’s exterior is finished and most of the interior.
One thing I love about the building is that it has views of the outside. This is from the terrace looking north to the Osage Hills.
This is looking through another window east. You can see downtown Tulsa just to the right.
From the terrace looking southwest into the sun.
This area is going to be a cafe with outside seating on the terrace. I didn’t take any photos of the new galleries. No windows and plain gray walls. Not much to see there, yet.
On the terrace looking at the exterior walls. I was struck by the wavy design and asked the guide what that was about. She said she was told but did not understand it. She said it was “architectspeak.” Maybe so. I think it does add interest to the building.
They are still building this grand staircase which is going to be in the center of the building and go to all the floors.
I can’t wait to see it when it is done.
How much does all this cost? About $140 Million. Check out the private money donated. Tulsa has a lot of very generous families who are not afraid of donating money to the right cause. There is a lot of work to be done. They are designing the interior fixtures. The contractor will turn the building over in May 2025. The concrete and other materials used in construction needs to “off gas.” The vapors could be harmful to the collection, so the museum is not scheduled to open until November 2026. I can’t wait. Check out Gilcrease.org for more details. Check out their online collection. It’s fabulous.
