I found this while on a walk just beyond the outer edges of downtown near the apartment house in my post yesterday. It looked to be some sort of retired portable carnival ride that had been out of service for a few years.
Category Archives: Tulsa
Ruby Tuesday – Red on Blue
I came upon this old school apartment building during a noon walk of the neighborhoods just south of downtown Tulsa.
Our World – Philbrook Museum of Art
Last week me and SuperPizzaBoy had some time to ourselves to we went to the Philbrook Museum of Art. We are members thanks to the world’s great MIL, SPB’s Grandmother “Nana.”
We di the whole thing, inside and out, we saw great murals.
Native American Pottery
Modern Native American Art
People brunching.
We love the entry hall at museum, it is grand and very geometric.
A painting of the Grand Canyon by Thomas Moran.
Their collection on Modern Design
We even liked the fireplace screens.
And in a house built by a oil tycoon do you expect the wild naked fish riding women to stay under covers? So to speak.
We also love the gardens of the museum.
We saw both Philbrook cats.
SPB went to say hello, the cat had things to do and places to be.
Philbrook is the place to be if you find yourself in Tulsa.
Weekend Reflections – The Gardens of Philbrook
Stevie Nicks and Rod Stewart at the BOK Center in Tulsa
Wednesday night Sweetie and headed downtown. The first stop was the penthouse bar at the Mayo Hotel for drinks.
And then on over to the BOK Center, my employer was nice enough to give us tickets to see Stevie Nicks and Rod Stewart together. I had had never thought of them belonging together but you know they both had their peak in the that brief time between rock and roll and disco (ughhhhhh).
Stevie Nicks opened up and sang eleven songs including several Fleetwood Mac Songs like “Dreams” and “Gold Dust Woman.”
Everybody was commenting on the drummers hair. Maybe he has been on the road too long. What do you think?
Ms. Nicks also sang a haunting “Soldier’s Angel” based on her visit to Walter Reed hospital several years ago.
I saw Fleetwood Mac in the early 1980’s when I lived in Houston. One thing I remembered was the onstage dressing room she had. Well she has a fancier version now.
I used to think that she had only one song, “Rhiannon” and not much range to her voice. Well I decided a long time ago that she is what she is.
She brought a shawl out and twirled about with it. She said it was from an early 80’s MTV music video.
I am not going to be rude and say how old she is. She still looks and sounds great.
Next up was Rod Stewart. Stevie Nicks was sultry and seducing. Rod was sassy and fully of energy.
He brought a large band with him and they did great, especially his violin player.
And his saxophonist. I guess that the guy who sings “Hot Legs” would want short dresses on his musicians.
Not that I noticed.
He opened up with “Love Train” and went right through his hits, “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna be Allright)”, and eneded with “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”.
A surprising number of his songs are covers, don’t matter.
His backup singers were pretty good, and also had short dresses.
He brought the Tulsa Strings out to accompany on a few songs. A nice local touch.
This being Oklahoma and all somebody threw their hat on stage. Mr. Stewart wore it, cooties and all.
He is getting kind of old also but he kicked a bunch of soccer balls into the stands. He is good at it.
A great time was had by all!!
Graffiti Wednesday – C’mon Dog!
Graffiti that has been there long enough to fade and streak by Nemesis. Another example unofficially tolerated graffiti. Personally I think it is clever. Nemesis executed it better than I photographed it I have to admit. I’m thinking that the dog and human figures are stencils. But what do I know.
Check out Jen one of Oklahoma’s blogging stars. She got me started on this graffiti thing. She blogs about a bunch of stuff.
Also check out FatCap, a great web site with all sorts of information about graffiti around the world. Find out who the graffiti all stars are in your town. Their database doesn’t list Nemesis. He doesn’t google either. Anybody who this person is?
Finding Something that is xSTINKt
Last Wednesday evening after work I headed over to Turkey Mountain here in Tulsa to go running and find a geocache.
It is hot here in Tulsa and when it is hot I like to go running in the woods rather than the concrete and asphalt. It also just so happens that there are lots of geocaches on Turkey Mountain, good ones, hard to find ones.
The map to the left shows the caches on Turkey Mountin. The happy faces are the caches that I’ve found. The stars out caches that I have hidden. The little green boxes and the question mark are the ones left to find.
Wednesday night I went looking for the xSTINKt Cache. I had looked for it before without any luck. It is hidden by a very clever geocacher who goes by the tag adairmd.
I took along my geocaching GPS receiver and my running GPSr and my Ipod touch. It has a camera and I am using it a lot these days. Lots smaller and easier to carry than a regular camera.
A good omen about six minutes into the run. A deer! I’ve seen lots of deer on Turkey Mountain but they don’t generally stick around long enough for me to fumble around with my camera. It is right in the middle of the photograph above just to the right of the slender tree in the middle. Makes me think I need to carry a better camera! One with a zoom.
Turkey Mountain has lots of ponds from one end to the other.
I popped out onto the powerline right of way for a little bit just as another runner went running by.
That evil adairmd, owner of the cache, has promised to delete all logs of the cache that show spoilers. Sorry adairmd, it is my journalistic duty as a blogger to leave nothing out. Above is a look of the sky from the cache location. Below is a pic of my GPSr.
The dead giveaway is the leaf below. Study it carefully, when you see a leaf exactly like that then you are within three feet of the cache. In all serious, I’m not giving any hints, except for the leaf. This is a unique cache and he wants you to find out what is unique about it for yourself. The cache was placed in April and I was only the fourth one to find it. It’s almost a two mile walk from the parking lot to the cache site. Most people are not going to go that far especially if they are not familiar with the trails on the mountain.
It started to get dark on the way back. I’ve never run in the dark on Turkey Mountain but I have run in the twilight. I love it.
It’s still hot on the mountain but you are out of the direct sun and off the reradiating hard surfaces of the city. Also, there are not very many people up on the mountain. It’s pretty quiet except for the mountain bikers getting a little rambunctious.
The sun gets really low and really colorful.
It’s a great place to gett your head on straight.
I uploaded my run to Garmin’s website. You can see my route and a whole bunch of metrics on the run by hitting the green button below. You’ll go to the website. And then hit the little triangular “play” button like you playing a cd player. You’ll be amazed by how slow I run and how long it took me to find the cache.
Hey, you can do better? Get after it!
And by the way, adairmd is a nice guy
Skywatch Friday – Mottled
Downtown Tulsa early Monday morning.
Graffiti Wednesday – Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame
A bench on the Boston Avenue Pedestrian Overpass near the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. I don’t think this is an official color scheme for the city. I think somebody, on their own initiative, painted the bench red and stenciled the images on in honor of three performers. I don’t know how long it has been like this but from the worn condition of the red paint I think it has been there for some time. I think that some graffiti is unofficially tolerated in our fair city. I notice that some “bad” graffiti disappears quickly but more artistic graffiti is allowed to stay, at least for a while. I run on the cities Riverparks trails two or three times a week and I’ve noticed that a lot of graffiti in visible areas disappears where more “artistic” works have been allowed to stay. I don’t know who is making the call, the guy or gal with the brush or one of their bosses but I applaud the judgements being made.
Still there, as of last week.
Painted over, for some time.
I like to see a little discretion used by our public officials. When they mouth “we are just following procedures” to justify stupidity it makes me cringe.
Does anybody out there have any idea who the guys on the bench are?
My friend Jen in Oklahoma City started the Graffiti Wednesday meme is posting about graffiti today.
Our World – Oklahoma Centennial Botanical Garden
We got a little break ffrom our 100+ temperatures on Saturday so we loaded up and went to see the Oklahoma Centennial Botanical Garden about ten miles northwest of downtown Tulsa.
It covers about 170 acres located in the Osage hills with a variety of terrain from a small lake to meadowland to lots of woods.
We had never visited the gardens before. I had run a couple of trail races through it but I was more interested in not tripping and falling on my face than looking around and seeing what is going on.
It is a work in progress but they have built nice trails with benches, the lake and a small visitor center overlooking the lake.
The Gardens have been a long time in coming and I think it is already a great asset to Tulsa. As they install the gardens it will become even more valuable.
Meantime, I’ll just poke around way behind Sweetie and SuperPizzaBoy taking my pictures and seeing what’s what.
In deep summer the colors are mostly gone, except for the greens, but if you look you can color here and there.
It seems like you are never very far from an oil well in Oklahoma.
Right now it is only open on Saturdays from April to October. They will expand the hours as they expand the facilities.
It’ll be fun to watch this play grow as the years go by.