Category Archives: RHOK

RHOK Monday – The Future

The Real Housewives of Oklahoma have their Mclinky Monday Meme going on. This week’s “theme of the meme” is:

“Look into the future. You’ve spent your life taking care of everyone else, but now the kids are gone and it’s just you and your spouse. What do you do now?”

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Retirement is not an option any time soon. We have a 12 year old with autism, SuperPizzaBoy, and how independent he will be is a very open question and weighs heavily on our minds.  So I can see me working for another ten years. However, I’m in the energy business and its just best to not count on longevity. It is a commodity based business and its fortunes wax and wane with a million different factors. (Just like any other industry!)

But anyway, lets just say we get our son educated and lets say I can retire.  I can’t see moving anywhere out of Tulsa. Tulsa has its problems but I just cannot see turning our back on our life here and moving somewhere else. Also, my wife Sweetie is very plugged into the community here via her volunteer work and is younger than me and she may not want to move and start all over somewhere else.

I am going to stay up a little later every night and sleep in a little later. No more getting up at 5:15 every morning. Does anybody really think I like that?

I plan on having lunch with Sweetie a lot at a lot of different places.

I am going to travel more. I am going to visit my family more and go see stuff that I always wanted to go see and do things that I always wanted to do. I want to go see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater for example and I want to take a float trip down the Grand Canyon. I want to see some broadway plays on Broadway.

I’m going to have a job. I plan on being a volunteer advocate for families with special needs who are trying to get the services their children need from their school districts. It kills me the way school district administrations screw over families  while avoiding their legal responsibilities to provide an appropriate education to their children. I think that I have a lot of skills that can brought to bear to help families deal with that. I am a professional negotiator by trade. I think I’m pretty good at it. I am not a yeller and screamer, I’m a problem solver.

RHOK Tuesday – Newlyweds

The ladies of the Real Housewives of Oklahoma are having their McLinky Monday again. I’m participating on Tuesday so I’m calling it RHOK Tuesday. I hope they don’t get upset. You don’t want to make them mad. They may swarm.

The theme of their meme this week is to share funny newlywed stories.

I’m also going to this opportunity to post a wedding picture of my wife Sweetie.

Heather Wedding_0001

You can see why I call her Sweetie. She has only got better looking over the years.

On the other hand, look what she got in the bargain:

Alan Wedding

I wonder where those frames went? You can get new lens you for them you know. Oh well, just one of the many things of mine that disappeared the first couple years of our marriage. Along with my Coleman camp socks and camo pants. She still pleads innocent, in a smirking kind of way.

The story she always brings up happened before we got married, the evening before as a matter of fact. We were at the rehearsal: Sweetie, me, her parents, my parents, and some friends and relatives from out of town. So, we got done with that and we headed off to the rehearsal dinner. Yeah, we did, my folks and I. I left Sweetie in the parking lot. Oops.

She brings it up every now and then in a good natured way. I still feel bad about it. At least she doesn’t mention the worse things I did. I’m not either. I wouldn’t know where to start, nor when to end.

Oh she put with a lot. My job for one thing. The energy business is either boom or bust. Well it kind of bust right after we were married. My employer closed the Oklahoma City office down and moved it to Weatherford, OK about an hour west of town. We lived about a half hour north of Oklahoma City. So we got married in September and we moved in November. Three years later we moved again, this time to Tulsa.

She was very patient. I had to start from scratch on the whole married thing where two people are trying to start a new life together. All the standard stuff furnishing the house, coordinating schedules, the whole yin and yang of married life.

And then there was the way I dressed. I was like into engineer beige if you know what I mean. If you don’t know what I mean then come see me sometime at work. I’ll take over where the engineers are. So she dragged me kicking and screaming into the land of not beige.

And then the food thing. I was happy. I had a box of payday candy bars in the pantry, a case of beer in the refrigerator and Dominos on my speed dial. She actually cooked! Wow.

She has always been there for me. She would need a week or more to write about all the antics I’ve pulled over the years.

Where Were You on April 19, 1995?

I was at work in the Oxy Building in downtown Tulsa when I heard the news about the bombing. I went downstairs to the cafeteria and watched the video. I remember it was all very confusing and nobody knew what happened or why. People didn’t know if it was natural gas explosion or just what. There was a lot of speculation that it was middle eastern terrorists striking in the heartland.

We had a couple of customers come in from Oklahoma City for a meeting. They worked several miles north of downtown Oklahoma City. They said that they could feel the boom in their office but they didn’t know what it was.

What a shock when we learned that it was fellow citizens that murdered so many people. The chief of coward’s advice to survivors of the murdered victims before he was executed years later was “get over it.”

A few days later I talked to another customer who worked just a few blocks from the Murrah Building. He talked how it blew out the windows of the downtown YMCA and injured children who were in the day care. He helped get the children out of the Y.

Sweetie and I went down a few weeks later to the site. What got me was the damage to the surrounding buildings.

It drove home to me the mayhem, violence, and chaos that can result from the power of morons.

I feel the same dread now, that I felt then. The political atmosphere is very similar. I know several people who think very strongly that the country is not on the right track and not a one of them I know would harm anybody and I will defend forever their right to express their opinions. But with freedom comes responsibility and when I see facebook comments such as, “where is Lee Harvey Oswald when you need him” I get very concerned. There is always a fringe group of morons out there who will act on things and they can cause great destruction.

So my prayer is not that people will suddenly make themselves happy with the present political situation. I pray that they will express themselves responsibly and keep faith in our democratic values and institutions and remember the weak minded out there such as the Murrah building murderers who had trouble distinguishing right from wrong. Words do have power.

It has been a long time since I’ve been to the Bombing Memorial. It was done exactly right.

I’m participating in a meme this week sponsored by the “Real Housewives of Oklahoma.” The theme of the meme this week is “Where Were You on April 19, 1995.” Go check out the Housewives. They are definitely real.

Where Do I Come From?

This pictures tells you a lot about where I come from:

That’s me with the Smokey Bear. The Forest Ranger is my Dad. The place is somewhere in New Mexico. I have no memories of it. We also lived at the Coyote Ranger Station in New Mexico and then in the Ranger Station at Payson, Arizona. We lived in government owned houses. I remember the houses in Coyote and Payson had the exact same floor plan. The houses were located right on the property of the office and warehouse. So we grew up very familiar with Forest Service trucks.

and Forest Fires

(top two photos from flckr.com)

My older brother and I, who was about 5 at the time, used to strut around the yard and warehouse kind of keeping an eye on things and asking the workers what they were doing. I guess that we figured that since Dad was the Ranger, well, that made us second and third in charge. A National Guard officer showed up one day to talk to Dad who wasn’t there. While waiting he was joshing brother Bob and I a little about what he was planning on doing. We puffed up and told him that he better check with Dad before he started.

We didn’t get our own house until Dad got promoted into a Forest Supervisor’s office in Price, Utah. We stayed there for five years and then we moved to Eagar, Arizona.

Dad did various things for the Forest Service but everybody fights fires as their backup job. Sometimes during really dry summers he would be gone for weeks at a time helping fight huge fires in Montana, Idaho, and who knows where. One day he would show up exhausted. We got real close to Mom. We played games and drank pop and worried about and missed Dad.

I was a Forest Service kid, as were my brother and sister. My Mom was a Forest Service wife. It was kind of like being in the army I think. It was very close knit. The employees and their families socialized quite a bit. Wherever we moved we already knew somebody. My Dad who has been retired over 25 years still attends a  reunion campout in Quemado Lake, New Mexico with his former coworkers and their wives. Mom has been gone for some years now but when she was still around she looked forward eagerly to the reunions.

So, we were always on the outside of wherever we lived. I mean the residents were very welcoming and we participated in whatever the school and the community had to offer but it wasn’t like I ever expected to stay anywhere. People will tell you that “the kids will be fine” about a move and that is true but I can tell you that it is gut wrenching to say goodbye to your friends and move hundreds of miles away and often never. I think that an entire Boomer generation went through the same thing and that’s why many people refused to move so much when they had kids. Its too hard on the kids I think. I’ve been there.

During my sophomore year in high school we moved from Springerville to Albuquerque. Talk about night and day. From very conservative, close knit, ranching and logging community in the White Mountains of Arizona to an ultra liberal city at the tail end of the 1960’s. Talk about culture shock, especially for the kids. It took about a year for us to find a social group to fit into. It all worked out for the best though. I got along with my parents very well and stayed at home while I went to college except when I worked as a summer roustabout in the oilfields of West Texas.

So, that’s where I came from!

I am participating in a new meme sponsored by the “Real Housewives of Oklahoma” aka “RHOK.” They are the the some of the smartest and talented bloggers in Oklahoma. One in particular, Miss Priss, was recently voted, “Hottest Mommyblogger” in Oklahoma. So go check them out.

The theme of the meme this week is “Where Do I Come From”