Thanks Sweetie, I savored every crumb. You are special.
Started north. I’m a sucker for any kind of trail. This one is nice, asphalt and well lit, even at dark thirty.
Part of the woods between the trail and the river is eagle habitat. Stay out from November to the middle of March.
Went as far as the new Creek River Spirit Casino, open less than a month. Cost, reportedly about $195 million. 300,000 sqare feet of space. I’ve been watching them build this for a long time. Nope, I didn’t drop in a few quarters before I turned around.
It’s getting light, sun is coming up. Here is a picture of the eagle sanctuary. You can see the river through the trees.
An hour after I started, a picture of the north side of the Jenks Bridge.
Check out Watery Wednesday for great photographs of water from around the world.
Monday at noon was the best day so far this Spring here in Tulsa, OK. So I put my hat on, hooked up my ipod, turned it to Miles Davis, grabbed my camera and went for a walk.
On the north side of downtown I came across this crane. I love big manly machinery. I hope that they keep it here a while. I think they are going to demolish a condemned bridge over the railroad tracks. I’ll have to come by periodically and make sure they are doing it right. Also, look at the blue sky. Like I said it was a gorgeous day to be out and about.
This is the BOK Tower, built in the mid 1970’s. If it looks familiar it may be because it was designed by Minuru Yamasaki and Associates who also designed the World Trade Center buildings. The BOK tower is 52 stories and 667 feet tall which is almost exactly one half the height of the WTC buildings (1362 feet and 1368 feet). Supposedly the BOK tower is the tallest building in the plains states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. (Wow! the plains states are world renown for their real tall buildings!!)
Sign inside the BOK tower. I’ve never been in a building where walking is not permitted. Beware, we Okies can be strict! I confess, I willfully walked through the Upper Level Lobby. Just try and find me!
Gotta go, I’m on the run from the walking police. Thanks for visiting.
For other views of the world click on over to That’s My World.
I’m still higher than a kite about my new license plate number 666BOI. I was so excited I decided to the truck repaired. You see about three years ago I got rear ended by a male nurse on the BA Expressway. (I know ha ha ha, har har har, you all are so darn funny, I’ve heard it all….) and my truck got damaged. I settled with his insurance company and got a check to fix it and never did.
In the meantime I got two cracks on the windshield, both of them eventually spread across the width of the glass.
Well, I can’t have the best license plate in the country be attached to a truck with a rear end that needed fixed. (Again, ha ha ha…. enough). So I took it in to get both the bumper and the windshield fixed.
After
Have you ever seen a rear end that was so smooth and wrinkle free?
My Mother-in-Law Nana is moved into her new house in Tulsa. She is was moving up here anyway and had a contract to buy a house when when she broke her hip and had to have surgery, then rehab here in Tulsa.
Well but she is one tough lady and she worked extremely hard and flew through inpatient rehab, and closed on her house. She and Sweetie spent most of the last week supervising the move from Antlers, OK to Broken Arrow. The movers unloaded it all Friday.
So here is a picture of Nana (on the right) and another tough lady (Sweetie) resting up at the new house.
A few treasures from the old house, now in the new house.
The Bear
The Old Cookstove from the Homestead in Northwest Oklahoma
SuperPizzaBoy’s Rocky Horse. I remember him small enough to fall of it. Now he trips over it.
Nana had the movers deliver the old piano to our house. It looks like it belongs here.
Click on over to Skywatch Friday and check other pictures of the sky from here, there, and everywhere.
The city provided trained people to make sure that all the kids participated and were safe.
The link to the Tulsa World article on the matter is here.
I don’t blame the Tulsa Parks people at all. SPB and I have met some of those folks through our geocaching hobby and they all have a heart for what they do and generally go above and beyond the call of duty. They are very hard working people.
The City is using doublespeak to describe the situation. “… the primary reason for discontinuing the camp was to include special needs children in other programs.” Excuse me folks, any children present? That is a bunch of bullcorn!! I’m sorry. I find it a very cynical use of language to justify the action. I resent it a lot.
According to the City spokesman, this is the only summer day camp that has been cut from the schedule. They do however “hope” that the kids will be able to participate in the other camps this summer. Gee, I hope so also.
Now we are taxpayers and we know that city tax receipts are down and everybody has to tighten their belt but why is the DDA camp the only camp cut? And the only alternative is “hope.”
We have a little disconnect here. Many special needs kids cannot be left to their own devices. Either they stay internal and don’t participate, or they drift off from the group, or they get frustrated and mad and act out towards the staff or fellow kids, or they get picked on, bullied, and attacked by the other kids. Many parents, have tried just dropping their kids off at some program and hope for the best. This doesn’t work too well generally for anybody involved.
For example, I have seen our son, SPB, punched in the gut and hit in the face by other children at our son’s Sunday School class here in Tulsa. That is one reason Sweetie and I taught in our son’s class. So we can keep an eye on him. The church stepped up and provided adult “Buddy’s” for special needs children to the benefit of all concerned.
Anyways if you live in Tulsa and would like to help please call the Mayor’s Action Line at 596-2100. I talked to them a little bit ago and they do a very good job of registering your comments and are very pleasant, professional, and courteous.
Also contact your City Councilor. They have email. They will answer your emails, if your courteous. You can find who your councilor is and their email addresses here.
We have a bicycle problem at the house. Sweetie’s is propped up against the wall. Makes it kind of hard to get in and out of her car.
Mine is balanced all wobbly on my work bench. So if I need to do anything I have to move the bicycle. Pain in the butt.
So after school today SuperPizzaBoy and I went to Home Depot and found two fold down bike racks for $5.95 each, plus tax. They come with screws but I spent a few more pennies on some heavier duty manly lag screws.
Come home, did my manly home project. Sweetie will be so proud of me when she gets home Thursday night! I’ve been telling her that I would take care of it since about 1992, and I did. Isn’t it nice to have a guy around the house who follows through?
A big party going on downtown in the Oilfield Capital of the World. A tea party. I’d never heard of such a thing but when I looked out the window at the crowd my coworkers had to tell me what was going on. Where have I been?
So I had to go check it out at lunch. Lots of signs, lots of nerdy looking people with cameras. A helicopter showed up. The photographers went crazy. I refused to join the crowd wasting electrons on a whirlybird a 1000 feet in the air. So I took a picture of this guy taking a picture. He has a lot better camera than I do. The speaker told everybody to wave at the helicopter, and they did!! Who’d have thought a bunch of free thinkers could be led so easily. Kind of worries me, how about you, you worried?
I don’t know what everybody is all bent out of shape about but the speaker kept on talking about taking back our nation, we are a nation of Christians…, yadayadayada badababadababa blah blah blah… No disrespect intended. I hate all political speeches. But I love politics, go figure. I was more into people watching. Then I switched to signs.
Its like everybody was just milling around waiting for something to happen. A couple coworkers came by and chatted. While we were talking every once in a while the crowd would cheer and clap and my friends would clap also. I asked them “Why you clapping. What did the guy say.” They said, “We didn’t hear him, we are justing supporting him.” I asked “Who is he?” They didn’t know. I guess I don’t get it.
I had a birthday recently and in addition to cake, ice cream and a lot of fun Sweetie and SuperPizzaBoy got me a new gadget. A new GPS receiver. The Garmin nuvi 500. It is a crossover GPS in that it does car navigation and geocaching. If you are a premium level geocaching.com member you can download tons and tons of caches to your pc and with then into the nuvi 500.
So anyway we have only found a few caches with this and I’m still learning how to use it so I don’t know whether it is going to supplement or replace my old gps. The nuvi is not very handy to hold and doesn’t seem to be as rugged and waterproof as the handheld gpsr’s. Also, you have to do a manual change from vehicle navigation to cross country once you get out of the car and I had’t quite figured out how to do that smoothly.
The thing that is helpful in geocaching is the cache description, hints, and logs of previous finds. Most handhelds just hold the name and location. For the other stuff you either have to print them out and carry (yuck) or you can use software for your cell phone like cachemate I use on my Palm Treo cell phone. That’s OK but then you have to juggle two gadgets. The nuvi carries all that stuff in it. That is incredibly handy.
The screen is nice and bright in sunlight, and you can have a lot of fun with the car navigation feature. SPB and I made the vehicle icon into a pickup truck to match good ole 666BOI better and we switched the voice from a bitchy lady Californian (it sounded to my ear) to a merely irritated English female voice. We are going to download a pizza slice icon from Garmin’s web site to be the vehicle icon.
Anyway, the jury is still out on the nuvi. Its a keeper for navigation, and I am definitely going to use it for geocaching to at least supplement by my existing gpsr. I can see using the nuvi to use to drive to the vicinity of the cache and then my handheld to find the cache. I’ll just have to experiment.
This is my existing gpsr. The Lowrance Ifinder Hunt. (Lowrance is a Tulsa based company). I have found maybe 600 caches with it and love it. It can hold in memory about 2000 caches. The nuvi can hold about 4000.
If you are going to do geocaching then you are going to need GSAK. An incredible piece of software that facilitates downloading caches from geocaching.com and uploading to your gpsr. It’s cheap, you can try it for free for a while before a nag screen appears.
