Son and I went on a walk around a local park in Tulsa last weekend. I liked the look of many of the trees that lost their leaves. You can see their arms now and their arms look like they are dancing.
I used Topaz Lab’s “Glow” software to emphasize the “arms” on this tree.
Linking with Digital Art Meme
Sunday after church I spent all afternoon putting our modest collection of lights up on the house. It always amazes me how long it takes to drag the stuff out, untangle everything, see what works and what doesn’t, run to the store to get what you need, drag the ladder out and then climb up and down the ladder a gazillion times. That takes 90% of the time, the rest of the time is actually putting up the lights. And then you get to make the adjustments and replace bulbs that decided not to light and well you know. Here we are.
So, we loaded up and and went to the Tulsa suburb of Broken Arrow to the campus of Rhema Bible Church and their gift to the community of a pure over the top Christmas lights show. (And yes, check out the web site, don’t tell them Yogi sent you unless you want to be prayed over, a lot, and then escorted off the campus.)
Their web site say they have two million lights and that seems like an undercount to me. There are lights everywhere.
I hope they get a discount on their power bill because even with led’s I bet that Public Service Company of Oklahoma is keeping an extra generator going.
They have trees wrapped and all sorts of characters like the gingerbread man above.
Heather and I liked the tree wrapped above with all different color lights. I wonder what the story is.
They do all this for free. It is just amazing and it is very popular.
And an ark.
And a Merry Christmas sign
And there is Logan and Heather. And no, she is not shrinking. It just looks like it.
Rhema keeps the lights going from 5:30 to 11:30 nightly through January 1. Go check them out if you are close.
Pearl Harbor now is such a pretty place. It is very hard to imagine that anything evil could happen at this place. But it did, 74 years ago on December 7, 1941.
Photograph, from a Japanese aircraft, of the harbor under attack.
When Japanese planes attacked the Pacific Fleet in a surprise attack.
When the Navy launch approaches the USS Arizona Memorial everybody gets very quiet. It is more than a memorial. It is also a grave site.
USS Arizona in the middle of the photo.
The Memorial is the final resting place for 1,102 Sailors and Marines who were killed when the USS Arizona sank during the attack.
It is one of the most moving experiences I have ever had visiting the memorial. It had been on my bucket list a long time.
A bare hint of a trail at West Highlands Park
Fall has definitely come to Tulsa and we are in a period of gorgeous days with sunshine and blue skies. And with the brush, bugs, and snakes gone I am back in the woods finding the larger geocaches. Once or twice a week I take off at lunch to go find one or two. Early in the week I went to west Tulsa’s West Highlands Park to find one hidden deep in the woods in an undeveloped area of the park. Previous finders had reported a lot of difficult bushwhacking. I’m lazy and I had my work clothes on and wasn’t interested in getting all tangled up in the brush, thorns, and mud so I spent a considerable amount of time looking for a trail headed to the cache. It wasn’t a regular park maintained trail. It is what land managers call a “social trail” and you are liable to find anything on such a thing. It is best to keep an eye on what is going on because it is possible to walk into something you don’t really want to walk into. Check out geocaching.com to learn more about geocaching or my link at the end of this post. 
Sure enough about 100 feet into the woods I find a collection and porno mags and some whiskey bottles. Sometimes I wish I had a trash bag with me (and a really really good pair of gloves!). I’ve brought along trash bags and it works out well. You pick this crap up and and drop it into a trash bin at the park parking lot. I hate it when people leave trash in public areas.
A few hundred feet further and I came upon an old squatter’s camp that was no longer active. They had left a bright green Dollar store shopping cart. That puzzled me because you would basically have to carry that thing through the woods to their camp. I mean if you have that much energy why don’t you get a job, earn some money, and get an apartment? 
Soon after, I left all signs of squatters and came upon signs of nature. Some busy little beaver got after this tree.
I found the cache, as a courtesy to the Cache Owner and the people looking for it I am not showing where I found it. If you want to go look for it, it is named “TAG CITO 2014 Commemorative Cache – West Highlands.” It was a fun one to find.
At lunch on Friday I drove out west to Keystone Dam to look for a couple of caches. 
I wasn’t really familiar with the area and ended up on this old road on the south side of the Arkansas River downriver from the dam. A road like this demands to be driven to the very end and I did. So then I looped back and got to business at hand.
I saw an eagle take off from the top of these trees near the “Ground Zero” of the Bomb Squad Cache.
The first one I went after was close to the dam and was named Blue Blazes after the trail that goes by it. This is on Army Corps of Engineers managed land and there was no signs of squatters or porn parties. Just me, the trail, and the woods.
Then I went to the other side of the dam and took a short hike along the north bank of the river and found the Bomb Squad Cache so named because the cache owner originally placed the cache too close to a post office and the police bomb squad came in and looked at it. They didn’t go stupid though. They left a note asking him to move it somewhere else and he did deep in the woods, and I’m glad he did.
Anyways I love walking in the woods this time of year on a bright sunshiny days. What about you, have you ever been geocaching?
Last week before the five or six days of rain at one of my favorite fountains and sculptures on Tulsa’s River Parks.
Linking with Skywatch Friday