Monthly Archives: December 2018

Visiting Tulsa’s Woodie Guthrie Center

Right after Christmas me, son Logan and brother Bob visited the Woody Guthrie Center in downtown Tulsa. The center is the archive for almost everything Woody Guthrie and they have a small museum showing off some of his papers, musical instruments, artwork, and of course his music.

They have on display lots of his papers with lyrics and notes, letters and such.

He put his stamp on his musical instruments including woodburning and ink. You may notice that on this violin he says it helped kill ten fascists. He was in the merchant marine during World War II and served on three ships that were sunk. (If I remember right.)

He wrote on all sorts of materials. You can tell he hated fascism. One interesting segment is that he lived in an apartment owned by Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump in New York. Woody didn’t really care for what he considered racist housing policy.

The museum also has a Virtual Reality experience of the dust bowl that is very eerie. Here are brother Bob and son Logan with the VR goggles.

The center also has a small space for special exhibits. This time they had a lot of memorabilia from John Cougar Mellencamp including recordings of his songs and quite a bit of material of Mellencamp talking about his music. I found it quite interesting.

As part of the Mellencamp exhibit was this reel to reel recorder/player. I tried to explain to my son how cool these things were and how expensive they were and then to why a ipod touch like mine totally outclasses these things. Reel to reel tape machines are still very cool in my book!!

Check the centers web site for information on hours, location, and exhibits coming up. They have an exhibit on Leonard Bernstein coming up in January. I’ll be checking it out. I got to see Bernstein at the premiere of one of his operas in Houston back in the 80’s. Everybody in the crowd was yelling “Bernie” like they knew him or something.

I am linking with Our World Tuesday

Skywatch Friday – Yule Edition

We had a full moon just before Christmas. Usually known as the Cold Moon. I found a new name that I like, “Moon Before Yule.” It was bright, silvery, and beautiful here in Oklahoma.

Also just before Christmas we had dinner with some friends and then went to Tulsa’s superb Gathering Place to check out the Christmas lights. We missed the lights but just walking through the place is great. Aboveis the Williams Lodge.

I’m continuing my geocaching trying to get to 2000 before year end 2019. I am finding myself in very out of the way places like the remote cemetery above where my only company was a few deer. We had a standoff for literally a minute or two with them and standing motionless until, I was like, okay you win and waved my arms and off they ran.

My brother drove over from Tennessee for Christmas and we are having a good visit and sharing Christmas with him. Its always nice to have family and consider ourselves blessed that we can be together.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas and I wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year!!

Linking with Skywatch Friday

The Lights at Rhema Bible College in Broken Arrow, OK

We had a great Christmas. We were blessed to be together and my brother Bob joins us for the Holidays and we had a great meal with Nana, the world’s greatest MIL.

After the meal, we ran home and dropped the dogs off (Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if we didn’t bring our three rescue mutts over to visit with Nana’s two dogs, they all joined giving the neighbor’s dogs a good barking if nothing else.) And then we ventured to the Tulsa Suburb of Broken Arrow where Rhema Bible College has had a great light display. They have been doing it for years and years.

We were eager to see the lights Tuesday nights because they are best seen o foot and the weather was good and is expected to get cold, windy, and rainy on Wednesday.

They have over 2 million lights and they spend months getting ready for the Christmas Season.

I bet they were glad to see LED lights get popular with their drastically lowered electric consumption. I bet the meter was about to spin out into space with conventional lights.

They are so generous. The whole thing is free. Yep, free, no charge for admission or parking or anything else. They do have refreshments and snacks available for charge and otherwise there is no charge.

And they do a good job of it. The designs have got more elaborate over the years and they have added music ad pulsating lights. It’s really a good show.

They are open nightly through New Year’s Eve. If you are in the area go check them out.

Take your camera. I chickened out and used the night landscape setting on my Nikon and I’m pretty happy with how things turned out. That is what makes me a picture taker instead of a photographer.

I also know my limits!!!

Skywatch Friday – Out and About

To the right a brand new hotel in downtown Tulsa. Lots of hotels have been completed the last several years and they all seem to be doing well. The tall building kind of in the middle is where I work.

Earlier this week I went geocaching in Tulsa’s Mohawk Park. I had a pretty decent sky.

I turned around and this little doe was checking me out. We had a bit of a stare down until I decided to see if she would let me get closer. Nope, she had all of me she wanted and ran off.

I hope that you all are doing well. I know that Christmas is not a happy time for everyone.

I am linking with Skywatch Friday

Instant Family with Mark Wahlberg

We went to see Instant Family over the weekend. A great movie about a childless couple who decide to adopt a group of three siblings. They sure didn’t know what they were getting themselves into as they deal with various “issues”with the three kids of widely varying ages who had been bouncing around “the system” for some time. I really love this movie and recommend it highly.

A Walk in the Woods

We are having some great weather right now. Sunny, almost warm, so Logan and I went exploring on Saturday in some urban woods. They are not a park, it is undeveloped private land. We were geocaching.

Their used to be houses here I think. Note the phone box out in the middle of nowhere.

I found the first stage of a multistage cache. The clue to the next location was a underlined letters in a Hardy Boys detective novel. Logan had to wait while I went through the novel and copied down the underlined words into my note book. The letters told a riddle that I think I have solved except you know the answer is a word and I need a bunch of numbers because I am looking for GPS coordinates!

We set that issue aside and went looking for another cache and found it. It Is a lot fancier than most of the caches we find. Some geocachers really put a lot of work into their hides.

So we only found one, but the fun is in the looking, at least for me. For Logan, the fun is getting back home.

I am linking with Our World Tuesday!

Skywatching in Sperry, Oklahoma

At lunch I went to the Tulsa suburb of Sperry, Oklahoma, a dozen or so miles north of Tulsa. They have a rails to trails project, the Osage Prairie Trail run right through town. Its a great place to take your bicycle. I found a cache called “Railroaded” near where I took this photo.

I was going to do a little geocaching while there. I ran across this sign at the first place I parked. Oops!! Luckily there were no geocaches around the sign and the weather is kind of cold. Also, there are lots of snakes in Oklahoma in areas where there are no signs.

One of the caches I found was called “Dress Up” it had some items you could wear and post on the cache page. I kind of liked these glasses, especially with the hat. I almost kept them.

There was another cache named “baby cache” about fifty feet away from this old gas station. I love the rock exterior. A scene from the movie “The Outsiders” was filmed here.

On my way back to the office I found this “hay bale art” out by the highway. Obviously whoever put it up is one of those crazy people who like snow. Who in their right mind, over 12 years old likes snow? Only ice is worse than snow. And tornadoes, and earthquakes. How come we have all the bad stuff in Oklahoma.

Not bad for a lunch hour, huh?

I am linking with Skywatch Friday

PhotoDynamic Therapy and Me

I am not much of an athlete but I try and stay active and get outside every day even during the work week, even when it is cold, I try and spend some time getting some fresh air..

I also have fair skin and having that and being in the sun is not the best thing. I use Aveeno cream and it works best for my skin too. I like to go hiking, bicycling, geocaching, trailrunning, all sorts of stuff.

I wear a 110 SPF sun screen every single day of the year and always wear a hat. Still I am on a first name basis with my Dermatologist, (I call her Dr. D). I go there at least twice a year and get my pre-cancerous cells blasted with liquid nitrogen. She has had to scrape a few off and one time I had to have some “chemo cream” on my forehead. That was a sight I tell you!!

So a few months ago I was in her exam room and she was blasting away and then said we needed to talk. She suggested that since I had so many pre-cancerous lesions she suggested Photodynamic Therapy. What happens is that spread a cream with a medicine that is preferentially absorbed by the bad cells. That takes about an hour. (I call it the marinating phase.) And then they expose my face to a strong light source that reacts with the medicine and kills the bad cells. (I call that the cooking phase.) So this week I had it done.

Alan - before pdt — Post Marinade and Cooking phase

The marinating phase went off without a hitch. The technician cleans your face really good, finished off by a rinse with alcohol, and then spreads the cream on your face and then I waited for an hour. And then I put some goggles on and stuck my face inside the light device and she turned it on and wow, was it bright, and hot. The reaction with the skin starts right away and the lights also make it heat hot and it was getting a little intolerable and then she gave me a fan to hold and direct upward and that got rid of the heat generated by the light and the stinging from the chemical got better in a few minutes.

Pro Tip 1: If you go through this, I highly recommend a small fan you can hold in your hand. It made all the difference in the world to me.

This baking phase only lasted 16 minutes and it passed fairly quickly. Then the tech shut off the light and wiped my face off with cold water which felt pretty darned good. She had an outstanding suggestion for any post treatment burning and tingling.

Pro Tip 2: Get some Aloe Vera gel and put it in the refrigerator! That was her outstanding suggestion and it worked. I love aloe vera gel anyway but when you put it on your burning skin and it is refrigerated,it stopped the burning cold.

So for 40 hours afterward I have to stay out of the sun, and away from windows and even strong lights. In about a month I will go back to see Dr. V for an evaluation and I am told and I read that often a second round is necessary so maybe I’ll get marinated and cooked again.

I am extremely thankful for therapies like this that prevent malignant cancers and I am also still amazed at health care in this country where if you are employed and have insurance, or if you are on medicare, life is good, and if you don’t have insurance, well your goose is cooked.

Want to know more? Check out this Medicine.net article for some good information and you can type “Photodynamic Therapy” in your favorite search engine to find out even more.

In the meantime, I will be switching even more from baseball style caps to wide brim styles. Anybody know of a wide brim bicycle helmet? I can run with a wide brim hat, that is no problem. I will also be seeing Dr. V at least twice a year for the rest of my life.

Pro Tip 3: If you are having skin problems go see a dermatologist. One that is a lot younger than you. You don’t need them retiring just when you need them the most.

Pearl Harbor – 77 Years Later

world war two image — Courtesy of San Diego Air and Space Museum – Flickr Commons

On the morning of December 7, 1941 the United States Naval Base at Pearl Harbor was attacked by 353 Aircraft from six aircraft carriers of the Japanese Navy.

world war two pearl harbor — Courtesy of San Diego Air and Space Museum – Flickr Commons

Eight American battleships were damaged, four of them sunk. All but the USS Arizona were raised and six returned to service. Three cruisers, three destroyers, and a couple of other ships were damaged or sunk as well and 188 aircraft destroyed.

The Japanese lost 29 aircraft and five midget submarines. It was a huge success for the Imperial Navy except that there were no United States aircraft carriers in the harbor. You see, even then the big battleships although impressive were already outdated. From then on there were very few ship to ship battles, the major battles were carried out by aircraft from over the horizon.

The most devastating loss was the lives lost. 2403 American lives were lost and 1178 injured. The attack sent shockwaves through America. The Japanese intended the attack to ward off American interference in Japan’s imperialist plans for southeast Asia and of course it had just the opposite effect. America declared war and three and a half years later defeated Japan.

--world war ii hawaii pearl harbor attack---- — Courtesy of San Diego Air and Space Museum – Flickr Commons

America has never done well it seems to me when we retreat inside ourselves and declare America First! When we retreat like that, other countries flex their muscles and move into the vacuum that we leave.

Several years ago I got to cross a major item off my bucket list when we visited the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. It was an unexpectedly emotional place for me seeing the sunken ship underneath the memorial and realizing how many people had died there. Usually I am clicking away with my camera but I only took one or two shots on the Memorial, I put the camera away and tried to think about what happened.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the sailors, marines, soldiers and others who died that day.

Skywatch Friday – Early December Edition

This is a view from the office. Back on standard time and the days getting shorter we are starting to get more colorful skies. One of the very few benefits of losing daylight savings time as far as I am concerned.

Speaking of daylight savings time, I come across this sun dial recently that was an hour off. What’s up with that? How do you adjust it. That thing is grouted in. I thought I could discreetly rotate it to get the time right but it is not budging.

So that’s about it for this week. I am linking with Skywatch Friday