I am not a vegetarian by any means but in the summertime I love fresh produce and fruit. The Tulsa suburb of Bixby used to be known for their truck farms and fresh produce. Will guess what the the flat lands with rich soil that make it suitable for farming is also loved by developers for building thousands of houses in nice subdivisions. So the truck and grass farms are rapidly disappearing but some of the produce places live on supplied from areas further away or even Texas, Arkansas, and Georgia.
From a recent visit, some fresh peaches from Porter, Oklahoma.
Local vine ripened tomatoes.
From left to right, fresh green beans, new potatoes, corn on the cob and okra.
Luckily I’m married to a woman who knows what to do with fresh produce. We eat well all sorts of produce all summer long. Green beans and new potatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, orkra, corn on the cob (and chowder), various peppers, marinated cucumbers and onion, and zucchini. Sign me up!! Not to mention peaches, plums, blue berries, blackberries, cherries and other fruit.
How about you? Do you have access to fresh fruit and vegetables? Do you like them?
Seen during a recent bicycle ride. This horse walked up to the fence and once he figured out that I didn’t have a treat for him I was dismissed with a flick of the tail!
One of the things I really like about blogging is being able to personally communicate with people around the world who I normally would never encounter. The exchanges are pretty brief but over time I think I have a pretty good idea of who the person is and what their life is like and I think they have an idea of who I am.
Several years ago I joined Postcrossing, a free online service that matches up people to send and receive postcards. You don’t really exchange postcards with one person. You request an adddress from the site and they send it to you and once that party gets your card, then your address is given to somebody else, so it is kind of like a chain. By now I have sent and received about 217 cards over the several years I have participated.
You send a card and it takes about 10 days to a month for the party to get it and then it takes about that amount of time to get a card back. It works out that if I send a card once a week, then I get a card about once a week. Remember the days when getting the mail was fun? Postcrossing makes it fun again. I love getting the cards and reading the messages and making just another tiny little connection with somebody on the other side of the world.
The latest card I got is this one from somebody in Portugal. They wrote about tiles and their importance in Portugal and how they are used extensively in the buildings. I just love little tidbits of information like that. So far I have either sent or received cards from 43 different countries. It is a lot of fun. The site is free to use although you can donate if you want. The expensive part is buying the international stamps. Postcards can be as little or as much as you want to pay.
People are gracious about any card they get but in general they don’t like multi-photo postcards nor do they like advertising postcards. When you get a person’s address there is a link to a profile where they can state what their preferences are. I buy postcards a lot so I can generally get something close to what they like. So far it seems that the Oklahoma themed cards are the most popular especially those with a Native American theme such as maps showing where the original territories were.
So if you want to do a little armchair travelling Postcrossing may be for you.
Tulsa is unique for having thriving downtown churches unlike many big cities where they are just barely hanging on. Here are three of them and a bonus photo.
This is one of my favorite churches, the Catholic Holy Family Cathedral with its unusual three spires. This year it is 105 years old.
Right down the street is the First Christian Church of Tulsa with its unusual tiled roof. It looks a little Middle Eastern to me.
And my favorite, the Boston Avenue United Methodist Church on the very southern end of downtown. An zig zag art-deco masterpiece designed by Bruce Goff and Adah Robinson. It was barely finished when the Depression hit and church legend has it that the leading members had to work like crazy to keep it from being foreclosed and turned into a movie theater.
This is the bonus photo. It is not of a church. It is the underside of the 21st street bridge over the Arkansas River in Tulsa. I caught it in the afternoon late enough to be lighted by the sun to the northwest (to the right roughly) and early enough where the light had some intensity to it. And I helped along a little with a Topaz Studio filter. It kind of looks like the inside of cathedral doesn’t it? Oh throw me a bone somebody!
There are several other very active vital churches downtown with interesting buildings. I’ll be posting about those later, maybe. I don’t plan my posts much.
Airmen from Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D., welcome the first RQ-4 Global Hawk to the base May 26, 2011. The arrival marked the beginning of a new era of remotely piloted aircraft at the base. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Johnny Saldivar)
The big news last week was Iran shooting down an American Drone over the Strait of Hormuz. Our government claims that it was flying in international airspace and Iran says it was in their airspace. Subsequently our President authorized and then cancelled a retaliatory strike against Iran. I wasn’t paying too much attention the drone itself until I read in the news that it cost $190 million (other sources are saying $220 million), and it had a wingspan bigger than that of the Boeing 747 airliner (that turned out to be an untrue claim.)
Photo posted to Flickr Commons by San Diego Air and Space Museum
So using my friend Mr. Google I checked the plane out. It has a wingspan of 130 feet according this US Air Force Fact Sheet and has achieved a flight time of 34 hours. It is cram packed with all sorts of surveillance and electronics gear and has no offensive capability. They can fly at 60,000 feet at a leisurely 310 knots and were considered hard to down with anti-aircraft missiles but not impossible.
Photo posted to Flickr Commons by San Diego Air and Space Museum
We have had them operational since 2011 and we have about 30 or so in our fleet. (Or at least we did until last week.)
So anyway, I am glad that our President called off the strike although it kind of puts us in a weak position now. Beyond that though I found out about this amazing aircraft that gives us some amazing capability. I’d love to be able to see one of these airplanes in real life.
Interestingly, according to this Wired article, Iran has attacked American drones before causing one to crash in Yemen and the other escaped. They were the MQ-9 Reaper Drones which according the Air Force are designed for dynamic execution attacks and surveillance. In 2011 Iran downed an RQ 170 Sentinel Surveillance Drone. According the Wired article, Iran reverse engineered the Sentinel and deployed their own version which doesn’t make me too happy.
For the last several years I get every other Friday off. Over the course of two weeks I work nine days for 80 hours. I love it. I got criticized by a former boss for actually taking the day off. It was like huh??
So this Friday, Heather had to go teach an exercise class so I went to get the oil changed in my car. Afterward i went looking for a geocache in this neighborhood park which made me a little nervous because it said “residents only” and then after I went across the bridge it looked like I would have to walk across the fringes of peoples back yards to reach the cache. So, as we say in the energy industry, I plugged and abandoned that plan. I like geocaching away from people, not in their back yards.
Heather and I went to a yin yoga class at our gym. It was great. The instructor had us fold our bodies in pretzels. At least it felt that way. I have very stiff hamstrings and the instructor had me do the modified pretzel. We did the dragon, the pigeon, the swan, and a few others. I have hit yoga pretty hard this year. I think this was my 18th class this year. I may not be able to do the full bore pretzel pose but I am a lot more flexible. Not that anybody but me can tell. It was the International Day of Yoga today, did you know that. It is also the Summer Solstice. Opportunities for all sorts of pagan worship!!
Everybody got home and we decided to go eat lunch at Torchy’s Tacos. Son Logan is kind of like me. He loves lunch!! I haven’t missed lunch in a long time. If I ever do, worry about me. He had a burrito, Heather had one taco and I had two. I love their brisket taco and I tried their ahi tuna taco. Not bad for raw fish is what I say. I don’t have to worry about people stealing bites of it from me.
Next to Trader Joes where I got very sad news. They are not selling my beloved pumpernickel pretzels any longer. They said they lost their supplier. Sad is what I have to say. I found some Skyhook Wine. Telling young engineers to get a skyhook lined up is a long favored gentle hazing by older people to younger people in the energy business. Along with getting a stripe of paint and other things. All in good fun. We don’t do hazing any longer. Probably for the best. I will say that Trader Joes is not where I go when I want to spend twenty bucks on a bottle of wine. Nope, I’m a two buck chuck guy all the way. Even if it is more than two bucks these days.
That is Heather’s hands picking out tomatoes and Dotson Produce in Bixby. There is a meme in facebook that says “It’s difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato” (by Lewis Gizzard) These are not home grown but slice those babies up, put some salt and pepper on them, parmesan if you are feeling fancy, and what you have is pure heaven. I dare you to think an unpleasant thought while eating them.
And that is about it. Pretty exciting huh? Great day off is what I say.
I am loving the big blue skies and the white fluffy clouds we are temporarily having. I say temporary because it clouds up and rains quite a bit these days.
The Arkansas River is still high but within its banks and it is muddy as a soaked cow pasture.
I love the big cottonwoods on the river. Even if some of them are suffering from storm damage.
Almost all the River Parks trails are open now. They had a big sinkhole to fill in and repave here. There is still considerable work to be done getting the lights going again and fixing the plumbing at the restrooms. There was considerable damage to the river banks and they are trying to figure out how to rebuild and stabilize them.
So that’s the latest with the sky situation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. How they looking where you live?
Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art is putting on an exhibition of over 150 photographs by Jason Lee. I’d never heard of him before and he got famous as a skateboarder way back when, and then got into movies, and for the last decade and a half has developed quite a reputation as photographer using various film formats.
Philbrook commissioned him to do a series of photographs on Tulsa and Oklahoma. They are his vision of Tulsa and Oklahoma. So when I went to check them out recently I was like, well, okay. His vision is kind of bleak and a lot of shows the disparity between the haves and the havenots here. There a shots of dilapidated buildings with the high rises of corporate Tulsa in the background for example.
There isn’t like one single work that is a showstopper. Its not that kind of exhibition. I think you have to look at the whole work in its entirety. From that vantage the show is outstanding. The thing that really inspired me is that I sensed a confident photographer going about his business shooting photographs of various scenes based on his instincts.
So, inspired by him, I am trying to figure out what my vision of Oklahoma is and make it more right brained than my analytical side. I found these images of various bison in a rural area of Tulsa. I kind of like them even though I had to park in the driveway of the property and just as I finished up since big loud dog showed up acting like he wanted to bite a piece of my leg off.
They are colorful, what they mean about Oklahoma, I haven’t figured that out yet. I am just going with it.
What do you think?
I drove on out of Tulsa into the countryside and came across this Turkey Vulture. I didn’t bother him one bit.
Across the road was a mainline block valve for some sort of liquids pipeline. It needs a little work I think.
So anyway, if you are in the Tulsa area go check out the Jason Lee exhibit at the downtown branch of Philbrook.
Wednesday night I went for a little run on Turkey Mountain for the first time in months. With all the rains and storms we have had and life in general, I just haven’t made it for a long time. Today was glorious though, cool and dry and as you can see the skies were spectacular.
I love those big fluffy clouds. We have not had them for a long time.
See that grass, I am not crouching down in the grass I am standing up. We have had lots of rain and the ground is still soaked. At home I haven’t even taken the winterization off our sprinkler system.
The trails were nice, especially this dappled section.
There is usually not much color this time of year but I saw a little bit on my outing. This pink bloom for one.
And this yellow flower.
And even a random leaf on the trail had some color to it.
I walked/ran about three miles and I loved it. I had forgotten how relaxing and meditative being out in the woods can be.
Wagon Wheel – where son Logan used to take his horseback riding lessons.
Wanted Posters – nope, my photo is not up there.
Warship – the USS Missouri now anchored at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese surrendered on her deck ending World War II. She was brought out of mothballs and refurbished during the Reagan administration. My brother had the honor of being on the crew when she was christened in San Francisco back then. Hopefully she will have a long retirement in Hawaii.
Water Towers – I love the Hot, Cold, and Warm towers in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
and Wife!! Here is mine at the grocery store.
And Will Rogers Birthplace – near Oolagah, Oklahoma northeast of Tulsa a ways. One of those great little landmarks that is definitely worth seeing if you happen to visit northeast Oklahoma.
I am linking with ABC Wednesday – come join the fun!!
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