Skywatch Friday – What Has Been Edition

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I am like zero for zero on sky photos the last week. No excuses, I mean the sky is always there right? Sure, but you need something in the sky to make it interesting. Not to worry, I dug into my archives. So this was taken in June 2010 in downtown Tulsa. I had to have been working late and that is not like me? So I didn’t wake up at work in time to go home after work.

#skyviewers #sunset #clouds #skyviewers #tulsa #oklahoma

I remember this photo well. Our family had gone to eat Mexican food with another family at a restaurant in a not very good part of town. After we ate we were talking and I noticed the sun set across the old vacant lot. I pulled out my old trusty Android clone and took a photo through the chain link fence and loved the sun flare, which of course I accentuated with snapseed and posted on Instagram. Speaking of instagram, are we instagram following each other on Instagram. Check my side panel, lets be followers. I love instagram but there are a lot of dishonest people on it and it took me a while to figure out how to deal with them. But I digress.

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This is a blast from the way past. This is my mother in front of the house she and dad had at Happy Jack, Arizona when he had his first job as a junior ranger for the US Forest Service. I love the beautiful blue northern Arizona sky peaking through the trees.  I think they lived there before any of us kids were born.

And now an optional digression.

Mom talked one time that Dad was gone for an extended period of time and she was snowed in and got so bored she read through his college forestry textbooks. Another time, when we lived in a better house in Coyote, New Mexico she accidentally put a sewing machine needle through her thumb. Nobody was around so she pulled it out herself with a pair of pliers. She said I was around but I was about two or three years old and have no memory of that gruesome event. Mom was a copper miners daughter, and a Forest Service wife and  one tough lady. She loved her children fiercely and you didn’t really want to mess with her, or her kids. We lived in a succession of close knit small towns in the southwest and almost everybody was very nice but especially at school there might be some teacher or administrator who tried to lean on  one of us kids. If we were wrong, we would pay, if they were trying to twist things, she would twist them. It never took more than one encounter with her to straighten them out. 

I am linking with Skywatch Friday

20 thoughts on “Skywatch Friday – What Has Been Edition”

  1. Driller's Place

    It’s been quite a while since I sifted through my sunrise/sunset images. You’ve found a couple of great ones. Our moms were cut from similar cloth. Mine was a coal miners daughter and as an only child she could be like a mother bear with one cub. If I did something stupid, I got what we would refer to as experience. If I was threatened, heaven help the offending soul. Have a blessed week-end.

  2. Ellen

    When we were in Flagstaff in December I looked Happy Jack up on the map. It would be nice to visit there some day. It sure is beautiful country. I have a letter Dad wrote mom and he described it as being the most beautiful place he’d seen. I kept a couple of dad’s old textbooks and you’d have to be bored out of your mind to read even a page or two. It’s deep stuff. Did you ever know that Mom’s dad went up to Alaska in hunt of gold? I wish I knew more about that adventure. I wish I would have written down some of the stories mom and dad told.

  4. Peter B

    Great memories. You mom sounds like an amazing woman! Love that “blast from the past” shot with the snow piled high, and beautiful “sky over vacant lot” photo!!

  9. nancy chan

    Stunning shots of the sky from your archive! Yes, our mothers are tough! I remembered once I was bullied by a group of boys when travelling in the school bus. The next day, my mom was waiting at the bus stop to tackle those boys and that stopped the bullies!

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