We had a big bright full Harvest Moon last week during a clear night. We are going to have another full moon on October 31st. It will be a Blue Moon since it is the second full moon of the month.
My Skywatch photos this week are through trees. We have had some beautiful weather lately. Warm days, cool nights and the skies have been very clear. I went on a couple hikes in the woods this week and I loved the sun shining through through the trees. Nothing better than dappled shade and blue skies peaking through the limbs.
Couple that with a lot of the brush dying back already and it made for some great forest views.
I came out of my dentist’s office on Wednesday and saw this scene. I enhanced with the my new favorite app, Art Card.
I went geocaching in the afternoon and found this huge cottonwood tree just beginning to turn its colors against a very blue sky.
I am thankful for the great weather that we are having lately here in Oklahoma. Typically our Autumn lasts a good long time. I think I have mentioned before we have had several Thanksgiving meals outside.
I have been reading some pretty heavy stuff and this looked like a good beach read and it is. It is not any sort of light fluff even though it is set on Nantucket Island where the Levin family spends their summers in the matriarch’s house. They have gathered there for decades.
Against a backdrop of beaches, tennis lessons, and romance are some hard things. The grandson is in the army fighting in Vietnam. His sisters who range from early teenagers to adults in their 20’s are having problems. The younger ones are maybe growing up a little too fast. The Mom and Dad are not getting along and Mom is really liking her gin and tonics maybe a little too much. Grandmother is in denial about everything. And so the story moves forward.
It was fun that the book was set in 1969 when the country was going through so many changes and it references a lot of things I remember vividly. Senator Edward Kennedy scandal at Chappaquiddick where he left a young woman to drown and never called the police, the moon landing, Woodstock, hippies, marijuana. I was only 14 then and it was all pretty amazing and I was stuck in the little burg of Eagar, Arizona up in the White Mountains.
I loved this book. The characters are real and so re their problems. Yes, they kind of work through what is going on but not everything is tied up at the end of the book. Just like real life. This is my first book by Elin Hilderbrand and will not be my last.
My first pumpkin photo of the season at Lowe’s Hardware of all places.
This is a phone booth that has been in downtown Tulsa for years. There is no phone in it but there is a sign that says it came from Liverpool, England and that likely one of the Beatles may have used it. Yep, sure. There is a geocache in it though.
I went to Tulsa’s Woodward Park to walk around a little. I found this vantage point looking up some stone steps to a long forgotten memorial to William Shakespeare.
I walked up there and saw three blooms laying on the ground so I put them up and took a photo with a Polaroid App on my phone. Here’s to you William!!
Downtown I saw this cool sign, with sign language. I love the explosion of murals in Tulsa and elsewhere.
Back when I worked, I used to go running on the Arkansas River Trails in Tulsa after work on Wednesday nights. Wednesday seemed to be when the free spirits showed to also enjoy the evening. Hula hoops, slack lines, juggling, hammocks, music, and marijuana prevailed. The atmosphere was chill. One time when the water was low some of the free spirits showed up and displayed their rock balancing skills. They were amazing. I took a bunch of pics, this is the one I like the best, some geese came by at sunset to check out the rock art. So this is right out of the phone, no filters, and not even any cropping or levelling.
We have a pretty good vantage of the sky at our home. Here it is looking west. No need sometimes to drive places for Skywatch photos.
And here is a netted sky at one of those fancy multi level golf driving ranges. Never been although it sounds like fun.
This is a sculpture of a bison that I photographed at a low angle through the glass. It is called Guardians of the Plains and is on the turnpike in Sapulpa, just west of Tulsa.
This is a short video of a geocache hunt at a car museum in Tulsa. That is supposed to be a huge gasoline pump.
One day recently we had the swirly winds and funny clouds indicative of atmospheric disturbances which in Oklahoma means tornadoes. We didn’t have tornadoes. I used the Hyperspektiv app to kind of give an idea of the atmosphere.
I went out for a bike ride the other day. One of the best days of the year, sunny and cool, about 68F and hardly any wind. It was perfect. About ten minutes after this photo was taken I had a head on collision with another bicyclist who veered right into me. Luckily I had seen that he was a little jittery and had put on the brakes and tried to go to the right to avoid him but he panicked at the last second steered right into me.
We both ended up on the ground, I hit my head pretty hard on the pavement but I was wearing my helmet. The other guy landed on a guard rail with his ribs and was in bad shape and his bike was all mangled. Several people stopped to help and we went to a nearby parking lot. A buddy of his came and got him and his bike and Heather came and got me. My bike is okay. People rib me about how heavy, old fashioned and slow it is but it suffered no damage at all that I can see. I am going to have my bicycle shop check it and my helmet out to ensure there is no damage.
I went to our Bone and Joint Urgent care and got some xrays and checked out by a doctor and prescribed some meds. I can’t drive or drink alcohol while on them. So I just have a sore back is all, and a gouge in my hip where my handlebars got torqued into me when the guy hit my wheel. I hope the other guy is okay. He was hurting when he left the scene.
So if you ride a bike, wear your helmet. I hit the ground pretty hard with my head and I didn’t have a concussion. The other guy was wearing his helmet as well. I am thankful also for all the people that stopped to stop and help us.
Friday afternoon Heather and I took off way past Sand Springs to the Keystone Trail which is on US Corps of Engineers Dam near Keystone Dam and Lake.
A political trail sign!!
It’s a six mile plus or minus loop that is popular with the mountain bikers in the area. When we got there there was only one other person in the parking lot. We took the loop in a clcokwise direction and he took his bike counterclockwise and met him on the trail. We saw nobody else the whole time and ours was the only car in the parking lot when we left.
We didn’t see any deer, we saw lots of squirrels and this guy.
And these two, not friendly at all. I think we were interrupting something.
And rocks, we saw lots of rocks, big beautiful rocks. We didn’t see hardly any litter though. We walked through some spider webs which means that the trail was not very busy.
The trails were well designed and maintained. Not much erosion going on.
We even saw a little fall color. I think coming back in a month the forest would be beautiful with color.
Here’s a 38 second video of our hike. We went every which way. We covered about five miles in all and loved it.
I just got through reading Bolton’s memoirs of his brief time in the Trump Administrator as National Security Director. The book is certainly eye opening as Bolton describes working with Trump on issues such as China trade, North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction, the threats from Iran, and finishes off with the crisis in the Ukraine that led to Trump’s impeachment.
Bolton gets way down in the weeds and what comes out is his contempt for the way Trump does things. To Bolton, our president cannot maintain a train of thought for very long, cares little for issues except to the extent that he can use him to advance his own interests. He also doesn’t know the first thing about negotiating and mistakes personal relationships with international relationships. Bolton describes Kim Jong Un of North Korea laughing at Trump when he figured out that he could easily use that personal relationship to get concessions in negotiations.
Bolton also excoriates the House of Representatives for a lazy kind of impeachment where due to electoral schedules the calendar was abbreviated and so in the interests of time the issues were all focused on the Ukraine where in reality there was probably grounds for impeachment in a consistent pattern of self dealing by the President. The House also did not pursue their subpoenas in court so there was not much of an investigation and the process because ultra polarized and resulted in an acquittal by the Senate.
Bolton fears an unleashed Trump in a second term. The only thing that restrained him from many things in his first term was the fear of not being re-elected. Trump was barely constrained anyway and he’ll be much worse.
The book was interesting also as it gave me an insight into Bolton. The guy is pretty smart and has a lot to say. Once I understood where he comes from I could see where he got a lot of his beliefs. He is big into American Sovereignty for example which makes him very suspicious of any treaties that limits that for example. Despite some reports Bolton is not endorsing Biden. Bolton doesn’t say much about Biden but really goes after Obama and his policies.
The book scorches Trump pretty good. Trump did everything he could to stop publication of the book. It does not cast him in a good light.
A scene from our retreat to southeast Oklahoma. Perfect weather, no wind. A great time to relax. I used an app called ArtCard to create this.
Another reflection from historic Shannon Springs Park in Chickasha, Oklahoma. A former water stop on the Chisholm Trail and and now a beautiful park. Lots of infrastructure built by the WPA way back when.
Last Sunday we motored from Tulsa down to Chickasha to visit Logan at college. He’s doing very well down there but we need to go see him anyway.
We ate at this very decent Mexican Food restaurant. We all had burritos! It was a lot, in fact it was my last meal of the day.
And then we took advantage of the weather and went to Chickasha’s Shannon Springs Park. It is a great place with walking tracks and playgrounds and that big western Oklahoma sky.
Way back in the day the springs were a water stop on the Chisholm Trail. It was probably was not near as nice with hundreds of cattle standing around and in the water but very important.
The sun was shining and the air was warm but not hot.
Some of the trees look like they are getting read to turn colors.
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Heather and Logan found a cool swing that you could make go by pushing your feet. We all three tried it for a little while.
And we found what I call a hippie bridge. Kind of racy for small town Oklahoma. It’s not too small a town as we went to the big Walmart to get the kid stocked up on supplies. You know, snacks and pizza. I’m surprised he doesn’t have pizza squeezing out his ears.
https://flic.kr/p/2jK8Drg
And then back to the dorm and saying goodbye!! It was a great visit.
