Logan and the Sea Turtle wave at each other. My employer helped pay for this exhibit.
Once a month during Heather’s Book Group meetings, Logan and I have “Boys Night Out.” Recently we checked out the Oklahoma Aquarium in the Tulsa suburb of Jenks. They recently opened up the Polynesian Reef Exhibit.
It’s beautiful. The exhibit looks better than I photographed it.
I love this colorful Red Spined Starfish.
And this turtle.
The African Cichlids have been there a while. I love the colors and the random patterns.
If you are an Oklahoma fisherman, these striped bass are the ultimate in Oklahoma. They are huge.
We had a good time. Check the Aquarium’s Website for information to plan your visit. They are open late on Tuesdays which makes it very handy for Boys Night Out!
Last Saturday I went to the Tulsa State Fair. I love the Fair, I try and go every year. I love the sights and sounds , and the people and all the colors.
I got there kind of early so the midway wasn’t very busy yet.
Don’t you love it. I wouldn’t touch cotton candy with a ten foot pole. I haven’t had any since I was a kid. I am kind of a sensory guy and the texture totally creeps me out. Plus, too danged sweet.
Photos, I take my own photos, thank you very much.
I checked out the Oklahoma State Sugar Art Show. I did a separate blog post on it yesterday. I love all the cakes! I spent the most time there.
Then I went to the far eastern end where the crafts were. I love the quilts. There were lots of quilts there. Very nice.
This little teardrop trailer was a winner in a woodworking classification. Isn’t it gorgeous. These little trailers are very popular in geocaching campouts. I’ve always wondered about the practicality of these things. Like I am 63 years old and there is no way that I could change clothes in this thing. They are cool to look at though.
Pumpkins, lots of decorated pumpkins. I love decorated pumpkins. There were no Trump pumpkins this year, that I saw unlike previous years. Maybe they don’t allow them.
They had a lego competition. Lots of great entries.
I moved over the adjoining building where they had the birthing center (for critters not humans, just so you know, although they could probably handle that too, that would give them little kids an education don’t you know!) and the petting zoo. I didn’t go to either one of those. I took one look of vintage veterinarian tools and I saw all I needed to see.
And then over the FFA exhibits. I love those. It is kind of the best of small town Oklahoma. (Which is the best of Oklahoma in my opinion.) They had pumpkins also. They had a bunch lined up outside of the building. I didn’t see any Trump pumpkins here either. (I am going to call them Trumpkins from now on.)
They had a Smokey Bear pumpkin inside. As a Forest Ranger’s kid I am always into anything Smokey Bear.
There were lots of Snoopy themed pumpkins.
This is my favorite. No Trumpkins inside though.
The various FFA chapters have table displays and I love looking at those. Lots of work and creativity involved. This is for the Oolagah, Oklahoma Chapter. Oolagah is a town about an hour north of Tulsa, near where Will Rogers grew up. I loved the photo in this display. All those pretty young women and the guy, dressed in pink. Obviously confident himself and smart enough to hang out with women. I have always preferred the company of women, myself. Kudos the guy, whoever he is. I salute you. And whoever had the genius idea of inverting the expected colors. Nice.
A flower display.
Displays on native grasses in Oklahoma.
And this was an FFA project, to restore this beautiful Massey-Ferguson tractor.
And then on to the critters. I swear the pigs were making eye contact looking for a friendly face.
Some handsome sheep.
And the cows. These are Herefords. What my Dad called white faces. You don’t see too many of them these days.
The longhorns are always impressive.
Another longhorn.
I finished up and rested up with a Spaten Optimator at the Beer Garden. That and a corn dog was the only thing I paid for at the Fair (except for the $6 entry fee, and a $1 tip to the shuttle bus drivers, and a corn dog.) So, I’ll be back next year!
I try and get to the Tulsa State Fair every year. I don’t go for the rides or the food, or the all the cheesy vendors flaunting their wares. I go for the Grand National Wedding Cake Competition that goes on at the fair only on the first weekend.
It is the 25th year of the competion and it is directed by Kerry Vincent. A tough and demanding judge. Nice to the amateurs and really snarky with the whiny professionals.
The theme this year is “I am a modern classic.”
This year, like every year, the cakes in the professional division are very well done and very elegant. I am not going to provide very much more commentary. The cakes speak for themselves.
Traffic jam caused by an interview in the middle of the show.
This is one of my favorites.
I thiought this was spectacular.
The spray of flowers and bird on top.
The water dripping from the fountain below.
This is also a favorite. Inspired by John and Jackie Kennedy.
I loved this one also. A Wedding on the Prairie theme.
And that is a wrap. It is open one more day, tomorrow, Sunday September 30. It opens at ten. It gets very crowded and the later you go on Sunday the bigger chance that some of the competitors have taken their cakes home.
Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian writer who has caused a stir with his autobiographical fiction. I finished Book 1 about a year ago. I loved it but it was exhausting to read as Knausgaard delved into every single detail of his life. Book 2 is the second of six of his My Struggle series and it was every bit as fascinating and interesting as the first. It covers marriage and his three kids and his love hate relationship of being in a marriage and taking care of his kids, while trying to write.
He strips away the veneer of what society expects him to say about his thoughts on marriage and child raising and says what he really thinks, and his reactions to what he thinks. He applies the same process to the literary world and expresses the tiredness and resentment he feels toward readings and writings and literary things in general. He would rather spend the time writing rather than talking about his writing.
The whole thing is intense and I could only take about 50 to 60 pages at a time. Many paragraphs are over a page long. The angst is intense. So I’ll be getting Book 3 soon. I buy the books because it takes me too long to read them to get the library version. You can get the Kindle version on Amazon for $10.
Want a pro tip – I am moving away from Kindle except for very low priced books. I found an online used bookseller who will sell me Book 3 of the series for $5 including shipping. Meanwhile I will give my copy of Book 2 to our excellent local used book store Gardners. They will give me $5 credit against future books (yes I checked, they don’t have Book 3.) So my net cost of Book 3 is approximately $0. Sorry I digress into my thriftiness.
What about the poor authors you say? They will miss out on royalties as I execute my strategy. Yep, I feel sorry for them, but I am trying to solve my problems. They can worry about their own problems. I still buy lots of books especially from authors just starting out. I happily pay full price for those books.
This month we had the Harvest Moon. I love full moons. I take photos of all I can and apply all sorts of filters and editing to them. I hope that doesn’t bother you.
I went for a walk last week and caught a sunset and as a bonus I got lots of long narrow tree trunk shadows.
This is the Powerline Trail on Turkey Mountain, here in Tulsa. It’s the fast route from the north end of the wilderness park to the parking lots on the south end. It’s not the easiest though, you go straight up and down a couple of big hills. But is hard to get lost on it.
Logan and I decided to go on a hike today. We went to Tulsa’s Oxley Nature Center up north of the airport. We decided to do the little used North Woods Loop, away from the main Oxley Nature Center. We may have been the first people to use the trail on Sunday.
How would I know? Because we were walking through lots of spider webs. That honor traditionally goes to the early morning hikers and runners. It is not that pleasant but on Sunday we were walking through webs at four in the afternoon!
Went on the Sierra Club trail. It has my favorite walkway.
We saw the beginnings of Fall Color. We’ll be checking back.
Lots of fungus.
More beginnings of Fall Color.
And more and more fungus. We only went a little more than two miles but didn’t see anybody. We saw lots of squirrels and cardinals and a glimpse of a few white tailed deer as the scampered through the woods away from us.
https://flic.kr/p/MBkk6e
We were only out for a couple miles and it was nice not seeing anybody. Or hearing anybody, except the squirrels in the brush, the deer in the thickets, and the wind in the tops of the trees.
This novel is about Beverly Green a native Okie who made her mark in New York City and returns to Oklahoma to kind of slow down a little bit and get back to her roots and chill out a little bit.
Chickens play a prominent part of the story. Especially one chicken with an attitude.
So she moves to Guthrie, Oklahoma, the former state capitol (and still brooding about it) about an hour north of Oklahoma City. She opens a small bookstore but this being the gig economy and all she also gets.a newspaper gig as a side hustle and raises chickens.
Guthrie is a funky old town and is the perfect setting for this story.
The editor at the local paper where she works has assigned her the job of reporting on a local Sasquatch sighting and she dreads it. She doesn’t believe in Sasquatches see, but she was also tormented in her youth by visions of the beasts.
This has nothing to do with the story. It is a scene from the pharmacy museum in Guthrie.
She sullenly goes through the motion of pursuing the story, talking to local characters who believe in the creatures. In the meantime she keeps running into a man who she gradually becomes very attracted to. I guess that it what makes this a romantic novel. To me it is a romantic comedy and this part of the novel is hilarious. I haven’t read too much fiction before where a female character goes on in detail about why she is attracted to a guy.
https://flic.kr/p/rmXCk2
The pharmacy park hosts a small scene in the book. This is the family at the park. My Father-in-law, a former pharmacy and now gone, is honored there with a plaque.
I am more into thrillers, detective stories, and non-fiction but this book drew me in and I kept going. The writing just pulled me through was very sparkly and interesting from start to finish. The story involves a Sasquatch stakeout, chickens, and a kiss (a kiss is just a kiss right? or is it?) . It seems set up for a sequel or maybe a whole series.
I give this four stars out of four, or five out of five or however many stars you like. It’s a good read, and I hope there is another one from Andrea Neil soon.
You can get the book at Amazon or if you live in Tulsa at Magic City Bookstore. Both the physical book and the Kindle version, which I got, is are reasonably priced. You can sample some of her writing at her blog.
From the end of my bike ride earlier this week. I love a little color in the sky.
The Arkansas River runs through the middle of Tulsa from North to South. We are lucky because a huge part of the River is a public park of one sort or another for miles and miles. So we have lots of bike trails, many on both sides of the river. I have either run or rode my bike or walked every inch of them. I have never got tired of them.
The 21st street bridge from far away.
And up close.
The ONEOK Boathouse in the background with Peggy’s Pond.
Tulsa’s brand new park A Gathering Place for Tulsa is right on the river. Check the link. The home page is basically a flyover of everything and you can see how intimately the park is integrated with the River.
I love the ripples in the pond. See the tall grass across the way. Most of the park is planted in native prairie grasses so no mowing, a lot less water, and fertilizer, so less money spent on maintenance, less chemicals on the land and the river, better habitat for bugs and birds. Win-win-win. Sustainability to most Okies is how to maintain high flows from older fracked wells.
It has been open about 10 days and I have been there five days. That’s ratio that I would like to keep up. Looking at the video I mentioned above I saw about four or five things that I hadn’t seen yet.
One of these days, maybe when it gets cold, and it isn’t so crowded I am going to come over here and climb the towers and do some exploring. I may forego the slide though. I think my outside diameter is greater than its inside diameter. That would be a problem.
It’s a great place to take photographs. There are all sorts of things, and angles, and reflections, and interesting structures to make photographs. So I hope you don’t get tired of it. You see I’m still pretty excited about the Gathering Place.
I saw lots of sights on my August trip to Yellowstone National Park to explore the park with my sister Ellen who works there. One of the most graceful and beautiful things I saw was a lone Trumpeter Swan feeding in a river. (I think it was either the Firehole or Madison River, I forget which, the first flows into the second).
Definitely not a sight one sees in the wild in Oklahoma. We stopped and took lots of pictures of this guy (gal?). It was paddling around, dipping its head in the river, and sometimes tipping its entire body forward so just its butt was sticking up in the air. The Cornell Lab has a great web site on Trumpeter Swans here.
We stayed for quite a while looking at this swan as he swam about. My sister tells me that he stays there a lot and sees it almost every time she drives through the area. Just thinking about it gives me a sense of calm.
Earlier in the day we had been in Jackson, Wyoming and on the way back we saw a pair of Trumpeter Swans at the National Elk Refuge.
Ellen and I sure packed a lot of things into three days!!
