2016 Tulsa Leake Car Auction

Friday is my day off, Heather had to teach an exercise class, and Logan is out of school so I dragged him to the Fairgrounds to the Leake Car Auction.

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Lots and lots of cars there. I’m partial to red cars, lIke this Mustang above.

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Or the Porsche being cleaned up. It is hard to be a Porsche for styling.

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I also love the big American cars of the 1950’s like this 1954 Crestline Victoria. I love all the chrome, that beautiful blue color, and the swoopy curves.

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I don’t mean I ever want to own one I just like looking at them.

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I like the more homely but distinctive cars also such Trifun quarter ton truck. The three wheels are a gas.

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And the tilting bed. They said only 300 miles since new but the seats and everything else in the cab was very worn. It was a very hard 300 miles.

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And who doesn’t love a land cruiser. These are classic vehicles. 

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How about an air boat for hunting alligators?

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I love the camo but don’t you know that thing is loud.

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By far my favorite of the show was this heavily modified1967 Land Rover

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It had the best and most puzzling hood ornament.

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It looks like it could be chasing down lions and elephants in Africa.

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I like the “scouting seats” up above. Scouting seats my butt, I bet rich Texans sat up there and shot at critters. If somebody wants to buy it for me I would sit up there and shoot critters also, with my camera.

Fitbit Charge vs Garmin Vivofit

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I try and stay active, I really do. I’m 61 years old and I think it is important to keep moving no matter what age you are because once you stop it is hard to get going again. Plus being active is fun.  I also love gadgets and there are lots of gadgets out there to monitor how active you are in a very detailed way.

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I used to have pedometers and they are okay but they are not connected to anything. Later on I tried various fitbits. They are fun and they interconnect with your phone or PC and you can interconnect with other people and comment on each other. I had to take it easy though. Lots of people have more tender feelings than I do and didn’t appreciate being razzed. At first I razzed people who had less steps than I and then didn’t work and then I razzed only people who had more steps than I and people had problems with that too, so I stopped being a drive-by razzer. I started razzing people by cheering them. I’m evil like that and not a very good person. Just so you know.

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But still it was a lot of fun except that Fitbits are easy to lose, very easy. The first one that I lost they replaced free, gratis, and that was great, and then I lost it and I went ahead and bought another one. Then I lost it. Then I bought a better one and I loved it. It would measure vertical distance  as well as steps and then guess what I lost it. So I asked fitbit for a discount on a new one and they offered up 25% discount on a replacement and that is great except there website prices are 30% higher than what Amazon and other online retailers sell the same devices for. Sorry, a 25% discount on merchandise overpriced by 30% is not much of a deal. So I decided to leave Fitbit. I don’t blame them. after all I’m the one who lost these devices. I feel that I am the Johnny Appleseed of fitbit devices. My lost gadgets are all over the Tulsa area.

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So I ended up with a Garmin Vivofit. It is less than half the price of the Fitbit Charge and doesn’t measure vertical distance but it measures steps just fine and it also synchs with Garmin Connect which is Garmin’s online dashboard which is what my Garmin GPS running watch synchs to also. I tell you it warms my heart to be running and both the Vivofit and the watch are both in tune so to speak and are coordinated on the dashboard together when everything is synched up.

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The Fitbit charge had one thing that really irritated me. The low battery life. At first I could get through a whole day plus without charging it and toward the last, which was just a few months of use, it would only make it through sixteen to eighteen hours and was getting less all the time. The Vivofit uses batteries but they only need changing once a year supposedly. They do this by requiring a manual synch instead of automatic and the display is not lit. So anyways I’m liking the Vivofit so far, but I haven’t lost it yet.

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But I miss the fitbit dashboard and razzing by cheering. Garmin has a great dashboard but I am the only one on it… It is no fun cheering and razzing myself. Nobody shows up when I do the search for others. Most of my running peeps are on Strava which is geared towards the GPS watches and is fun but not the same kind of fun.

So a big plus for Garmin for their more affordable technology and a big plus for Fitbit and their dashboard and social connections.

It’s a tie is what I say.

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Never Quit is Our Motto

Sunday afternoon and the kid is going to a pool party after church and a friend of his is going to give him a ride to the event. Okay, well the lawn needs mowed, paper work needs to be papered, and house worked needs to be house worked but you know it is a beautiful day so lets go bike riding!! The plan is to go the Blue Rose parking lot on the River and go north and then cross the river and head down south and take a side trip on the Cherry Creek trail. Okay lets go.

Alrighty, I air up the tires and install the bike carrier and load the bikes. Logan’s friend shows up and off they go and so off we go!! We get there unload the bikes put our safety gear on and head off and the about three miles into it, BOOM!!!, my rear tire basically blows up into shreds. Oops, so we walk back to the nearest parking lot. Heather takes off on her bike to the car and meets me at the skate park parking lot. In the meantime I’m doing the Google maps search and bingo, Tom’s Bicycles, where I bought the bike, is open on Sunday.

We head over there and they fit me out with a new tire and a new battery for my cycling computer. (You gotta have all your instrumentation instrumenting if you know what I mean). So we load everything up and head back to the river to resume our ride.  I have a to tell you that I love Tom’s Bicycles. They are a throwback to another era in a great way. They really are interested in getting you up and going rather than marketing a bunch of stuff at you. At the same time, they have everything you will ever need.

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We gear up again and head on down the trail. 

And whoops! guess what, Heather gets a call from the kid. His ride left the party a while ago and Logan needs a ride home. Yep,this was about a half mile into our second ride. 

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So we turn around and head back to the car and head off to south Tulsa. It is obvious that a high power does not want us on the River Trails today.

So we pick up the kid and he is all excited, talking about the party and getting lay out by the pool and the food, yes, he liked the food. Okay okay kid. So we get him home and we briefly think maybe forget it. And I’m looking at the grass that needs mowed, and the paper worked that needs done, and Nah, lets try it again.

And so off we go again, except this time we go the Creek Turnpike trail. Not as pretty as the  Arkansas River, but a lot closer, and hilly, oh so hilly that we have not rode it in years but you know what we could handle the hills. We have 21 speed bikes for a reason. We could handle the cross roads, another reason that we don’t ride Creek Turnpike despite being so close to the house. We ended up with a 14 mile ride and a big sense of accomplishment.

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So we set a family record of three bike rides in the same day. I am not looking to break that record.

Make Me by Lee Child – Jack Reacher Again

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I just got through reading the Kindle version of Lee Child‘s Make Me. Lee Child writes the Jack Reacher series of books. I think there are about twenty now. Jack Reacher is one tough hombre. 6’5″ tall former Army Military Police officer who doesn’t take crap from anybody. Something happened in the Army a long time ago and Reacher quits and now travels on foot or train with nothing but the clothes on his back an ATM card and his toothbrush.

This book opens up with him getting off the train in Mothers Rest somewhere in the Great Plains about five hours north of Oklahoma City and is surrounded by wheat. He runs into a former FBI agent now PI there who is looking for her partner who has gone missing. They team up naturally and they find out that something is not quite right in Mothers Rest. Something evil is going on. To figure it all out they end up traveling to Oklahoma City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Phoenix and then finally back to Mothers Rest.

Reacher in his search for justice ends up murdering several people, one of them twice (nice trick huh) don’t worry though because they were all bad people who were circumventing our justice system and needed killing.

Anyways, this is my brain candy so don’t criticize me.

I got the Kindle download free my the Tulsa City County Library. You can’t beat free.

A great review of the book from the New Yorker They like it! Hmmm, they usually like boring literary fiction featuring depressed people and no action.

Turkey Mountain Trails Added to National Trails System

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Exciting news to many of us here in Oklahoma. The National Park Service announced the designation of Turkey Mountain’s Red, Blue, and Yellow trails (about 7 miles total) as part of the National Recreation Trails and will be added to the National Trails System. The announcement comes just in time for National Trails Day.

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No, this doesn’t mean that the Feds are coming in to take over the trails, the designation recognizes existing trails built and maintained by others. The National Park Service will provide special trail markers and add it to their web site. The main thing is that the designation provides additional credibility to those who are trying to get grants for Turkey Mountain. 

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Kudos to the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition who led the effort behind the scenes to get the designation. UWC is quite an organization. They started last year in response to a tone deaf effort by the City of Tulsa and Simon Properties to build a cheesy outlet mall on Turkey Mountain. Thanks to the efforts of TUWC and other organizations, the community rose up in opposition and Simon is proceeding on building the mall at a more appropriate location. I was amazed, do you know how many times Oklahoman’s are successful in opposing bad development ideas? Very few times is the answer.

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So this is great news but the preservation of Turkey Mountain is still a process more than event. Steps are continuing to be made by both private and public entities. The citizens of Tulsa passed a bond issue to provide funds for the purchase of the proposed Simon Malls site. After the close on that purchase, the River Parks Authority, who administer the land, installed new cable and post fencing to keep vehicles off that property. The vehicles were tearing the trails up and some of our fellow citizens were dumping their trash.

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So we have recognition from the Feds which helps but Turkey Mountain still needs lots of support from the community.

Turkey Mountain Map

Read the Tulsa World Article on the designation

Download a map and check the trails for yourself.

Check out the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition, get involved.

 

Weekend Reflections – Lake Logan

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A cloudy afternoon, Lake Logan at the West Side YMCA on Turkey Mountain in Tulsa, Oklahoma

I was doing my Wednesday night run on Turkey Mountain last Wednesday night. I call it run even though I stop a lot to take photographs. I took 79 of them Wednesday. I had my trusty weatherproof, everything proof, Nikon AW110 point and shoot with me set on “Auto” mode and I noticed after taking one particular pic that a menu option popped up offering instant edits. So I decided to see where that took me and it gave me a choice of six filters. So I experimented with it and this is an example of the “Toy Camera” filter. I kind of like it as a variation. Luckily the camera saves the original image along with the filtered image so I can save myself if need be.

I’m looking forward to the day when cameras have just as good a filters as our phones and ipods do along with wifi connectability so one can buy and upgrade filters, as well as upload our photos directly to our various social media and photo storage sites. I have two cameras that have wifi compatibility but only with cell phones and setting up and maintaing the connection is time consuming and chews up battery life at an alarming rate and doesn’t work that great.

So, does your camera have some hidden features that you found?

I am linking with Weekend Reflections

Skywatch Friday – Sneaking a Pic

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Earlier this week I sneaked back up to my old work area on the 17th floor to take a late afternoon pic of the sky to the west along with the Arkansas River. Of course me being me had to try out a few filters on the photo to give a little more character than what it had originally.

It turns out okay but I wish I could get the Aloft Hotel chain that bought our old City Hall and converted it to a loft hotel (whatever that is) to take their sign down. I can’t imagine that an old office building would make a very good hotel but what do I know? I mean besides nothing.

I’m linking with Skywatch Friday

Wednesday Waters – Lafortune Park

Lafortune Park Pond

We are deep into Spring here in northeast Oklahoma and we have lots of rain so one can see why this area is called “Green Country” by some. Pretty soon will come the high temps and humidity but after all these years that doesn’t bother me that much. You learn how to adapt.

I’m linking with Wednesday Waters