Creed with Sylvester Stallone, Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson

It was raining all day long and Heather went to spend the afternoon with the ladies and Logan wanted to see a movie so we went to see Creed, an offshoot of the Rocky movies.

Poor Logan had never even heard of Rocky and it has been at least 47 years, plus or minus, since I saw it so neither one of us knew what to expect.  I at least was very surprised. I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings but I thought the original Rocky was kind of cheesy and I don’t think I saw any of the sequels. This movie is actually good, or maybe my tastes have lowered. You know we all kind of compromise on certain things as we get older. Or maybe I should say I compromise a lot more than I used to rather than toss everybody else under the bus. Yeah, well I get distracted a lot more easily also.

Anyways what we have is Michael B. Jordan playing Adonis Johnson, the illegitimate son of the great Apollo Creed, Rocky Balboa‘s nemesis from way back when. Anyways, Creed dies before young Adonis is born and he grows up in the streets and various juvenile centers until Apollo’s wife finds him and brings him home to live with her. He gets educated and ends up with a great job but loves to box in makeshift rings in Mexican bars. He finally quits his job and heads across country from Los Angeles to Philadelphia and seeks out Rocky Balboa to ask him to train.

After playing hard to get Rocky agrees and starts young Adonis on a program. Along the way Adonis finds a very sweet girlfriend, Bianca who is a singer. Rocky gathers a bunch of old veterans to train Adonis to be a professional boxer. I’ll spare you the rest except to say this is a great movie. Anthony plays Adonis with a lot of depth. He is a hard worker while training, a fierce fighter in the ring, and very tender with his girlfriend. Sylvester Stallone plays the crusty vet helping the youngin’ to perfection, teaching him not only how to fight but how to be a man. Tessa Thompson plays the quiet understated girlfriend. She expects respect and gets it and never raises her voice The fighting scenes are intense and fierce. The camera is right in there with the guys and the power and speed of the punches is dazzling. This movie will get your adrenaline going.

I don’t remember much about the original Rocky movie and I think I like this installment much better. Again, I’m not going to give anything away except that a sequel is set up by the finale of this movie. And just for full disclosure young Logan says the movie was okay but he couldn’t get out of the theater fast enough.

Check out the IMDB site for a bunch of information about the film.

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Christmas 2015 – In the Books

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Christmas happened this year. Hear you go a rare shot of me in my snuggie. 

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The kid with his Nana. The kid is getting taller and taller. Is there something we can spray him with to slow him down a little bit.

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Heather and Nana, quite a team.

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I got a candid shot of Heather. She said she hated it but then she made it her profile pic on facebook. Should I hit her up about royalties?

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I captured Nana also.

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Before the Christmas meal. We decided to have it more informally this year in the kitchen. Lots less work that way.

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My sister Ellen posted this on facebook today. She’s the cute one in the middle. I’m the good looking guy on the right and brother Bob is on the left. I’m guessing mid 1960’s in Price, Utah. We always had a great Christmas. Often we would load up afterward and head up to southern Idaho to see our relatives there. That was fun, or we would head down to Phoenix and see people down there. That was fun also. Bob and Ellen, with her husband Irvin, spent Christmas in Idaho with my dad this year.

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She also posted this picture of her three girls. I’m guessing in the 1980’s.  Dana is on the left. She and her husband Adam are in Australia visiting his family with their little girl who was born this year. Adam is an Australian citizen you see and their little girl has dual citizenship which I think is totally cool.  Jillian in the middle is also visiting my dad, her Grandfather for Christmas in Idaho. Her husband Brian is in the Army serving his country overseas this season. Mary on the right spent Christmas in Colorado Springs with her son this year.

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This isn’t a Christmas picture but it is Ellen and her Husband Irvin with Logan back at the turn of the century. 

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This is also not a Christmas pic but it shows my dad in between Logan and brother Bob.

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And this is brother Bob and me with our mother a long time ago in Coyote, New Mexico.  She is never far from our thoughts.

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Hey you know, when we celebrate Christmas we celebrate it with the critters also. This is abby our sweet but not very smart mutt.

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And Rascal, he is sweet and smart. You can see that he has been reading the paper.

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And our sweet but perpetually cold mutt Ginger. My niece Dana pictured above lives in the Phoenix area and I think Ginger would like us to move there also.

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And Nana’s dog Fiona. She always enjoys visiting us, but is ready to go home when that times comes also.

That was our Christmas this year or at least part of it. I’m big into Christmas not running into a huge stop on Christmas Day so I’m going to go ahead and everybody a Merry Christmas.

“Simple Dreams” by Linda Ronstadt

Simple Dreams - Linda Ronstadt - Book Cover

Back in the 1970’s and 80’s Linda Ronstadt ruled the airwaves as the Queen of Rock and Roll. She was the whole package, an incredible voice that could take any song and just fly, and she was incredibly cute. Later on she went off that path and got into Broadway with “The Pirates of Penzance”, then singing the “Great American Songbook” and then later Mexican folk songs. I really respected all these moves because she veered off from the sure thing and followed her heart into what she really wanted to do which by the way, were mostly commercial as well as artistic successes.  She gradually faded from my musical consciousness and when I saw her “Musical Memoir”, Simple Dreams,  I had to read it.

She grew up, the daughter of a Tucson, Arizona Ranch and Hardware store owner, in a musical family. She loved music and became a fixture on the Tucson folk music scene and then left for California for the good of her career. There she bounced around several years trying different things out and ended up getting noticed when she was part of the Stone Poneys. From there it was just a matter of time and some extremely hard work before she made it big. On the way she had an education on ethically challenged record executives, grueling road trips, and vagaries of loyalties in the business.

In her book she gives us a lot of the inside story into her musical career and how she had to fight to convince people to stay with her as she followed her own instincts. Later on she talks about she is retired from the music business now and is raising her daughters in Arizona. I had no idea, and she doesn’t say so anywhere in the book, that she had Parkinson’s Disease and that it has made it impossible for her to sing. She is not moping around feeling sorry for herself. Despite the disease making everything hard, she is staying involved with her extended family and adopted daughters.

This is a great book and I recommend it highly.

Christmas Moon 2015

Christmas Moon 2015

I’ve been reading about the Full Moon that we were supposed to get Christmas night. The big deal is that it is the first full moon on Christmas since 1977. We are supposed to have some weather blow in so I was wondering if we would even be able to see the moon at all but low and behold we could.

So I got my new camera out and put it on the tripod, the Nikon D5300 and went out there but it didn’t seem to be getting it done so I grabbed my Canon SX40 SuperZoom and tried it out. Even with the tripod it took a long time to get a decent shot where I got good magnification yet kept got the whole moon. This is at about x68 magnification. The camera does x35 optically and the rest digitally.

And just because it is Christmas I will tell you that I ran the the photo through Topaz Lab’s Adjust software first to bring out the details and second to give a little color range to the details.

it is kind of hard to beat the Canon SX40 for moon photography. I couldn’t make it work until I consulted Mr. Google and I learned to just put the camera on “Auto” and let it do the work. I did and it works great.

So, did you have a chance to go check it out this Christmas night?

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Christmas – 1959 or so

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I like old Christmas pictures from years ago. This is my Dad’s family in Del Rapids, South Dakota in the late 1950’s. I’m the the kid looking back. I’m sitting on my grandmother’s lap. The lady in blue to the far left is my great grandmother. My brother, Bob, is in the red shirt on the floor.

I love the tree with all the tinsel. My Dad was a forest ranger in New Mexico. He got a permit and cut the tree on the Santa Fe National Forest and hauled it all the way to South Dakota on top of our station wagon.

The house was my Great Grandparent’s house. It is still in the family.

I like this photo because it is like a look back into history and I was a small part of it.

Do you have any old Christmas photos that you treasure?

Digital Art Meme – Holy Family Cathedral

Holy Family Cathedral

This is Holy Family Cathedral in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. I have taken many photographs of this church over the years mainly because it is a beautiful and interesting building situated in a great spot.

I took a photograph of the Cathedral with my Ipod Touch, crapped it with the Snapseed app and then applied a texture using the Distressed FX app, all on the Ipod and then uploaded it to Flickr for inclusion on this post.

I am linking with Digital Art Meme

It being the Christmas Season and my post featuring a cathedral I am adding a video of While Shepards Watched Their Sheep.

Christmas Memories

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Digging through the files. This is Logan when he was two. He has always been a Christmas kid.

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One year we got me Logan some Thomas the Tank Engine track and cars. I He loved it until Heather took it away from me he outgrew it. Sniff.

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At least two out of the three of us can smile.

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Boompa and Nana with Logan. Boompa, Charles, was the word’s greatest FIL and a heck of a great guy. He and Logan loved each other and were best friends. He was taken away from us suddenly years ago and we still miss him every day. Boompa loved Christmas and he loved his grandson.

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This is my mother, Granny, with Logan when he was about six months or so. Nobody loved her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids like Granny did. She is also gone now.

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We are moving forward though making new memories. We are confident that we will meet up with Boompa, Granny, and others again and the memories will be that much sweeter.

For new classic singers can anybody beat Michael Buble?

For great Christian Gospel Hymns check out my friend Driller's Christmas Music Marathon, going on now.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens with Daisy Ridley

Could be Spoilers!!

The family bundled up and headed to the local movie house (as we used to say a long time ago) to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Logan was super excited about it. Heather got our reservations last week and we had all been looking forward to it. I hadn’t been reading about it or anything. I loved the original Star Wars movie and the subsequent two were good but not great and the movies in the series since then were very forgettable.

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I liked this one!! It is set years after the original movie the the worlds are littered with the detritus of the “old days” of the series now being scavenged for parts. I always loved how the space ships in Star Wars were high performance but battered and heavily modified. So in this movie the Millennium Falcon is found and pressed back into service despite a continuing series of malfunctions and bypasses. It kind of reminds me of our dishwasher back home that I’m kind of babying along.

They also bring out some old characters that are also kept going using baling wire and duct tape. When Harrison Ford appears people clap; the old dude still has that magic. The sad story is Carrie Fisher,her spark is gone and her performance weighs heavy on the movie. Whatever happened to Princess Leia? From what I understand she has had a hard life and it shows. Now Chewbacca is just as full of vim and vigor as he ever was.

The Storm Troopers are given life in this movie. They have feelings and emotions and are more than just drones to be mowed down by the heroes. I loved it and that is all I’m going to say on that topic.

Daisy Ridley steals the movie away from everybody else. She plays a scavenger, Rey, picking apart crashed space ships for parts in order to get her “daily portion” before she is thrust into a bigger role because of her sense of right and wrong. She plays a very strong woman who doesn’t back down from anybody including Hans Solo. She, along with everybody else, manages to keep her clothes on during the movie.

This movie was very satisfying. The forces of light are fighting the forces of darkness. There is some epic fighting. They are also set up for some great video games in the future and are set up for a continued sequels with younger characters. This movie brings back much of the magic of the original three movies. I saw the first movie back in the late 1970’s at the Galleria in Houston, Texas. I think I stood in line through one showing just to see the following showing and I was glad to do so. I might have been willing to do it again for this movie but thankfully we don’t have to do that any longer.

I strongly recommend seeing this movie. I hope that I haven’t spoiled it for you too much.

If you saw it, what did you think?

Mashable’s scene by scene recap. Huge spoilers

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Rudolph Run 5K – Broken Arrow, OK

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They had a cool and very engaged Santa at the race. He was giving out high fives, especially to the kids. I like active and engaged Santas. I still have a bone to pick with him about the ever increasing amounts of coal I get in my stocking every year.

Saturday I ran in the first ever Rudolph 5K in Broken Arrow. It was only my second race since I screwed up knee on a trail race on Labor Day and the first race where I was going to try and run the whole way.

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People dressed up with reindeer antlers and red noses and all sorts of costumes.

I went through a couple months of rehab on my knee and about a month on my own doing the stretches and exercises that the Physical Therapists taught me.

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So I pretty pleased, I was able to run the entire way though pretty slowly. My knee felt fine before, during, and after the race so getting faster is now a matter of training and conditioning. I never was very fast. My motto has always been to start slow and then taper off.

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I could say that I was fast enough to place third in my age group, which would be true. The whole truth is that there were only three men in my age group, not counting the thousands of guys in northeast Oklahoma who slept in and didn’t enter the race. So I’m booking it as third in my age group.

I appreciate the organizer of the race, Fleet Feet Sports, and all the other people including volunteers that it takes to put on an event like this.