It doesn’t look like it but it is raining and cool this morning. I think Fall is falling. It is about time. We had a pretty mild summer as summers go here in Tulsa but I’m looking forward to cooler temperatures. Autumn is Tulsa’s best season and it lasts a long time.
I love horses and the people that work with them. Thy are so graceful, even the nags are graceful to me. Although from an engineering point of view, it seems to me that their bodies are way too big for their slender legs. I also enjoy watching people ride horses. There is kind of a mutual feedback between the horse and the rider and subtle changes in a rider’s posture and how they hold the reins and how they respond with their bodies to the horse’s movement affects the movement of the horse. We have put Logan’s therapeutic horseback riding lessons on hold for a couple months because he has a lot going on at school including some Saturday rehearsals at the same time that his riding lessons were. I am already missing the long drive to Pioneer Woman country to take his lessons and occasional talks and walks with the director Bob.
Bob had a way of simplifying everything and when I asked him why riding was such a great therapy for people with autism he said basically that when you get on a horse and it starts moving that you need to adjust yourself so that horse doesn’t move out from underneath you. It is this responsiveness to an outside force and feedback that is so important to people who don’t have that response instinctively.
So Logan had those lessons for a few years and I took literally hundreds, if not thousands of photos of him riding the horses and I think the lessons “worked.” Just what they did, I don’t know exactly but I could tell that Logan loved riding the horses. People ask what the horses “do” exactly. I say, they make him better. How, I don’t know.
Well, I’ve kind of digressed a little bit. Now I have to feed my horse jones via the horses in the top photo. They are in a pasture next to Logan’s school and after I drop him off and the horses are close to the fence and there are no cars behind me I’ll stop and take a quick photo of them. It is a good way to start out the day, looking at horses I mean.
How do you feel about horses?
Linking with Saturday’s Critters
I had my 9/80 day off on Friday and Heather and I went to see “Learning to Drive” with Ben Kinglsley and Patricia Clarkson. Clarkson plays Wendy a woman who gets dumped by her weasel of a husband just as the movie opens. The little turd decided to tell her that he was leaving her in a restaurant, hoping that she wouldn’t make a scene. That didn’t work out so they took their fight to a cab driven by a Sikh named Darwan, played by Kingsley. Darwan gets the weasel to his girlfriend’s house and Wendy to her house. Darwan finds out the next day that Wendy left something in his car and he delivers it back to her and she takes his card.
In the meantime Wendy has promised her daughter, Tasha (played by Grace Gummer, who is also Meryl Streep’s daughter) that she would learn how to drive so she could visit her in out in the sticks way up in Vermont or somewhere. So she calls Darwan and he proceeds to teach her how to drive. While she is learning to drive she is also learning how to live her life without the weasel.
Meanwhile Darwan has his own issues. He is single and and is planning on marrying somebody he doesn’t know from his village in India arranged by his sister. He doesn’t really know how to deal with her and so he and Wendy kind of muddle along teaching each other about life as the driving lessons proceed. Then Darwan’s wife Jasleen shows up and she and Darwan get married the next day and start their life together in Queens and she is so unhappy because she doesn’t understand why her new husband is never home and he doesn’t understand because she just won’t adjust to life in her new place.
Anyways I’m not going to tell you about the whole danged movie but I loved this because it is about growing and changing and adapting and picking yourself up and moving forward and making a life for yourself. I loved this movie.
Clarkson is a marvel. She is so expressive and when she is frowning and sad, we are sad also and when she is happy, she is radiant and we feel great. Kingsley does his thing where just subtle changes in expression really multiplies the emotional effect. He is also a definite solid guy in counterpoint to the weasel.
I thought this was a completely satisfying movie and give it two thumbs up. It is R rated mainly because we get a really good view of Clarkson’s breasts bouncing around as she has a sex with a guy she met. I mean I like looking a breasts as much as any guy but this was totally gratuitous and didn’t have much to do with the movie before or after the viewing.Not that I am complaining.
This week’s Skywatch Friday shot is from my mother’s beloved Idaho. She grew up there and moved for a time and came back when she and my Dad retired. She’s been gone for some time and I think of her every day. Most of what I am today is because of her. 
She was a natural Forest Ranger’s wife. She loved the mountains and loved her family. She always told Dad that she would live anywhere but she had to be able to see mountains.
We lived in some really out of the way places sometimes in Forest Service houses. I remember when we moved from Coyote, New Mexico to Payson, Arizona and you know what. The houses we lived in were exactly the same!!
Coytote, New Mexico Ranger Station, brother Bob on her right on my on her left.
She loved her kids, her grandkids, and her many nieces and nephews, and their kids too!!
Here she is giving Logan a lift.
She had her health issues but she never let them slow her down.
Rest in Peace Mom
I found myself with some time last Saturday after I dropped the kid off at his Improv class so I went up to Tulsa’s Linnaeus Teaching Gardens and strolled around taking pictures. I am trying to learn how to do bokeh where the subject is in focus and the background is out of focus. I found these yellow flowers (you want to know what kind they are, I told you, they are yellow flowers) and loved them. For today I ran them through Topaz Impressions and backed the filter off about a quarter.
There is something about the last days of summer that makes flowers that much more beautiful even though they may be a little faded.
I was on Google Earth the other day trying to figure out how to get somewhere when something caught my eye. It was a a huge tag looking straight up into the sky with the words “Tulsa” and above it a similarly gigantic arrow pointing west. Below is a screenshot from Google Earth.
I looked at it and zoomed in and out and it looked a little photoshopped to me. You know, just too perfect and too white to be the real thing. By the way that loop road to the upper left of the TULSA sign surrounds a buried water reservoir still in use today. That is why the area is called reservoir hill. That and it is a hill.
So after work naturally I had to run up there and see what’s what. Actually with my bum knee I drove up there and sure enough there is a huge arrow and TULSA sign made out of crushed rock.
It turns out that this is a recreation of another arrow installed right on top of the reservoir back in 1927. It was part of a promotion celebrating a Charles Lindbergh transcontinental flight at that time. It pointed a little to the southeast of the where the present arrow points to which is the Tulsa International Airport. You can see a photo of the old arrow here.
The new arrow was installed a few years ago with some bond money devoted to neighborhood projects. You can read about that here.
It was kind of hard to get an elevated view of the sign and arrow even when I walked up the hill.
I think the whole thing is kind of cool. It is a bridge back to the 1920’s boomtown era and Charles Lindbergh, the oil tycoons that ruled Tulsa then and whose influence is still around today. I had never heard of this arrow before and I pride myself on knowing all sorts of little things about Tulsa.
Do you know any interesting tid bits about where you live that nobody else does?
A pile, a pile,… I have no pics of piles (that I’m willing to share anyway). Wait, a stack is kind of like a pile. How about Smoke Stack Barbecue!!! Whatever that is.
How about Arabian Horses?? My sister and niece Jillian have come down the last two years to Tulsa and we have gone to the Arabian Horse Show. They can’t make it this year but I just might go myself. The horses are beautiful and magnificent and the show is quite an event.
When I was a kid we lived for a while in Payson, Arizona. We went back some time ago for the first time in over 40 years and it was great remembering. My Dad was the Forest Ranger for the Payson Diistrict of the Tonto National Forest. That is my Dad and brother. The building is my Dad’s old office and is now part of a museum as is the former Assistant Ranger’s residence. Kind of strange walking into a house that you remember very well and seeing it as a museum. It was all good. Except that my first grade teacher who used to beat the crap out of six year olds has a school named after her and is revered as a saint. I don’t get that. I got slapped out of my seat more than once by her.
4. Strength
I participated in a 5K a while ago sponsored by the Creek Nation. It was part of a program to increase the health of tribal members. I’m not a member but they let me sign up.
Yep, here I be, all by myself
I have had to take some steps back lately. Last week during a trail race on Turkey Mountain I tripped a fell and my knee landed right on a rock. Ouch!! It hurt. I made a stupid decision to go ahead and finish the race and in fact ran a little bit of the way. I just didn’t feel like quitting.
There are lots of places to trip on Turkey Mountain and I have found most of them by personal experience.
I might have should have gone to some sort of urgent care place, maybe I don’t know. My knee was sore and stiff but I didn’t sense that I was in any sort of crisis situation.
How do you like my newly pink sock? How about the blue zip ties on my Hokas. The most expensive shoes I have ever owned.
On Tuesday I went to my employer’s clinic because I couldn’t get in to my doctor in a timely fashion. The doctor looked my knee over, congratulated Heather on her wound cleaning and dressing skills and sent me off for xrays.
The X Rays were done at a brand spanking new Catholic owned hospital in the burbs here in Tulsa. I’m not a Catholic, I’m not sure what I am at this point, but I like the way the decorate hospitals. You get the sense that they think Jesus is somebody more than your buddy who helps your favorite football team win games.
Anyways I started seeing things with new eyes and my sore stiff knee. The available parking spots to get in the hospital were some distance away from the entrance. Ouch, ouch, ouch. I mean my pain is temporary and I’ll get over it and I’ll resume parking farther than I have to in order to get my fitbit step count up but lots and lots of people have to contend with long walks and their pain or stiffness or immobility is just something they will have to live with permanently. And they are not whiney babies about it like I am.
Dang the open registers are a long ways away. And then I get to walk back this way to get to the exit.
And then I had to go to a Target and run an errand. You know when you are walking at about 1 mph those stores seem a lot bigger than before. And really Target you only have three registers open and they are in the middle. Okay, ouch, ouch, ouch I went. Whine, whine, whine. Again I saw the store with new eyes. I’m having a lot more empathy for people who contend with this stuff every day. Also, I have my choice of medical care available, my employer’s clinic, my primary care physician, urgent care, all for nominal cost. My insurance company even has a nurse available 24/7 if I want to talk to her. (I did talk to her, she kept telling me that knee injuries take time to heal and I would have to be patient with it…) If I was uninsured or under a major medical policy I would have some hard to choices to make, especially if I was on a limited income.
Plus other people don’t have the world’s greatest wife to take care of them!
Playing with my new favorite Ipod app “Matter” . Are we Instagram buds yet? Why not I’m YogiAB. Look me up. As long as you are not selling Herbalife or body wraps or are a “life coach” I’ll follow back.
The other thing that is throwing for a loop is a personal attack on me by another blogger. I am the main admin for Skywatch Friday. All I do is set up the page for linking in by other bloggers. It was started by someone who passed away several years ago and I am just one in a chain of people who keep the meme going. I am in my third year doing this and enjoy it and regard it as my way of contributing back to the blogging community. I wont’ get into details but I got an email with somebody who was furious with me for the last Skywatch Friday linkin. I tried reasoning with them but to no avail. I consulted with one of my co admins who counseled wishing the person peace. Getting something like that out of the blue is quite disconcerting. I am not afraid of conflict (the Oklahoma natural gas business is not for the faint of heart I will tell you) but there is usually a reason and there is usually something you can grab onto to make the situation better for the person who is angry. Anyways, peace everybody. I am gong to be more sensitive to people in the news who inadvertently suffer attacks from the public. These people are real people even though they may have made you and angry for some reason. There is no reason to launch on them.
I love the Lululemon girls and their signs at the various races that pass their store.
Anyways, my knee is now getting better and I’m going to be pestering my doctor about rehab. This may be my excuse not to do the Tulsa Run 15K this year. I have a streak going of running it 21 years in a row. Streaks like that are okay but get to be a pain in the butt. But then I think. That is six weeks away. Maybe I’ll walk it? Maybe I won’t.
Have you ever had anything throw you for a loop? How did you react?
I took Wednesday off because it was Heather and I’s anniversary and one of the things we did was go see “A Walk in the Woods” a movie with Robert Redford and Robert Deniro based on the book of the same name by Bill Bryson.
The movie opens with Bill Bryson, played by Robert Redford, being interviewed on television and then attending the funeral of a friend. We can tell that he is fumbling looking around for a new adventure and then he finds out about the Appalachian Trail. Over 2000 miles long from Maine to Georgia and by gum he decides to tackle that but his wife forbids him to do it unless he gets a partner. Finally he finds an old scruffy acquaintance, “Katz,” played by Nick Nolte who shows up and off they go.
These guys were buddies 40 years and ago and they have a rough start on their new adventure. Neither one of them is in good enough shape at the start but they get in the groove. They have different outlooks on life. Bryson is a nerd who knows facts that only nerds care about and Katz just wants to take things as he finds them and concentrate on the “big picture.” They have some comic adventures and become even closer during their trek.
So, yep it is buddy movie but it is a good buddy movie. They are buddies who are physically way past their prime but they don’t back down from anything. Redford does his typical underplaying the role and Nolte is bigger than life. I’d give this flick two thumbs up.
It is R rated because of the language. Lots of cuss words in here but everybody keeps their clothes on.
I had a few hours to myself last week so I went to Oxley Nature Center north of Tulsa’s airport. I only found one cache but the enjoyment is mainly in the looking. I walked up to one of the lakes and too this shot. If it looks familiar it is because it is taken from near where my blog header shot is taken. I’ve probably got two dozen pics of the same scene over the years, summer, winter, fall, spring, cloudy, clear, cold, hot, with Heather and Logan, mostly without. If there is a law against repeat photographs then I’m in for a long sentence.
I’ll have plenty of company though if I’m sent off to blogger jail. The bloggers I regularly read do similar things. A pretty or attractive scene tends to stay that way. What about you, do you repeat yourself a lot? Going back to the same scene I mean.
