This is a horse pasture in the middle of south Tulsa. I drive by it when I drop the kid off at school. It’s like a breath of fresh air before plunging back into traffic to get downtown.
So what do you do to get a breath of fresh air?
Linking with Skywatch Friday and Good Fences
Late afternoon sun on Turkey Mountain, Tulsa, Oklahoma. It is threatened with an Outlet Mall.
“Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.” — Cree Indian proverb
“Keep close to Nature’s heart … and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.” — John Muir
More Earth Day Quotes from International Business Times
Check out Earth Day to find out what it is all about.
Enjoy, get out and take a walk in the woods, fields, beach, desert, or wherever nature is where you live.
I was taking my lunchtime walk around downtown and came upon these plants sitting on the steps of Holy Family Cathedral. What caught my eye and what I like the best is the foil. I have no idea why they were there. Truth is I don’t know that they are Easter Lilies or not. I mean it has been a while since Easter. So what do you think dear reader? Lily or something else? Cast out or just letting them get a little sun or left for somebody else to pick up?
I need some answers before I go crazy!
Logan’s school put on a production of Guys and Dolls this past weekend.
Son Logan had a small part and even the guys with the small part have to get makeup.
Complete with the head tilted up and down and side to side. No complaining either. Or rather you can go ahead and complain but nobody is listening to you.
And then Mom ties your tie and makes sure that your shirt is tucked in.
It’s showtime!!
Your time on the stage kid!
And then the girls in the 1940’s style dresses show up and steal it away from you. That’s life kid.
And then we get more girls.
And then we get the Salvation Army. This is a Christian School production after all.
And then the guys come out. You know how guys are, sinning one minute.
Singing in church the next.
And then we get the dancing girls with the twirly dresses. There was a whole stage of them. Too many heads showed up on the photo so I cropped all but this one girl out. You get the idea. The dresses were sewn by the moms supervised by one who had a mathematical background who figured out a precise pattern for each girl (no I am not kidding.) You can tell she had the right equations. Pretty amazing the moms in this show. Without them, not much would have happened.
The kids gave it their all. They worked hard for weeks, and so did the moms and the teachers. It was exhausting.
The result was great.
Here is our gentle giant of a sun next to his Nana and Mom. Doesn’t he look great in a double breasted suit?
And then on to the afterparty, food, soft drinks, and a swimming pool. Nothing better than that for teenagers. A nice big firepit for making smores and then a big downpour showed up putting a damper on the smores until one of them grabbed a big table umbrella. That’s problem solving I think. What do you think.
They’ll be talking about this production for years.
I can’t believe that it has been twenty years since the Oklahoma City Bombing when 168 people were murdered. I remember it like it was yesterday.
I was watching the news unfold on television and at first the pundits were convinced that it is an act of Islamic terrorism. It took a little bit of time but then we found out that one of our own, with some help from fellow cowards, had done the killing.
It is just flat unbelievable that such evil exists in the world. But it does.
The Memorial that stands where the Murrah building stood is now a place of peace, serenity, and healing. The Memorial was done just right. There is a museum there but I have never been able to bring myself to visit it.
I just kind of wonder whether we as a country have learned anything or not. At the time of the bombing it was the militias that were in the news and how they thought that the Federal Government was taking away our rights and blah, blah, blah. The Oklahoma City murders seemed to quiet that talk for a time. Such talk seems to be on the upswing again and it scares me a little bit. There are mentally unbalanced people out there, like the cowards responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing, who are liable to act on those words.
But for today, lets just remember the 168 innocents and their family and friends.
This is Macho, a horse stabled near where my son goes to school. Don’t worry about his ribs showing, I have it on good authority that he has bad knees and they limit his eating in order to keep his weight down and make it easier on him. So he is well cared for. Notice all the bright green grass? We have had some great soft rains and good sunshiny days lately. Things are really green around here.
I took the pic on late in the afternoon Thursday and I liked how he had a little bit of afternoon color on his flanks.
Yesterday evening I didn’t make it out to Turkey Mountain after work to run with the TATUR group. I was on the wrong side of town you see because it is almost tax time and I had to go pick up the return and see how much extra damage I was having to pay over and above what we’ve already paid.
You see I just get totally confused on who to vote for because well you know Obama likes to give my money to his friends, the poor people and almost all Republicans like to give my money to their friends, the rick people. Now Hillary, she’s different, she doesn’t have any friends so she’ll just keep my money. Stuff like that makes life a lot simpler is what I say. Besides if she gets elected she’ll have to buy a new email server. I think a President who can set up their own server is pretty cool. What do you think.
Well, I’m sorry I hadn’t even begun my post and I’m already off topic, way off topic. So since I couldn’t make it in time to run Turkey Mountain I went to Tulsa’s Hunter Park and started off trying to find a few caches there and then since it is connected to the Creek Turnpike trail I took off on that trying to find a few. I think I looked for about a half dozen or so and found about two.
I am not very good about finding micro caches and some of these hides are pretty darn clever. I have come to terms with myself about not finding many of the clever hides. The point is getting out and about and trying.
So I had a pretty good run. If you click on the thingy above and get it going you can see how I was searching in places and then moving on. At the end I forgot tot turn off my watch so that is what the last mile or so is fast.
Do you have fitbit? One of those little devices that tracks your steps. This is my fitbit reading for yesterday. I got in about 15,000 steps which is over seven miles. You can see that I have a pretty sedentary job and then I go walking at lunch and then how I got moving once I got out caching and then how slow I was when I got home and plopped myself down in front of the television.
What about you? What was your big adventure yesterday (or whenever?)
Note, despite the sign, the hours are Wednesday through Saturday from 10 to 5.
I love serendipity and it happened to me this past weekend. Saturday I went to Stillwater, Oklahoma for a trail race and went via back roads from Tulsa instead of my more usual route on the turnpike. On the way out, going through the small oilfield town of Yale I saw a sign that pointed out the Jim Thorpe Home. So coming back after the race I stopped and checked it out.
A volunteer greeted me and invited me to sign the register where I noticed that I was the first visitor that day. She gave me a tour of the small home and its contents. It was really fascinating. Thorpe was not born in Yale, he and his wife, Iva, purchased the house in 1917 and left in 1923. The house has many of the original furnishings and is painted the original colors and duplicated the wallpapers used. The volunteer told me that it was originally a mail order house from Montgomery Wards. The house also contains many photographs and memorabilia of Thorpe’s.
What really piqued my interest were the stories about Thorpe. She described how in the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Thorpe on the Gold Medals in both the Pentathlon a and Decathlon by competing in fifteen events in just three days. He went on to play professional baseball and football and act in movies. Many consider him the greatest athlete of the twentieth century. The end of his sporting career coincided with the beginning of the Great Depression and he struggled to make a living and died in near poverty in 1953. His death set off a chain of events that is still playing out today.
![[Jim Thorpe, New York NL, at Polo Grounds, NY (baseball)] (LOC)](https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3029/2868006613_18120cc62b_z.jpg?zz=1)
Library of Congress Photo – No restrictions on use, courtesy of Flickr
![Thorpe [and] McGloughlin (LOC)](https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3034/2830017899_7e9be8ebc6_z.jpg?zz=1)
Library of Congress Photo – No restrictions on use, courtesy of Flickr
Library of Congress Photo – No restrictions on use, courtesy of Flickr – 1912 United States Olympic Team
I’m kind of pulling for the family. Doing the research for this post one sees that Thorpe although a great athlete encountered great tragedies and reversals in his life. His twin brother died when he was nine. Thorpe’s first son Jim Thorpe, Jr died at three years of age. In that very house in Yale. His Olympic Medals were taken away from him unjustly (they were later returned, long after his death.)
![[Jim Thorpe, New York NL, at Polo Grounds, NY (baseball)] (LOC)](https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2702/4370136353_a14b7fe55a_z.jpg?zz=1)
Library of Congress Photo – No restrictions on use, courtesy of Flickr
In an October 2015 update, the Supreme Court has declined to hear an appeal by the Thorpe family to move Jim’s body back to Oklahoma.
Saturday morning I got up at dark thirty and headed out to western Oklahoma to Lake McMurtry to run the 12K portion of the Lake McMurtry Trail Run. They also had 25K and 50K events. The people who run these trail runs are hard core and they consider the 12K to be kind of like a fun run or something.
The Race Director, Trail Zombie got us all organized and everything with a few simple directions. Mainly don’t get lost and don’t cheat. TZ as we call him directs several races during the year, leads weekly runs on Turkey Mountain, volunteers a lot and has his own full time business. He is one of the world’s really nice guys.
And here is the start. I started out last place and stayed last place for a long time. 12K is about 7 miles and I finally passed a few at about mile four. I say a few because I think I finished 46th out of 50 or something like that.
The course was an out and back which means that we run back on the same trail we run out on. Plus the other races used this route as part of the route of their races. This means that people have to be aware of what is going on and let people pass by. I’ve run lots of trail races and I have never seen any conflict on the matter. People just pull off and let others pass and everything is cool. The whole ethic of trail racing is cool and laid back and that is why I like it. Don’t get me wrong, people run the race hard.
The race was almost entirely in the woods but we broke out into grassland just briefly a couple times.
And here is the beer stop. One stop but we hit it twice. How many races do you know provide craft beer at the water stops. I had a Coop Brewing DNR the second time, I forget what it was I had the first stop, but it was good.
And right close to the beer tent is the regular stuff, water, gatorade, pickle juice (yep, I’ve learned to have a shot of it when I can), baked potato quarters rolled in salt, bananas, cookies, nuts, m&ms. No wonder I can’t lose weight and no wonder I don’t finish any better than what I do.
I actually buckled down and ran the the last few miles to the finish and didn’t take any photographs. My average miles split was 13:30 which is not too impressive but is at least a minute faster than most trail runs I run in so I am pretty happy.
At the finish TZ told me where to find the “Leap of Doom.” It is a feature of the 25K and 50K races but they don’t let us 12K baby runners on it out of fear for our lives. But, I fortified my courage with a beer and headed out to check it out.
I could tell I was getting close. One thing about TZ is he is good at warning people. I couldn’t turn back even though I wanted to so I ventured on ahead.
And the warnings kept coming. But I was intrigued, I mean who doesn’t want to see the 72nd wonder of the world.
Gulp
Here are the instructions. I don’t know how to breathe and scream at the same time, do you?
Of course I had to record the event for posterity. This is first attempt.
This is the second attempt. Do you like my shoes? Do you think I should put movie ambitions on hold for a while?
And so I survived the famous Leap of Doom. Well the other thing I needed to do was go find a geocache.
The nearest one was about a kilometer away so I walked to it. Turns out that the location was right on the the trails used in the other races. While I was looking for it several runners stopped and asked if I was okay.
I turned my Garmin watch on for the hike. I get amused at myself when I run on a geocaching hunt cause it shows me going around and around, and I did go around and around. I finally found it though.
And here is the location. I loved the old car. The amazing car geeks at Car Spotting Tulsa think it is a late 40’s Chevy. I love all the bullet holes. And yes I did find the cache.
So, I was done. Got a lot done over there in Lake McMurtry is what I think, ran a race, jumped the leap of doom a couple times and found a geocache and a neat car. So I gathered my stinky self up and drove back to Tulsa. On the way I stopped in the little oil field of Yale, Oklahoma and toured Jim Thorpe’s house. Fascinating story about the greatest athlete of all time who lived in a small town in Oklahoma. That will be on the next post.
Thanks for hanging with me all this way!
