A Day for Our Mothers

Mother’s Day is a big deal to me. I mean where we would be without Mothers?

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SuperPizzaBoy has always been tickled by Sweetie. My beautiful wife and mother to my son.

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Not much has changed. Sweetie is still the sun that SPB’s planet revolves around.

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 I’m just afraid that there are no girls out there that can compete with SPB’s Mom.

with world's greatest MIL

My mother-in-law Nana is the world’s greatest. I have to tell you that she puts up with a lot from me. But I’m worth it, right? Uh, say right! Well lets move on.

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My Sister Ellen is also a great mother. She has three beautiful daughters and a wonderful grandson Mr. Beans. Check out Ellen’s blog if you get a chance.

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Speaking of great mothers, this is Ellen’s daughter Mary and Mr. Beans.

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This is my favorite photo of my mother who has been gone for some years. She always had that Irish twinkle in her eye. She loved her family very much. 

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I don’t think that there was anybody that loved children more than my mother. Here she is getting acquainted with SuperPizzaBoy.
Be sure to appreciate the mothers in your life today.

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A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal

A Map of Tulsa is a novel by Benjamin Lytal. It has been all the rage lately so hey I had to read it. It is about a guy Jim Praley and a girl Adrienne Booker. They both grew up in Tulsa but didn’t know each other until Praley comes back to town after a year of college.

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They meet at a party and end up going to Cain’s Ballroom and eventually have a sort of relationship. Jim pursues her hard and she give him the old flamethrower and ice cold treatment which of course guys just love.

Tulsa Highrise

Adrienne Booker is an heiress who lives in the penthouse apartment of her family’s oil company office building. She doesn’t go to college she spends her time painting oil paintings and being a very cool and distant person. Jim buys her a gun and shoots a few windows out at her studio and like any good Okie girl she falls in love with Jim and they live together in the penthouse. Jim eventually goes back to college and they fall apart and then in the second part of the book Adrienne has a bad accident and Jim comes back to Tulsa.

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So anyway, the book is about men and women, growing up or not growing up and the changes that occur with people and between people, loss, and how you just can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Generally I’m not much into literary novels and I’ll freely admit that probably means that I’m not very smart but, I need strong characters and for something to happen. In this book the dramatic events happen to the characters, not caused by them, but the aftermath has to be dealt with and analyzed by the characters so they come across as being fairly passive. Somehow it worked for me.

The city of Tulsa plays into it also as Lytal’s Tulsa is a town where everybody has a place and knows almost everybody else and nobody is anonymous. That’s about right. I’ve lived in big cities and small towns and Tulsa is the biggest small town that I’ve ever seen. I guarantee you that two randomTulsa residents who have lived in town longer than a couple years will discover within 15 minutes multiple mutual acquaintances. I’ve never seen anything like it. Somehow Lytal, a Tulsa native captured that sense of everybody being tied together in the book.

So anyways I’ll give the book four stars out of five.

ABC Wednesday – “Q” is for ….

Q’s are really hard. I guess questions are Q’s but I don’t know how to take a picture of a question.

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I finally found a Q last month in San Antonio. On the northern reaches of the Rivewalk way beyond the fancy hotels and cheesy restaurants, art museums, and expensive condo’s and where only homeless people, runners, geocachers, very lost tourists (I find some, or they found me, should have seen the look on their face when I told them that they had a two mile walk to the Alamo) and the park police roam I found a Quonset hut. I finally found a Q! I hope that you like it. I worked hard for it.

The tourists I found were not impressed. I told them, “Well if you don’t want to walk all the way to the Alamo, there is Quonset hut around the bend.”

#geocaching #riverwalk #san_antonio #texas

“Or you can go geocaching with me.”  They walked away acting like I was the strange one. At least I knew where I was, and everything there was to do. 

Wikipedia says that Quonset Huts were developed by the Navy during World War II for use as cheap, easily assembled buildings. The military built about 150,000 or so during the war and sold many of them to the public. They were first fabricated at Quonset Point in Rhode Island.

ABC Wednesday

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Our World – Tulips

Early in April the Tulips were coming up in Tulsa’s Woodward Park. I took along my Lomography Diana Mini toy camera, a simple film camera.

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The tulips were beautiful as you can see. I loved the deep rich color.

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They were everywhwere.

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Above and below I did a little experimenting with double exposures. The poor man’s photoshop.

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It is certainly not an improvement on nature but I like the tulip ghosty images.

Our World Tuesday

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Perfect Pairings – Oil

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Horizontal drilling into the Cana Woodfod Shale, Canadian County, Oklahoma, fairly recently

Psalm 114-14-15

14 He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth;

 15 And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart.

Don’t worry folks, I haven’t gone off into the deep end. I am reading a book about the history of the oil industry and this scripture was telegraphed as a prearranged signal by a predecessor company of British Petroleum that a well they were drilling in what is now Iran was successful. Personally I think the verse refers to olive oil.  As part of the research for this post I found that there are lots of swindlers who use vague Bible quotes such as this to try and fleece trusting people out of their money by promising amazing insights into where the oil is by using the Bible only. And that brings to mind another verse:

16 “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

 Matthew 10:16

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This is a well fed coyote, not a wolf, that I met on a geocaching excursion in Bixby, Oklahoma.

Perfect Pairings

Scavenger Hunt Sunday – Background to Bambi

Time again for Ashley Sisk’s Scavenger Hunt Sunday. Every week she give five prompts and then we go looking for them to display on Sunday the following week. So lets get going.


Background

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The young man in the Old Navy tshirt is SuperPizzaBoy and that is all I’m going to say about this pic.

Spotted or Dots

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Well, who can argue with Bambi.

Weather

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That is your truly. I got lots of snow shoveling in during the winter of 2011. Everybody in town did. That was so wrong!!!!!

Motion

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SuperPizza boy riding Cisco (who I called Frisco in a previous post) during his therapeutic horseback riding session Saturday. SPB is getting more and more comfortable in the saddle.

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Please don’t tell anybody because I’m in the energy biz but I’ve never been to a gun shot but I am now a devotee of Sugar Art. I attended the Grand National Wedding Cake Competition in Tulsa back in September and it blew me away. It is coming back to Tulsa on September 28 and 29 during the Tulsa State Fair. Let me know, and we’ll go together. What these people do with sugar will flat out amaze you. This year’s them is “Ballet 2013.”

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If you are looking for a fun meme check out Scavenger Hunt Sunday.

Iron Man 3 with Robert Downey Jr and Gwyneth Paltrow

The whole famdamily went to see an early showing of Iron Man 3 today. I’m not going to give you a review. You can get all sorts of good reviews all over the place including my favorite, IMDB dot com. I’ll just tell you what the movie is about. It’s about bad guys getting the comeuppance they deserve by a hard working underappreciated good guy and about how the love of a good woman will cure anything.

Robert Downey Jr. does a good job playing a wisecracking superhero with panic anxiety disorder. He’s also got a new iron suit that could be great but he hasn’t worked out all the kinks. When you are fighting bad guys you gotta have an iron suit that you can depend on.

Gwyneth Paltrow does a good job as the damsel in distress. You can tell she is a big star because she keeps all her clothes on. It’s only the new actresses trying to make their way that have to make movies half naked. I think what the deal is is that these action movies cost so much to make what with all the cars blowing up and special effects and such that they run out of money for costumes for the actresses so they have to play a lot of scenes with nothing on. For some reason they always have plenty of money for the guy’s clothes. Obviously Ms. Paltrow makes enough money to afford her own clothes if the studio doesn’t provide any. My advice to young actresses is to keep extra underwear in their purse just in case the studio can’t afford to give them any. That way your Mom and Dad can still be proud of you and not embarrassed by you showing off all your charms to the world.

I also don’t think they feed these young ladies enough either. They are all really scrawny looking. I’m thinking about starting a new charity where you can adopt one of these women for about $50 a month or so. The money would go toward extra clothes and food. I mean we do the same thing for starving kids in the Phillippines right? We need to take care of their own. Are you willing to help out? Keep in mind that you will get a letter from your adoptee every now and then telling you about what a difference you have made in their life.

Well I’m digressing from the point of this post, and while I’m at it I’ll digress some more. You know what I wrote above about the love of a good woman can cure anything. I was lying. The love of a good woman will never get the Dallas Cowboys to the SuperBowl but that is okay because neither can Jerry Jones or Tony Romo.

Well I’ll just wrap this puppy up. The movie gets four stars out of five and the Cowboys are definitely not going to the SuperBowl. Also, SuperPizzaBoy reminds me to tell you that since the movie is a Marvel comic movie to not just jump up and walk out when the credits role because there is a short post credit feature. Because “everybody” knows that is what happens with Marvel movies.