A coworker and I went to Oklahoma City Thursday to visit customers and go to a gas industry luncheon. We got downtown a little early so we wandered over to the Devon Building in search of a cup of coffee. The building was just completed in March. In the lobby they have a spectacular reflecting pool. I was really fascinated by it.
The water is less than an inch deep and I love its wrapped around design. I’ll be coming back when I have more time and a better camera as all I had was my Ipod Touch. I’ll be taking more pictures of the exterior. The photo below was taken about this time last year.
The building is really striking. It is about 850 feet tall and dominates the skyline for miles around. There will be an restaurant, open to the public, at the top that is opening soon. I hope the food will be able to match the view. Devon Tower
I take off work early on Wednesdays to run a long ways on the Arkansas River Trails here in Tulsa. I’m training for Tulsa Run 15K the last weekend in October and half marathon segment of the Route 66 Marathon to be held in November. I’m a little nervous, I haven’t run a half marathon since the 1990’s! So this will be my first of the new millennium This pic is from last week about 3 miles into my 8 miles that evening. I used to take my camera with me but I now have an Ipod Touch with a pretty darn good camera, for a music player, don’t you think?
Check out Skywatch Friday for other views of the Sky from all over!
Back to Seattle, sorry. The big tourist destination on the waterfront in Seattle is Pike Street Market. It buzzes all day every day and shuts down completely at 6 PM. Everybody talks about the fish. And yes there is fish everywhere.
I loved the neon signs. They are everywhere and they are big and brash. There is lots going on so they have to be seen. No sign is seen better than a neon sign.
I found this while on a walk just beyond the outer edges of downtown near the apartment house in my post yesterday. It looked to be some sort of retired portable carnival ride that had been out of service for a few years.
Another edition of Scavenger Hunt Sunday. I love this meme it makes me think. The host lists five items and then you post photographs of the items. I love the open ended nature of it.
1.Shadow
I get every other Friday off, my wife and I often ride bicycles if the weather is nice. I take along an old school film camera I wear around my neck. This is the pedestrian bridge across the Arkansas River here in Tulsa. The bike rider is Sweetie! 2.Keys
Well, I don’t have a single picture of key. Sweetie and I did attend a Black Keys concert earlier this year. Does that count? I hope so. 3.Smile
I captured this at the Oklahoma City Zoo. 4.Unedited
I went to the Oklahoma Sugar Art Show and Grand National Wedding Cake Show last weekend. The above was the winning entry by Vivian Pham of San Jose, California. I say it is unedited because usually I would straighten it. Really and truly the cake was straight up and down. I’d of also done a few things to take the background distractions out. The above is straight out of the camera. I’d never been to a sugar art show before. It blew me away, I’m going back next year. It turns out that the Oklahoma Sugar Art Show is the World Series of Baking. Who Knew?!?! 5.Spice
I just plain don’t have any “spice” photos. However I made pancakes for the family last Sunday. I made this one special for me. The pancakes are Prepared Pantry Marionberry, I added bacon, two fried eggs, some apricot syrup and the spice part? Habanero Garlic Hot Sauce spread liberally throughout. Tell you what – I don’t have to worry about anybody else in the family stealing it from me. What can I say? I love the spicy, savory, and sweet all mixed together. There is a burger place here in town that has peanut butter cheeseburgers with habanero peppers. Makes my mouth water just writing about it. Well that’s about it for this week. Check out the other bloggers and their interpretation of the scavenger hunt items. Their skill and creativity blow me away.
I get every other Friday off, generally when school is in session we drop SPB off at this school, then we go have breakfast and ride bikes. Yesterday though it was too danged cold to go ride so we ran a few errands and then went to see Looper. The new Bruce Willis action flick.
Looper is a time travel movie. It is set in two time periods in the future. The near period is 2044 in Kansas. Tell you what 2044 in Kansas is not very pretty. Things are pretty bad, I can’t figure out if it is because Romney or Obama won this next election. I wish somebody would tell me. Anyways back to the movie. In 2044 there a bunch of assassins called Loopers. What they do is go to a predesignated spot at a specific time, spread a tarp, wait a little, and then blast with a blunderbuss blasts some poor dumb schmuck who was sent back from 30 years in the future appears and appears out of thin air. The looper collects the silver that is taped to the schmuck and then disposes the body.
You see disposing body in the future is very hard to do so when organized crime wants to off somebody they send them back to the past. The looper’s all very well paid and live the high life in among all the misery.
So far so good right, well the bosses in the future every once in a while for reasons of their own decide to “Close the loop” by sending a looper’s future self back to his younger self to be blasted away. They younger looper then has 30 years to live. A fundamental sin is for the younger looper to let the older looper get away. Then you got two versions of the same guy running around. That’s not good.
Well in this movie Bruce Willis plays the older guy, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the younger version of Bruce, and does a great job also. I think Emily Blunt steals the show playing the shotgun toting single farmer mother who shelters the younger Bruce for a time during the movie.
The movie was well done, the acting was great, the special effects nice, the whole deal. I didn’t really care for the movie that much. We saw lots of schmucks appearing out of thin air and very vividly blasted away with bloody bits going everywhere, lots of torture and disfigurement. There are children murdered (not on screen but the reference is there) and I just don’t care for that. Emily Blunt’s character is the only “good guy” in the movie.
So I’m not going to give a star review. The movie does well what it sets out to do, I’m just not glad that I went to see it.
Gottatellya, I love the Jack Reacher books by Lee Child. They are way beyond brain candy. Jack Reacher is like this 6′ 6″ ex Military Policeman who roams the country on foot with nothing but the clothes on his back, a toothbrush, and an ATM card. He buys a new clothes ever three days and throws the old ones away. WhattaGuy!!
He doesn’t take any crap from anybody either. In this book one of the character says something like “You don’t like to be pushed around, do you?” Jack says “I don’t know, I’ve never been pushed around. If I do, I’ll let you know if I like it or not.” He had lots better experiences as a high school freshmen than some of us did is all I have to say.
In this book Jack is hitchhiking in the midwest on his way to to Virginia to meet a woman he has never met. He gets picked up by two men and a woman who are wearing identical shirts. At first he figures they are part of some sort of corporate team building group but as they travel on he figures out differently. In the meantime a man is brutally murdered and a cocktail waitress is abducted bringing in the FBI in the form of a semi hot Agent named Julia Sorenson.
Well before this book is out Jack Reacher has to deal with not only the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, and a bunch of Syrians he also gets to cop a feel of Agent Sorenson’s wrist that almost makes him swoon.
So does Jack deal with all this and still get his unseen woman in Virginia, or does Agent Sorenson or the Syrians, or the CIA dissuade him? Does he finally get pushed around? Read the book to find out.
I love Jack Reacher, I give this book four stars out of five.
