Signs, Signs – Central Library

I’m a big fan of libraries. Tulsa has an excellent system of libraries scattered all over the City and County of Tulsa.

Two views of the sign at the west door for Central Library of the Tulsa City County Library System.

You’ll find me at lunch at the library two or three times a week using their free wifi to play Scrabble and Words with Friends on my ipod or actually checking out books. I’ve been doing that for about 20 years now.

My fellow patrons are in doing their homework, listening to music, reading newspapers and magazines. For some, they are getting a respite from the cold. Everybody is treated with respect. I love libraries.

Signs, Signs

Christmas 2011

Yogi here with a Christmas report from Oklahoma

It was dry, sunny, and warm!! You can have your White Christmases, you really can. For me I like the warm sun.

Christmas Eve we spent at Nana’s house. Here is mother and daughter. I like that dynamic flip in Sweetie’s hair.

We brought our three mutts to mix and mingle with Nana’s two mutts. It was mutt mania Christmas Eve especially when Sweetie broke out the treats.

After an excellent meal of tacos and tamales courtesy of Nana and a nice long relaxed visit, we went home and watched “A Christmas Story” in our jammies. SuperPizzaBoy loves that movie and laughs hard. It’s fun watching him. Sorry, no pj photos folks. I don’t think SuperPizzaBoy would mind, Sweetie would. Anyway, after the movie he went off to bed and then Santa came (wink, wink, to all the parents out there). Santa ate the two gingerbread cookies and was nice enough to leave a note.

Next morning, coffee and more gingerbread cookies. I know I said no pj pcs, but you know I lie a lot. You can tell when I’m lying. If my lips are moving, I’m lying.

Nana and I showing off our favorite gifts, hand knitted scarves from Sweetie.

Ginger, got a hedgehog. Notice the wild eyed neurotic look. The hedgehog never did give her any milk, and Ginger tried all day long.

Nana gave me two cameras, a special fisheye film camera on the right, and an old Kodak Brownie on the right. She gave me some 120 film for the Brownie, the shutter worked, I cleaned up the lens as best I could and snapped a few pics outside. If I can find a place to process the film, and if there are pics halfway presentable I’ll share them. The fisheye camera will be interesting I know the flash is powerful. I took a pic of Sweetie and she reeled. I think I could stop the Russian Army with the flash. It is powerful.

Sweetie worked hard preparing a variety of tasty dishes, I smoked some chicken quarters and a turkey breast and we ate very well. We had a coworker of mine who joined us. It’s always nice to have somebody join our foursome.

We missed being with the rest of my family who gathered at my Sister’s house in Colorado Springs.

And now, the dishes are picked up and cleaned up and we are resting.

I hope that you and your family had a great Christmas!

From home to home, and heart to heart, from one place to another

The warmth and joy of Christmas, brings us closer to each other.

(Emily Matthews)

Merry Christmas from the Yogi’s to you!

(Yogi, SuperPizzaBoy, Sweetie, and Nana)

Weekend Reflections – Christmas

Christmas is many different things to many different people. A big part of Christmas is light and what makes light fun are reflections.

Christmas tree in downtown’s beautiful art deco Philcade Building.

Even lawyers love Christmas.

Reflections while putting the lights on at our house.

Wreaths at a florists window.

Decorations at Pier One.

Hey, if I don’t see you before then have a Merry Christmas!

Weekend Reflections

Skywatch Friday – Chilly Early Morning at Washington Irving Park

Skywatch Friday

Outdoor Wednesday – Dance With Me

I love trees, I love’m in the summer with all their leaves and I love them in the winter when you can see their bones. I love how they adapt to each other as they compete for sunlight.

This grove of trees looks like a wild dance party to me.

“Oh come and dance with me, my baby

Let’s dance, till we go crazy

The night is young and so are we…

…Let the music hypnotize

Let our bodies synchronize

One dance and you’ll be mine…”

(Dance with Me by Debelah Morgan)

Do you see it?

No? Do you see my son SuperPizzaBoy swinging to the beat?

Not only do I love trees, I love film also.

Outdoor Wednesday

The Vault by Ruth Rendell

The Vault is one of Ruth Rendell‘s “Inspector Wexford” novels. Reginald Wexford has retired from being a policeman and is kind of bored although he finds plenty of stuff to do. None of it really has any meaning for him. He is a good detective but he is not very dashing, athletic, and is the opposite of the tough guys we love so much in America.

He gets a call from the police asking for his help on his case. They need the help really bad but not so bad as they are going to pay him or really give him any sort of official status or even cover his expenses. The case involves a hidden underground vault near a house where several bodies have been found. Several from over ten years ago and the latest just two years ago.

The case is a real headscratcher and Wexford proceeds to work on it by talking to the present occupants of the house, neighbors, and others. He does it almost apologetically explaining to everybody that they don’t really have to talk to him, but they do. He slowly starts piecing together what happens. The people he talk to are all characters, most of whom have secrets of their own, and are not necessarily that helpful, but they are helpful enough.

In the meantime he has family drama to attend to. His daughter is involved in a love affair with a man half her age who really can’t handle rejection and things really take a bad turn there. His daughter is hiding what really happened and he has to figure that story out while solving the police puzzle.

I give this book four stars out of five. I love the interplay between Wexford’s work on the case and his family life and all the different “difficult” characters he has to talk to, and the portayal of a mine trying to find some meaning in his life.

Go to library and get this book! The Kindle edition is $12.99 which is way too much in my opinion.

Ruby Tuesday Miscellany

Various Ruby Tuesday Candidates Recently

A candy cane at Tulsa’s Winterfest and below some playground equipment. Both photographs are film.

A phone booth found while shopping with Sweetie at Utica Square.

Sad to report, SuperPizzaBoy doesn’t want to visit Santa this year:(

Ruby Tuesday

It’s Christmas, 1980’s Oklahoma style.

My favorite Christmas decorations are nativity scenes. The stores are loaded with them. All sorts of styles to choose from.

We have several in our house. Sweetie does a great job with them.

This one below is special to me. It is not the fanciest one we have.

I got it in 1986 right after I moved to Oklahoma City from Dallas. In those days before the internet and Amazon.com you ordered novelty merchandise out of catalogs. Remember all the catalogs from those days? Lands End, and Eddie Bauer were just the beginning. Anyway my secretary, whom I’ll call Frances, was the catalog queen in the office. She’d find something cool and several people would order it. Anyway she found this nativity scene and several of us in the office ordered one. I don’t know why I did, I was single and didn’t decorate for Christmas but I liked it.

A subsequent summer Frances drowned after falling off a sailboat during a midnight cruise on Lake Hefner with her new boyfriend. She wasn’t wearing a life jacket and didn’t know how to swim. It being at night the guy couldn’t see her and a sailboat is not the most maneuverable thing around. They didn’t find her body until the sun came up the subsequent morning.

It was a real mess. She had left her long time boyfriend of many years a few weeks before. But he was still the beneficiary of her life insurance, 401K, all that stuff. It was a real heart breaker. He got it all and he kept it all and I dealt with both him and her family through the whole process. It was a sad and stressful time, for a long time, for everybody who knew her.

We were kind of a tight knit little group and the loss and chaos afterward hit us hard. This was in the midst of the mid 1980’s oil bust that knocked all of Oklahoma for a loop. It seemed that things were never going to get better but eventually of course they did.

Christmas is many things to many people and to me a big part of it is remembering Christmases past especially people who are gone. I always think of Frances at Christmas and how things often don’t turn out the way we plan and that life is fragile. I also learned that people are resilient and although they may never forget something somehow they get through it.

“She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,because he will save his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21 NIV)

And of course I learned that you need to keep your beneficiaries current on your life insurance, 401K’s, and such to help out the people you leave behind because you really don’t know when something is going to happen to you.

I’m linking up with That’s Baloney today for her perfect pairing day.

Camera Critters – Coyote Geocaching

I was at a local park very early Friday morning to hunt a geocache. As I was walking to the cache I looked up and saw a coyote.

He noticed me about the same time so we stopped and looked at each other. He was nice enough to hold the pose so I could get this shot.

Then he trotted off. I was able to get this last shot of him. As I was walking another coyote came out from the woods to the left. He didn’t stop so by the time I got my gloves off and camera out, turned on, and pointed in the right direction, he was gone.

I was worried about one thing though. They had come from the direction of the geocache so I went to check it out.