“But, Lord, ’tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,
The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord!
Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul!”
From “It Is Well With My Soul” by Horatio Gates Spafford
Check out That’s Baloney for other pairings.
Looking west from downtown Tulsa. The Arkansas River in the foreground.
Checkout skies from all over the world at Skywatch Friday.
We had a Veterans Day Parade Wednesday in Downtown Tulsa.
The motorcylce police led the way.
Marching Bands
Color Guards
And of course Veterans. It is their parade after all.
Veterans on Foot
and Veterans in a Jeep
Women Veterans
Veterans in a Trailer
And Veterans with other modes of transport
We even had Veterans on Motorcycles
We had some Veterans from other countries. He was welcome as well.
There were Cheerleaders
We had some military vehicles that looked like they meant business
We had some really nice cars
Shoot, I know that lots of places have parades with all this stuff, did your parade have a boat?
We had horses
The SWAT Team showed up in their armored car.
Can’t have a parade without a firetruck can you?
I think Tulsa put on a fine parade for our Veterans. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Its the least we can do. Lets think of them the rest of the year also.
SuperPizzaBoy and I went geocaching at Oxley Nature Center at Mohawk Park Sunday. It wasn’t the pine barrens of New Jersey but it was kind of spooky. The leaves are gone and the woods are pretty tangled up from the ice storm a couple years ago. But hey we had a good time.
Off we went down the seldom traveled trail.
I kind of like the woods caches. Urban micros are fine but I like finding caches away from a crowd. Boy were we away from the crowds.
Treasure!! kind of.
The next one was a little tied up. It was put out by a bunch of cachers last year who showed up and cleared some of the trails from storm debris. There is a tradition in caching of “CITO” an acronym for “Cache In, Trash Out.” Part of giving back to the parks and landowners who host the caches.
I went back Monday at lunch to find another. It is down this long road, converted to a trail. It was pretty lonely when I started.
When I got close to the cache site, suddenly there were a lot of people nearby. I tried to act keenly interested in this, even taking pictures of it.
So I wouldn’t reveal the location of this.
Geocachers call non-geocachers “Muggles.” Muggles mean well but they often take off with the cache, container and all, or vandalize it, so we make pains to make sure that the caches stay concealed for the benefit of the next person looking and the owner of the cache. If the cache goes missing or is damaged it is the responsibility of the cache owner to replace or repair it.
SuperPizzaBoy and I have found 873 geocaches and have hidden 26.
Check out geocaching.com for how to join in the fun.
Last Saturday night Sweetie and I dropped off SuperPizzaBoy at Nana’s and headed downtown to the BOK center to see Alan Jackson play some country music.
At least Sweetie wore jeans, I wore slacks. Neither one of us owns hats or boots nor a big fancy belt buckles. We were not worried though. We had been to some Country shows, Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift. Nobody wore hats or boots to those shows except for the girls in short skirts. The shorter the skirt the taller the boot seemed the rule. Nobody on stage performing wore a hat. Not only that, both those girls could rock Metallica clear out of the house.
Anyway we got to the Arena and there were hats and boots and belt buckles everywhere, even on the stage not to mention the audience. Wassup? Man we were out of place.
And, the stage was pretty simple. Microphones, a drum set, steel guitar, and lots of guys playing guitars and violins. A few lights and some video gear. No runways, nor multilevel stages. The sound booth looked like the one we have at church with just a couple guys reading the paper and fiddling with the controls.
Strangely enough Alan Jackson hasn’t invested a whole lot in a choreographer. He basically stood in front of the microphone, played his guitar, and sang. His band pretty much stayed put also and played their instruments and sometimes harmonized with him. He didn’t run, strut, preen, juke, jive or anything like that. What kind of show is he putting on? Does he think that people came to listen to him sing songs?
He did a fine job. I’m not a country country kind of guy and I wasn’t sure that I liked this concert right afterwards but I’ve changed my mind. Jackson is a fine singer and he did that well. His band, the Strayhorns, have been with him a long time and it showed. They played well but Alan Jackson’s voice was the star of the show.
I give this show three stars out of four which is good.
In mid-October the family drove up from Tulsa to Saint Louis for a Fall Break trip. We are big zoo fans so the Saint Louis Zoo was a must see. It had lots of animals of course but something special about this zoo is the landscaping.
Of course, being a zoo they had plenty of interesting critters.
For great views of our world from all over check out That’s My World.
Saturday, Sweetie and some other members of our Adult Sunday School class helped Walt Whitman Elementary School with their annual carnival. SuperPizzaBoy and I went along because it sounded like fun. Typical deal right, Sweetie works and SPB and I play.
There were games to play
Hot dogs and cookies
Snow Cones
A little sensory time in the gravel (try it, it feels great!)
Some silliness for Dad
Finally, exhaustion
Nearby we spotted a blanket somebody make long ago. I love it.
(If you look close you can see the careless photographer.)
Todays verse is:
“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”
Proverb’s 22:6 (NIV)
Check out That’s Baloney for more pairings of scripture and photographs.
I’m a blessed guy. I don’t know know why. I certainly haven’t done anything to deserve it. But its true. Not only am I married to the best Wife a man could have and am honored to be the Father to a Son that is the best Son in the world, but I get great parking spots. Ask Sweetie, I have parking place mojo. When I pull up to the front, somebody just pulled out, We almost always park near the front door. Legally; Not always, but often enough.
I’m blessed in other ways also. My employer in the last year decided to give everybody vacation commensurate with their years of experience in the energy industry, not just years with the company. Wow, I have 32 years in the energy industry so they handed me 5 weeks of vacation. It has just floored me. I don’t take it for granted. It is going to go mainly toward spending more time with the family, but who knows what else. Our church, like a great many others, has mission trips availble year round. You can do them here in Oklahoma, or the States, or elsewhere from Mexico, to Lithuania, to Tanzania. Who knows? I have been handed a gift I didn’t deserve,I have to figure out how to give something back.
The other thing my employer did was give us the option of a 9/80 work schedule. In other words we can work our 80 hour two week schedule in 9 days and get every other Friday off. That was just handed to us. It makes for long days for nine days, but it is worth it. Yesterday I had one of those days off. We dropped SuperPizzaBoy off at school, ate breakfast together, ran a couple errands and then loaded up the bikes to Tulsa’s Mohawk Park.
Mohawk Park is on the north side of town next to the airport. We parked at the Mary K. Oxley Nature Center in Mowhawk Park.
We rode down to Lake Yahola where I took a picture of Sweetie. Note the golf course in the background.
Some of the waterfowl on Lake Yahola. We didn’t ride there too long. Too darn windy!! Plus the geocaches I thought we could get were not reachable from the dam.
We got off the dam and went meandering around the park. We came upon an area where beavers had been active.
Oh, oh, the dweeb himself.
Stylistically a disaster right? You know what drives Sweetie crazy? The little bell near his right hand. That’s what. He comes upon people, he goes ding, ding with the bell. If he yells, “On your left!” then they move to the left. The ding dong likes the bell, what do you think is best? I listen to my readers. Especially those who leave comments!
Here you go, here is Sweetie again. It has finally dawned her the last few years that Yogi got a far better deal in this marriage than she did. You agree? – Hey, its a rhetorical question. You don’t need to answer!
We got off into some wild and wooly parts of Mowhawk. I hadn’t been here since the middle 1990’s during a Corporate Challenge Marathon Relay. Narrow roads. Abandoned roads.
The course went down this way and back. I was a little cranky because they didn’t have any water stops. I had a little “attitude.” Hey if you are going to put on a race then do it right!!!!! There was a race crew out there putting up barricades early in the morning and they got behind me in their truck. I was running down the center of the road and they were following me and I knew they wanted around me so I stayed in the center. They followed me at my extremely slow pace and after a while couldn’t stand it any more so they gave me a little honk of the horn. I guess to tell me that I was doing a good job. So I gave them a middle fingered salute without looking back to let them know I appreciated their hard work.
They gave me a long loud blast of the horn to encourage me even more, so I gave them a a two handed salute in appreciation. This went on for some time. Turkeys!
Hey, can you tell I have issues? Got any advice? Sweetie does, its along the lines of “Get over yourself. You have been talking about that for years.”
Hey, we got to the end of our ride. I saw a tree with leaves on it where I thought the sunlight reflecting on the leavds would really pop out.
The leaves reflect fine and I could enhance it in Corel but I think the best pictures are the ones right out of the camera. What I liked about the ppic looking at it now is the tree’s shadows on the road. I didn;t even notice it before.
Anyway, that was our ride Friday and some of my blessings. Tell me a blessing you had.
Authors of some of the books I’ve read in the last year and a half courtesy of librarything.com.
Tell you what, they are certainly a bookish looking lot if you ask me.
Recognize anyone! Let me know.
I admit that when I first looked at the pictures I didn’t recognize any of them.