Palace Cafe – Cherry Street

After Sweetie and I attended the Color Purple on Saturday we went to eat. Going to the PAC shows has turned into “date nights” for Sweetie and I even though we go to matinees. So I guess really they are date evenings. Are we getting old? Nah, I’ll just leave it at that.

So the mutual question is, “Where do you want to eat?” I mentioned the Palace Cafe, Sweetie thought it a good idea so we cruised by. It was 5:05 and they open at 5 pm. “Are we going to be the only ones there?” “That’s no fun.” So we cruised down Cherry Street. “Tucci’s – no we ate Italian yesterday. Not eating at a deli, no Panera on a date, not in the mood for Full Moon.”

Turn south on Utica, “Hey how about PF Changs, uh OK… Howabout McGills – thats a good place.” We pulled into their parking lot. We didn’t get out. Sweetie says “Lets go try something new.”, “Lets, who cares if we are the only ones there.” So we drove back to the Palace Cafe.

Boy, did we make a great decision. We weren’t the only ones there and we would not have cared. The place is perfect for a date. Its small and intimate. The staff is very good and non-intrusive. All that is necessary for a date. We’ve been to restaurants with good food but the experience is spoiled by indifferent service. Not here.

The food here is wonderful.

Sweetie had Tomato Bisque for starters and then the Salmon for dinner. It is pictured below. It had a delicious mushroom rice cake with it.

I started with the house salad. I had to take a picture of it. It tasted wonderul. It had some sort of aged vinegar on it. Sweetie can fill you in on the details. I was too busy eating it.

For dinner I had the “Catch of the Day.” It had some sort of italian name but was basically a seafood stew with salmon, shrimp, and clams. It was seasoned perfectly. This may be one of the best restaurant dishes I have ever eaten anywhere. (“Gee, that’s really impressive Yogi- is it really better than the Coney Island chili cheese hot dogs?”) Believe it I have eaten some great meals at some great restaurants and I will put this dish up against any of them.

I give the Palace Cafe four stars out of four.

Oprah Winfrey Presents the Color Purple

Sweetie and I drove downtown on a cold windy Saturday to see The Color Purple. The short story about this musical is that it is almost perfect. The story is wonderful, the singing is great, the choreography is understated, the sets and the costuming is just right.

This is not a blockbuster like the Lion King. The word I think of for this show is graceful. Everything is just right, balanced, and extremely well done. The songs are wonderful. Some of them have a pop feel to them, others are almost a blues rock type thing. The performers did the songs spot on.

I give this show four stars out of four. I am really really glad that we saw it.

Arrow of Light Ceremony – Soaring Eagles Patrol

Big Night at the Yogi Family Thursday Night.
SuperPizzaBoy goes through the Cub Scout Arrow of Light Ceremony. The Culmination of Five Years of Work.

Sweetie fixed up and fussed over the Boy’s Uniform. She fixed up Yogi’s also.

The boys were nervous before the meeting. Below is a first ever event, they all sat down together without being herded. They are wild hellions but good kids. They called themselves the Soaring Eagles Patrol

The Arrow of Light Team from Boy Scout Troop 26 of Good Shepherd Lutheren Church did the ceremony and did a great job. It was very solemn and well received.

I didn’t get a good shot of PizzaBoy but part of the ceremony is that the boys are brought to the front on the shoulders of the scouts. The Cub Scouts are all very nervous about that part.

Afterward the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts put on a group photo op for the parents.

Nana, Sweetie and PizzaBoy


SuperPizzaBoy and Yogi. We’re both happy its over. I’ll miss the kids and the kids parents. I really got attached to them. Most of them live in the neighborhood so I’ll be seeing about them. I’ll always be appreciative of the leadership and most of the parents of the Soaring Eagles Patrol. They went out of their way to make sure that PizzaBoy had a good experience in Scouts. The kids were also very nice to him.

PizzaBoy is going to take a break from scouting. He, Sweetie, and I all think that he might benefit from a year or so of growing up before trying Boy Scouts.

I think Scouting, both Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts is very helpful to kids. Not only is it fun but in my mind unifies Family, Church, and School and teaches the kids how to be citizens.

Its fun for the parents also.

Skywatch Friday – Tree in Winter

A couple weeks ago I went out for an afternoon run. I have passed this tree countless times but that day I stopped and took a picture of it. I like trees in winter, you can see the shape better.

If you look closely you can see signs of ice damage that so many of Tulsa’s trees had last year.

For great views of the sky from all over the world check Skywatch Friday.

Preaching the Gospel – Spreading the Word – Saving the Lost

Two lost souls were saved yesterday. Two coworkers who although both very nice upstanding members of the community and very nice, pleasant, hard working citizens of their nation were lost. They had not heard the word, they had not found what they were looking for. They were out in the woods wandering around. They had a general idea of where to find what they searching for and they were on the right track but they hadn’t found it yet.

Then, that still quiet GPS, said: “Seek over there, and maybe ye shall find”
They responded to the voice, and to the arrow on the GPS they were holding
and
They found their first Geocache! Praise Be!

Sisters Linda and Linda. Uh, I mean Sisters Linda F. and Linda F., uh
Sister Linda and Sister PecanLady
Newest members of the church of Geocaching, Lunchtime Mission
Go forth and find more geocaches Ladies! You are pretty good at it.
We went and found another one a little ways away.

Time to quit. We’ll make plans to find more.

2008 Okie Blog Awards

I had a pleasant unexpected surprise this morning. I found out that my blog was nominated for the best culture blog for the 2008 Okie Blog Awards. I’m very flattered and appreciative and if any of my readers want to vote for this blog I thank them. The polls close on February 7.

Just click on the logo aboved to go to the link with the nomination list, the rules, and the procedure.

Some of the other nominees are on my blogroll and I recommend them highly. I haven’t had a chance yet to go through the rest of the nominees on the list but I am looking forward to doing so. I expect quite a few will end up on my blogroll. I’m always looking for new blogs to read and just looking at the list there are quite a few that I don’t know.

Thank you very much again too those who voted to put me on the list.

Roads to Quoz – An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon


Roads to Quoz” is William Least Heat-Moon’s latest book. It based on travels that he and his wife took to various parts of the United States. Quoz refers to the odd and remarkable but unexpected that one finds on the road while traveling. This book is not so much a travel book but a book of stories that he picked up while traveling. Darned good stories also about forgotten expeditions, drug running, real estate speculation, childhood escapades. Story after story.

Is this a good read? Sure. Just be ready to jump ahead because he bogs down every now and then. There is an excellent 250 page book in this 535 page book. I rate this 3 stars out of 4.

“Blue Highways”,”PraireyErth”, and “River-Horse” are other books that he wrote that I read. They are all travel books except that PraireyErth was confined to a township in central Kansas. Blue Highways was his first book. He had just got fired and divorced. The writing was to the point. Hey, he needed the money. Its the only book besides Tom Sawyer that I’ve read three times.

Union Depot – That’s My World Tuesday

Tulsa Union Depot, another Tulsa Art Deco building, was completed in 1931 and served as Tulsa’s rail passenger terminal until 1967. It sat empty and deteriorating for years until it was converted to office space in the 1980’s. Last year another marked the completion of another conversion. It is now the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame.

The building has a lot of detailing. Below is my favorite. I couldn’t figure out what it was for a long time and then I realized that it was a winged wheel on a railroad. The design is repeated all around the building.

Visit other entries for That’s My World from all over the world.

Geocaching 101 – Mohawk Park

SuperPizzaBoy and I went on a geocaching expedition to Mohawk Park Saturday. It was as pretty a January day as you will find in Oklahoma. Oklahoma can get very cold but usually after a front comes through the sun will come out and warm things up into the 50’s or 60’s. Perfect for being outdoors. Plus the fall and winter are the perfect times for geocaching. No snakes, chiggers, ticks, mosquitos, nor poison ivy plus the vegetation is knocked back so it is easier to get around.

We tried to find a couple of caches in Mohawk proper but the trail we were trying to use was still blocked with dead limbs from the ice storm last year. It was pretty slow going. We could have bushwhacked from a road but SPB doesn’t like going through tall grass. One thing I’ve learned geocaching is that sometimes its ok to plug and abandon a cache. As of this morning there are 715,008 caches worldwide and we have found only about 739 of them, so there is always another cache to find.

Before I get too far down the road a few commenters have asked what geocaching is. I’ll use the definition on the front page of the geocaching.com web site:

“Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment.”

Basically people hide containers out in the world. They use a GPS (“Global Positioning System”) receiver to determine the longtitude and latitude of the containers and then get on the geocaching.com web site and create a web page for the cache with the coordinates and some wordage about what to look for. The containers have to contain at least a log for people to write on and maybe a few toys or trinkets to trade.

Then, other people look up the cache page, get the coordinates, put them in their own gps and then go look for them. When they find them, they write their names and dates on the paper log (that proves that they have been there) and maybe trade a trinket. (The rule on trinket is that you trade something at least as good as what you take.)

Then when you get home. You go back to the web page for the cache and post a log online.

It doesn’t cost anything to get an account at geocaching.com. You can create an acccount, using minimal personal information, and start looking at caches. You put in your zip code and it will give you a list of caches and a map. For $35 per year you can get a premium membership which gives you better mapping capabilities and enables you to download directly into your gps (if you have the right gps, cables and software) massive numbers of caches (I can do 2000 at a time).

As far as equipment goes. You can get a nice Garmin GPS for about $70 on sale at Walmart or Academy or I bought a used one for $35 on ebay. There is a hardcore subgenre of geocachers who find the caches without a GPS using topographic maps. I’m not hardcore.

Its a lot of fun. SPB and I have found caches all over town. We have been down most of the roads in this area. Most state parks have lots of caches. I almost always find caches when I’m on business trips. They are all over. There may be a thousand in Tulsa County. People are adding caches all the time.

Its fun hiding caches also. SPB and I have hidden 24. It is fun reading peoples comments when they find them. This morning I read the following comment from somebody (the OxFoxes) who found our Boys Night Out – City Center cache.

“This was a fun hunt.
I literally opened up the cover on that old phone box with a screwdriver to make sure THAT wasn’t the cache. (That old thing isn’t ever going to work again, but I put it back together the way I found it anyway.) I also went up on TOP to see if there was something up there that looked like a cache. It looked like a LONG drop from up there, with no protective rail.
While I was looking for the cache, the First Presbyterian Church across the street began to peal out Christmas carols and hymns on their chimes. It went on for half an hour. It added an interesting air to my cache hunts downtown for awhile.
Once I figured out where the cache was, I wasn’t sure how I was going to GET it. Fortunately I had a very long ice scraper in the car that did the trick. Fortunately, there weren’t any muggles around on a Saturday night to watch my antics trying to retrieve and replace the cache.
This was a really clever hide. I enjoyed it, and the ingenuity that went into hiding it.
Thanks for the cache!”

A nice comment like that makes my day. (hint, hint, you lurkers out there!)

Now back to our trip to Mowhawk Park. We struck out in the Mowhawk Park proper so we went to Oxley Nature Center. Our first find of the day was The Enormous Cottonwoods of Bird Creek. There we hid a travel bug in the cache. A travel bug is a little side game to geocaching. Items are tagged with an aluminum marker with a unique ID. The travel bug is moved from cache to cache and the owner of the tb can monitor its movements. SPB and I have several travel bugs. One is somewhere in Germany now. So I get logs that I can’t read. The tb we dropped off yesterday is not one of ours we picked it up somewhere else. Its considered bad manners to hold on to them too long. The travel bug below is named Wish it, Dream it, Do it and has traveled 1832.9 miles. Click on the link to see where it has been.


We found another one at Oxley yesterday. I’ll show you the picture but not the name of it. It took me an hour to find it. It was about 50 feet off the posted coordinates. You go spend an hour looking for it to! Sorry to be so mean spirited, but that is the way I am.

Here is a picture from the site where a cache is supposed to be located. We didn’t find it. You go look for it, let me know if you find it. It is at the site of a an old farm that John Denver’s uncle used to farm, the cache owner claims. It is called Once There was a Farm. I liked the area, trees and a meadow. Can’t be better than that.

Below is another cache. I’m showing the cache but not the name. SPB found it all by himself!


We finished up after finding 3 and not finding 1. Took about 3 hours. Lots of hiking in the woods. I love it.

A Warm and Well Secured Walk Downtown when its Cold Outside

So what do you do if you work downtown and you need to stretch your legs a little bit but it is real cold outside?

Well if you can make it two blocks then you can walk quite a ways sheltered from the wind and the cold. And, as a bonus, if you take your camera and take pictures every now and then you will have your own security guy. You don’t get the same one the whole way, they just kind of daisy chain you from one to the other.

You enter the Philtower building, shown above. It was built by Waite Phillips (The same guy who lived in and then donated the Philbrook Museum to Tulsa before he and the Mrs. bugged out for California.) While there check out the ornate lobby shown below. There is a little room right off the lobby that has a display of the original drawings and such. Check it out. Also, if you have time check out the Philcade right across the street to the south. It is ultra ornate. There used to be 27 shops on the ground floor. Now its pretty much all office space.

From the Philtower you can go north through interconnecting doors all they way to the Midcontinent building. This is where your first security guy appears. He just kind of follows you around as you take pictures. The lobby is even more ornate the then Philtower. There is also stained glass depictions of downtown Tulsa and some paintings. One by Wilson Hurley (one of my favorites).

Go down the escalator, your new friend will go down with you. There is the below right display there. The Midcontinent building is actually one building cantilevered over another building with like a 1/16″ gap or so in between. Fascinating techhnically. Led to lawsuits that are still going on. Even more fascinating.

Let me ask you, don’t you think that the display is begging for a geocache? Something magnetic and hidden? Yeah, I do also. I have a feeling that my friends wouldn’t agree. Maybe later.

From there, head north through the tunnel. Your new friend doesn’t follow you. Hang a left at the parking garage and wind your way over to the BOK bank (not the tower, the one in the old Farmers Exchange building. You come out right by the vault. Even I knew not to take pictures of the vault.

On the way you pass some production studios and video conferencing centers and you pick another buddy. Nobody is going to mess with you on this walk, if you are afraid to walk downtown alone, you are on the right path.

And then you go under Williams Green all the way to the Adams Mark Hotel parking garage. Here you have to walk about 100 ft in the cold. But covered and out of the wind.
Go into the Hotel, up the escalators, hang a hard 180 degree turn to the right and go through the skyway to the Williams Complex. You know, where the ice rink used to be. Now its a trade floor, pretty empty now since the Enron debacle.
Now you can join the crowd that goes around and around the expansive lobby of the building.

At the far eastern end of the lobby is our new City Hall. Go check on Mayor Taylor. Why not, I’m in her Mayors Million Mile challenge. I already have about 64 miles. I could ask why she is still stuck at 55 miles. We could have coffee.
Nope, no can do another friend tells me. Public access to the new City Hall is limited. You have to have business with the city or be talking to a particular person. Otherwise, you have to work there. My friend is very nice. I say OK, she is just carrying out policy.
You have walked for about 15 minutes. I don’t know how many miles. If you want to walk a lot , walk around and around the old ice rink. Everybody else is. Personally, the sun is out, the wind is down, I’m tired of my friends, nice as they are. So I just walk back on the sidewalks and streets.