Our beach vacation is ending soon. We’ve walked miles on the beach, spent hours on the beach. Ate a lot of really good food, read books, stayed up late on our balcony and really had a good low key time. Back to reality soon.
We are having our family vacation in Alabama’s Gulf Coast. We love the beach and the Gulf of Mexico. This is a shot on Wolf Bay at Orange Beach. So I am on “minimal blogging mode.” I’m taking lots of photos to generate “content” as the youngsters say. The Skywatch Friday pages are already made and will come up as normal this week and next.
On Sunday, July 20 a couple weeks ago I took off on a bike ride on the Tulsa RiverParks. It was hot and I didn’t start until midmorning for various reasons so things got a little warm.
Sunday is a big day for Tulsans to get outside and ride their bikes, run, walk, whatever on the RiverParks. The traffic is mainly on the east bank so I started out on the east bank and went up and down the west bank just to get away from people.
Still, it was pretty busy but not overly so.
I was passed by almost everybody except…
…for people standing.
I always love going by PSO’s old Tulsa Power Station electric generating station. That sign looks really nice at night.
I got to my predetermined turnaround point and rested a bit and drank some water and then reversed course. I always check the weather apps to see which way the wind is blowing. I don’t mind riding into the wind on the outbound leg, that way I have the wind at my back going back to my car.
I was one hot, thirsty, old bike rider at the end! 14 miles all told.
I am linking with Skywatch Friday.
A deck with wood rails in our neighborhood green belt.
My favorite dog walking route is in the greenbelt. Here we drop down into what I call “Shady Valley.” Nice respite on a hot day.
On my bike ride last week. This is where I rested for a while.
And this is a trail bridge over Mooser Creek. It never seems quite wide enough for riders approaching each other. The last two photos are kind of funky I know. My new bike cam only takes video so the stills are screen shots. I returned the camera and now have one that takes stills and video. Life is too short to edit video is my motto.
That’s it for this week. Everybody try and stay cool except you guys/gals in the southern Hemisphere, you try and stay warm!
Shadow Shot Sunday (Now at a new ink!)
I went hiking with a friend on Friday, we came upon this family of deer. My friend is kind of a speed hiker so I didn’t even take time to move myself so the one deer occluded by the tree was free. Oh well.
Various native pollinators have really been at work on my wife’s pink hibiscus shrub in the back yard.
And squirrels, boy do have squirrels. Most of them ignore the habanero flavored bird food but interestingly there are a few that love it.
Lizzie the cat loves to nap but when I get close to get a shot of her napping she always wakes up.
Long lines at the camera feeder. It is very popular.
Scattered birds
A bluejay (I think) at the peanut feeder
A 22 second video of some of the birds that visited the feeder.
I’m linking with Saturday’s Critters.
The other day Heather and I went to Joe’s Farm in Bixby to get a few things. The sign above is from previous years. This year the farm didn’t grow any produce, they planted a cover crop to replenish the soil. They still had blackberries and flowers as well as produce from other farms to sell. Heather loves blackberries and asked if the blackberries were still available. The lady there said they are pretty much all gone but if we wanted to we could see if we could find some for and gave us a container to put them in. So off we went.
We passed the fruit trees.
And before you get to the big tree you hang a right and…
And there are the blackberry bushes. I had never picked blackberries so…
I asked Heather, are these blackberries and she said yes but they are not ripe. The ripe ones are very dark. Okay, I get it. And the blackberries were pretty much all picked over but we went up and down several rows and gathered enough to fill the container. It was fun, kind of like geocaching, except for berries.
And then on the way back we stopped and looked at the flowers. They sell cut yourself flowers. Photos are free! And yes I used a filter on the photo above (and below). Flower photos demand impressionistic filters is what I think.
I forgot to take a photo of the blackberries we picked. Heather made a blackberry crisp out of them and that was pretty tasty.
I am linking with My Corner of the World and Skywatch Friday.
The Big Burn was a giant forest fire in August, 2010, that ended up consuming three million acres in Idaho and Montana. Upward of ten thousand men fought the fire, 78 of whom died during the fight.
The devastating fire caused the US Forest Service to change the way they fought fire. You see, the Big Burn started out as dozens of small fires that converged into the destructive force it became. The thinking went, we are going to put out the small fires as soon as we can so they can’t join other fires. So when a fire was spotted it was put out as soon as possible.
That’s great except fire isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Fire does a lot of good. It clears out and thins the forest. Fire is needed to grow some trees. For example lodgepole pine trees have serotinous pine cones which means they need high temperature to open up and disperse their seeds. (My dad was a forest ranger and this was his favorite lesson to tell people about why fires are not necessarily bad.)
So after decades of such policy allowed the amount of fuel in our forests to grow. You couple this with global warming (yep it’s a thing) and the fires of today are nothing like the fires my father and his coworkers fought fifty years ago. This is having an effect on people’s lives. For example, one place where we used to live years ago was in the White Mountains of Arizona. I try and keep up with things and the fire situation has gotten so bad that insurance companies are not renewing policies for people who moved out to the woods to be by themselves. The risks are too high.
The Big Burn is a great book with a compelling story. It is mainly about the birth of the Forest Service and how the Big Burn helped solidify their start. It is also about Theodore Roosevelt and he is always fun to read about.
Sunday morning I rode my bike up and down the west side of the Arkansas River. It was hot, and I was exhausted at the end of my 14 mile ride but I was happy. I had my trail camera on my bike capturing the scenery including lots of other bicyclists, walkers, runners, and escooter riders. Here is a collage of a few of the people I saw.
We continue to get a lot of rain here in Tulsa. When it rains and I want to go hiking I use one of the sustainable trails in town rather than splash through the mud on my regular haunts. So this time I went to Ray Harral Nature Center in Broken Arrow, OK. Their trails are mainly asphalt with some gravel.
There are always lots of birds at Ray Harral but I hardly ever see them. At least with the Merlin App I can figure out what they are. I got lucky this time.
I spotted a couple of cardinals and they stood still long enough for me to get a fuzzy photo (or maybe phuzzy photo) of them. One in a shrub.
And one on the ground.
I saw a couple squirrels as well. In town they are not shy at all, out in the woods they hide. So I got one in a tree.
And another on the ground.
And this is our son, Logan, captured mowing the yard with my trailcam. He got offered a job yesterday (and accepted it) as a full-time paralegal for a law firm here in town. He’s worked very hard to get to this point. We are very proud of him. He’s going to have to give up shorts and tee shirts in exchange for a shirt and tie but hey, he can do it.
I’m linking with Saturday’s Critters.
Earlier this month I was at the Y taking a yoga class. When I went in, the weather was sunny. When I got out, the ground was soaked and the skies were full of clouds that had lots of rain still in them.
Looking South
Looking East
Looking West
We had had torrential rain. I drove home, about four miles and it was dry as a bone.
We had a Full Buck Moon on July 10. Clear skies so I was able to get a halfway decent image of it.
I started working Ipad jigsaws puzzles again. I have a very old Ipad and the app wouldn’t work because I needed to upload and install a new Operating System and it wasn’t working. Drove me crazy!! So I was googling like crazy and then I got on Microsoft’s Copilot AI and asked it how do I upgrade and it said just load itunes on your laptop and then plug in your ipad to the laptop and it will upgrade all by it’s lonesome. I did it and it worked!!
This AI deal is a little scary. I asked if it would take one of my photos and make a postcard out of it and it said sure, upload a photo, and tell Copilot what text I want on the card, what style a card and it would be happy to do it. So I haven’t done it yet. Maybe I’ll have one next week.
I hope that you are all okay!! Word is that ICE is supposed to hit Oklahoma hard starting today. So pray for all us Oklahomans.