Tag Archives: Ellen

Christmas 2023

Christmas and the end of the year buzzed by really quickly this year. Sorry I have been incommunicado all the sudden but hey, I’m back. So I’ll bring you up to speed.

A few days before Christmas we joined another couple for a Christmas music show at historic Cain’s Ballroom featuring several very talented local singers and musicians.

Isaac Hanson, of Hanson, showed up and played a couple of songs. Heather and I remember when he was just a little boy and played for free at local events with his brothers. He’s all growns up now and has a whole bunch of kids of his own.

Heather made her traditional gingerbread cookies. They are always a hit.

They go fast.

We made a visit to my brother Bob at his residence.

And gathered around the tree.

On Christmas Day we went to my MIL’s house and we opened gifts and had steak and baked potatoes for Christmas dinner. Bad blogger me, didn’t get any family photos.

A couple days later Heather, son Logan, Kodi, and I drove a roundabout route to Colorado Springs. My sister and BIL were hosting their family for Christmas. We hadn’t seen them for years so they graciously assented to our presence.

They are an active and fun loving bunch. If you are going to hang with them you better get up early and be prepared to stay late. They were very welcoming to us crashing the party.

Here is Logan with my sister and BIL’s dogs. The little dog is Maisey and is very sweet the big dog is Aspen. Aspen kept trying to play with our little dog, Kodi but Kodi was intimidated.

Sister and her husband treated us all to the US Olympic and Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs. It was great. There are lots of things to look at and videos of past performances and artifacts like the costume above worn by Peggy Flemming who won the Gold Medal in figure skating at the 1968 Winter Olympics. I always thought she was classy and elegant.

Back at my sister’s house, Kodi went for a walk and got to meet Jasper the horse and get sniffed and inspected really good by the horse. I think our city dog thinks he doesn’t want become a ranch dog.

On the drive back to Tulsa Kodi found an earth cache. A specialized form of a geocache. So now I call him Kodi the Geodog.

I also got a shadow photo of Kodi so I guess he is a shadow dog as well.

So anyway, that was our whirlwind trip!!

I am linking with Skywatch Friday, Saturday’s Critters, Shadow Shot Sunday 2, and My Corner of the World

Shadow Shot Sunday – Chapel Shadows

***Alumni Chapel at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque***

Deep Shadows under a bright New Mexican sun at the Chapel in Albuquerque. Deep memories also. My sister and her husband got married there forty six years ago.

And here they are now (or at least back in October when they came for a visit,) Still going strong!! Way to go Ellen and Irv.

Shadow Shot Sunday

Family Hike on the Mountain

Last week my sister, Ellen, and her husband, Irv, came down from Colorado to visit us.

While here we joined our brother Bob at his residence. Management was throwing an Oktoberfest, food, drink, desert, entertainment! We were all up for that.

Music was provided by a local accordion band. I didn’t even know that accordion bands were a thing. These folks were great. They all played together, you know, like they were a band! It was jam packed with residents and guests and I think everyone had a good time.

The next day I showed off Turkey Mountain. They were very polite. They live on some acreage where they have a front row seat to Pikes Peak at 14,114 feet. Turkey Mountain is 804 feet. They did not snicker, not even once!! Hey you know, we in Tulsa are proud of 804 foot tall hill. We can call it a mountain if we want.

Irv is a fellow geocacher and he found one on the moutain.

Ellen made friends with Sasquatch.

We went by Pepsi Lake. They didn’t ask why the ponds on the Turkey Mountain hill are called lakes. I don’t know!!

We ended up going about 4.5 miles or so. I was worn out.

We had a really good visit.

I’m linking with Skywatch Friday. Come join in the fun!!

2022 National Arabian Horse Show

My sister and her husband were in town recently to visit and attend the National Arabian Horse Show here in Tulsa. She and he were heavily involved in youth horse judging community in Colorado Springs and attended the horse show regularly for several years.

Heather and I attended the final night of the show with them and the show was amazing. Beautiful Arabian horses being ridden by people that know what they are doing. They had several different classes or style of riding.

The horses are gorgeous, groomed beautifully. The riders are dressed very well also. They ride their horses around the ring in various trots, walks, canters and hand gallops all the while scrutinized by a team of judges.

The audience is raucous during the competition cheering their favorites on loudly during the competition and judging. They also cheered the winners loudly. Great sportsmanship, not a boo heard the entire evening.

The horses have a distinctive gait. I’m told that they have to be trained to do it as it doesn’t come naturally.

Hopefully we can attend next year. It had been 2013 and 2014 when we last made the show.

Links to the 2013 and 2014 shows

Skywatch Friday – Skies of Hope

We have a little hope. After a rocky period, we have a glimmer of hope for our brother Bob. He’s responding to therapy and so we are headed the right way. He’s a long distance runner with a bunch of marathons under his belt and he knows what hard work is.

The last week or so, our sister Ellen has been with brother Bob at the rehab hospital. that was after a week with her at the first hospital while the medical staff tried to figure out what was wrong with our brother. She and I quizzed doctors and nurses, googled the info they gave us like crazy, waited long hours for the specialists to show up on their rounds.

Just keep us in your thoughts and prayers is all I ask.

I am linking with Skywatch Friday

Skywatch Friday – Hike to Trout Lake at Yellowstone Park

During my trip to Yellowstone Park earlier in August to see my sister, we took a hike up to Trout Lake. It was a hike that kicked my butt but was only 200 feet in elevation change. But it was worth the climb. The lake is absolutely gorgeous as are the the views from the lake.

There were a couple guys fishing from floats for cutthroat trout. One of them told us that he had caught (and released) eleven and they were gorgeous with deep rich colors. He was a little older guy and mentioned that the hard part was hauling all the gear up the trail from the road. I had a feeling that he lived not far from the Park. I am wondering if he stashes his gear nearby.

My fellow bloggers over the years have taught me the beauty of imperfection and change in plants. So I took lots of pics of plants in the midst of transition. Nature is beautiful in all its cycles.

Here is my sister Ellen, the Park Ranger. I felt guilty as we were out from 8 am to about 9 pm every day. She loves showing off Yellowstone Park. Check out her blog. She saw wolves today on a hike.

Here is my Garmin connect view of our outing. It doesn’t lie, like I might. It says 200 feet of elevation change, I’d of sworn 2000 feet. And 1. 4 miles long. Why, it was easily six miles, if not longer.

I am linking with Skywatch Friday today. Come join us! You don’t have a blog? You can link an Instagram photo!

I’m a little late with my post. I was going to write it Wednesday night along with setting up the Skywatch Friday meme and my brand spanking new Dell laptop with super duper quad core processor and solid state hard drive decided to not work, at all!!! As I thought about it though I remembered that Staples, where I bought it from, had given me a thumb drive which they said to keep track of because it was a recovery drive. So a few hours ago, I stuck it into my Dell and fired it up and it came up normally and asked if I wanted to restore my settings to factory, and I said yes and everything now works fine. What’s up? Can anybody tell me?

Our World Tuesday – Yellowstone Park’s Grand Prismatic Spring

My last few posts have been about my recent trip to Yellowstone National Park to see my sister Ellen, the Park Ranger (so proud of her, our father was a Forest Ranger so it is great to see her carrying on the tradition). I only spent a few days with her as we went around the Park and the adjoining Grand Teton National Park, but I saw so much.

So one day we went to see the Grand Prismatic Spring at Midway Geyser Basin. I’ve seen lots of photos of it the last few years and maybe, or maybe not, I saw it as a kid during our whirlwind 1960’s style vacations that we took as kids.

This trip I was wondering what the first people who saw the thermal features in the park thought. Steam and boiling hot water coming out of the ground. What a wonderland or what a nightmare. Plus the ground could give way any time sending somebody to their doom or at the very least severe burns. Something that happens to the dummies today who think the rules do not apply to them.

Yellowstone is a wonderland in many senses of the term. Its natural beauty is astounding and its supernatural features such as the geysers and hot springs are bewildering.

When you leave the parking lot of the Grand Prismatic Spring you come upon this scene of boiling hot water entering the aptly named Firehole River. The chemical engineer in me was doing mixing calculations trying to figure out how much the temperature of the hot water raised the river temperature plus wondering how much bad stuff from deep down in the earth is now dissolved in that how water, and how much precipitates out of solution when it mixes with the cold water, and how the remaining dissolved minerals and higher temperature affected the trout fishing. My sister just said she sees lots of fishermen (fisherwomen too!) on the River and so I decided I would worry about something else, especially since I didn’t bring my calculator with me.

But it was like entering a different world with all the steam all around us. I learned that autofocus cameras don’t like swirling clouds of steam so I would focus a on a rock and then pan away. Just in case you are wondering why the steam is out of focus and the rocks are not.

The closer you get to the Spring, the more steam you see, especially on a chilly morning.

They have benches but they are mainly for people getting a better angle on the water.

At first, I could see why you got up on the benches. So much steam swirling around obscuring the view.

I liked this view. You can’t really see the spring, but you can see the colors of the spring reflecting off the steam.

Ah here you go, things kind of cleared up a bit. The different colors are from some of the bacteria that live in the spring that thrive at high temperatures. I find that concept fascinating. How can anything live close to boiling point with all sorts of strange chemicals involved.

The strangeness just extends away from the spring.

There is an overlook trail that Ellen took us to where you can get a better look of the Grand Prismatic Spring. You have some elevation and perspective that you don’t get at a lower level and it is easier to see. It is more than just a little walk but it is worth it if you are up to it. I think the spring is gorgeous. And I love the name Grand Prismatic Spring. I think it lives up to its name.

One thing about Yellowstone that I learned very quickly is that not just Americans love Yellowstone. The world loves Yellowstone Park. A huge percentage of visitors are from outside the USA. Somehow I feel that increases the responsibility of us to take care and preserve the park. The international visitors bring their culture with them and selfie sticks but somehow it all works and everybody gets along. I think that is great.

This is a view at ground level below the overlook. We are pretty far away but one can still see the colors of the spring in the spring.

I’m linking with Our World Tuesday, come check it out.

Happy Father’s Day Dad

Another Father’s Day and I am blessed to still have my Father. He lives a thousand miles away but I think about him all the time. He is my personal hero. Dad is getting better at the group selfie thing.

He grew up in the plains of South Dakota but somehow became a Forest Ranger with the US Forest Service.

We lived in some really out of the way places. This was Coyote, New Mexico. In case you are wondering, I am the good looking kid. It has been years since my brother and I have held hands like that. It may be a few years before it happens again.

He fought forest fires for a living.

And suffered from the same photography frustrations as I do now. Left to right I think that is me, sister Ellen, and brother Bob.

Dad was always student of history. We took a journey to Fort Sill, Oklahoma several years ago and found Geronimo’s grave in a very out of the way place on a very cold day in November.

Here is a publicity still by the Forest Service with him and me and my Smokey Bear on the Santa Fe National Forest. I am still waiting for the royalty check.

Here is Mom and Dad in Ireland back in the 80’s. They had lots of fun together.

This is Dad with my sister Ellen, brother Bob, and me at a church reunion in Payson, Arizona.

Dad even tried a little geocaching, here with me and sister Ellen. Mainly trying to be a good sport more than a love for the sport. He was always a good sport.

He has slowed down a little bit but is still sharp as a tack and is still living life.

Happy Father’s Day Dad, I love you.

Dad Gets a New Home

I have been flying lately up to and back from Idaho Falls, Idaho where my Dad lives.

I’ve been going through the Denver Airport, which is huge and has limitless opportunity for people watching.

It also has the best airport pub in the country, The New Belgium Hub. It was pretty empty last time I was there.

The Idaho Falls Airport is kind of small by comparison.

My dad called my sister and said that he was ready to change his living arrangements. We all went up in early July and looked around and found him a place. My sister and her husband took over from there and got him moved and his house ready to sell. So he has moved from his house of over thirty three years with the beautiful shady back yard to a very nice place in the same town where people are checking on him and life is quite a bit easier.