Skies over the Turnpike!
The Full Wolf Moon
Skywatch on a Terrace
Fuzzy handheld Skywatch with an iphone
A sunrise from our backyard. Notice the fence pickets. Decided to give you folks a break from my front porch skywalk shots.
A Turkey Mountain Skywatch
And another skywatch from Turkey Mountain, this one with rocks.
I hope everybody is having a good weekend. I’m linking with Skywatch Friday. Go check it out.
This is Route 66 Village, a transportation museum, sitting on it’s namesake highway on the west side of Tulsa. Blue Skies and a big blue locomotive along with a towering oil derrick.
I’m linking with Skywatch Friday today.
This past weekend son Logan and I decided to take a walk around Tulsa’s Lafortune Park. Lafortune Park has a big playground, picnic areas, tennis courts, a high school, baseball parks, and two golf courses with a walking path about 3 miles long winding around it all.
I didn’t bring my camera, just my cell phone. Luckily there were some pretty decent skies.
Part of the trail was a little muddy. In the 26 years we have lived in Tulsa I bet that I have either walked or run around Lafortune hundreds of times.
I love pedestrian bridges. Logan is now 20, when he was about 3 he liked to go hide under this bridge and pretend he was a troll. The kid used to drive me crazy!! Perfectly good playground 100 feet away. Oh well.
There he is. He lags a little behind but it works out because I take pictures and study on things and eventually he catches up to me.
I’m linking with Skywatch Friday.
The other day I had a meeting in a field office of my employer’s in Western Oklahoma. I had a little time afterward so I went on a little drive.
I drove past a herd of cattle.
Then a newly drilled well being prepared for fracking. Notice the green pipe in the foreground being built to take gas from the well for processing and delivery to market.
And then I turned down a muddy farm road to get to this marker.
And walked a short ways down a grassy path to this humble grave.
This is where Jesse Chisholm is buried. He blazed the Chisholm Trail from South Texas to Abilene, Kansas where tens of thousands head of cattle herded north to supply beef for the northeast. He didn’t drive cattle, he was a trader with several stores and developed the trails to restock his stores. He also had good relations with many of the Native American tribes and negotiated to recovery of several women and children who had been kidnapped by the tribes. He also helped facilitate several peace treaties. He died of food poisoning near where he is buried.
I think it is amazing that somebody who had such a huge part of the history and legends of the West has such a humble grave.
The sky was clear and the moon was bright so I took a photo of it. Don’t forget this Friday we have a full blood moon coming up. This was about 86% gibbous phase. I don’t always get them but I love it when I can see the craters on the “bottom” of the moon.
And here we are in the ‘hood. I loved the clouds one day when I was on the front porch. I guess sometimes I am a lazy skywatcher. While we are in a sharing mood, I took the photo of the moon from my front yard as well. Do you have any true confessions you want to share?
And this is my favorite building in Tulsa. The Boston Avenue United Methodist Church. An art deco masterpiece built in the late 1920’s and designed by Bruce Goff and Adah Robinson. The interior is beautiful also. It was our family church when we first moved to Tulsa.
And this is from Oxley Nature Center. I love how the island appears to be suspended in air. (Okay maybe I’m stretching it a little bit.)
Okay, that’s it for this week. Don’t forget the full moon on Friday. Take some photos for me. I’m going to be at a baseball game so I am depending on you.
You can tell that in Oklahoma we are strict. Walkers and runners over there, bicyclists over here. I feel jealous of roller skaters, and skate boarders. I guess they can go where they want.
Spring is here, the weather is warming up and we have daylight savings time. I love daylight savings time. With the warmer weather it is time to ride my bike. I am not running any longer, I don’t know if I am ever going to run, and walking is great, but walking is so slowwww. Riding is a lot faster than running.
That is the Creek Nation River Spirit Casino over on the left. The relationship with the tribe and the rest of the state is complicated in Oklahoma. I kind of like complicated. I had a guy ring the doorbell today to try and sell window replacements to us. He was a good guy and not giving me the hard sell. I asked his name (I forget what he said but it was both unfamiliar and nice sounding to me.) He laughed and said that he is Cherokee and the name means “first born” in that language.
Heather and I went on a bike ride a couple week ago on the Arkansas River. We started north an d basically flew north. We were sailing, biking was easy. It was great. We went north to the turnaround and headed south, into a strong wind. It was a long slow miserable painful seven mile slog back to the car. Springtime and Oklahoma winds are not always great.
Heather and Logan were busy doing something the other day and so I went on a bike ride on the Arkansas River. The forecast and the skies were both threatening so I didn’t go far.
Today I took a half day off and came home and got our taxes organized to to take to the accountant this week. That always makes me anxious. I ran into some questions about my late Father’s estate and his tax return. I talked to my sister, I talked to the accountant, and I talked to my sister again and it is all good. Of course I am sure she appreciated me calling her about tax questions on her birthday. But I got it all figured out. And then it was like, I got it all figured out, the kid is still at work, Heather is at work. I am going for a short bike ride, so off I went for a quick ten miles. Above is a not bad turnaround point.
The Blue Rose Cafe on the River. I love it. Not in the cards today though.
I still can’t run and today I was planning on getting on a cycling machine but the forecasted rain had ended and temps were moderate so I decided to get outside and walk a few miles instead of getting on the cycling machine. I don’t know about you but exercise machines are a necessary evil. So I went walking in the windy, gusty, cloudy weather (I love that kind of weather.)
I had to go check out progress on a high rise condo/apartment complex going up. I enjoyed my time out on the river. I went a total of about 3.2 miles.
This is in my employer’s parking lot. We are all about checking, double checking, and rechecking. We have protocols for everything and used to be March was a big month for snow. In like a Lion, out like a Lamb is what they say about March in Oklahoma. With our climate change, February is the new March. So soon I expect we’ll be outfitting the parking lot security vehicle for snow in late January instead of March.
After work, I drove home, and this sky greeted me just before I got to the house.
Here in Oklahoma, we have our issues but we do have great skies. How are the skies where you live?
The sky during a recent blustery day on Tulsa’s industrial west side. I love the bare trees, the blue sky, and the clouds. I even love the “trash to energy plant” on the lower left side of the photo with the two smokestacks.
I got away from work for a little while Tuesday at noon and drove to nearby Gilcrease Museum. I didn’t go into the museum but I went for a walk on the adjacent city park, Stuart Park. There was a sign there to be on the lookout for a bobcat and to report sightings. So that kind of perked my interest. I didn’t see any bobcats but I did take a few photos. It was very warm, almost 70. This is after being 4F on Saturday morning. Now we are supposed to have an ice storm on Saturday. Oh well, this winter if you don’t like the weather just wait a little bit and it will change.
And then last night when I got home I noticed the moon was almost full so I got my trusty camera out and took a shot. It is the Full Wolf Moon, or almost full I guess. I love taking shots of the moon. I have dozens of them. I don’t know why, it doesn’t really change does it. I imagine I’ll be taking lots more as time passes.
Logan has a friend who lives out south of town in the middle of nowhere. I don’t mind taking him for a visit because there almost always good photo ops at various places on the way including this crossroads where the main road turns. For some reason I like to take pics of the sunset with car headlights. It seems to me that it adds a little bit of motion to a set piece. I’m just a lowly picture taker so what do I know
I’m still learning how use Lightroom and Photoshop and I am definitely in the “Why had I not done this earlier?” mode. I really like how the various parts interact. I can open up and do basic edits in LIghtroom and then pass it easily to PhotoShop where I can send it to a Topaz filter. And like magic it sends to the Topaz edits back to Photoshop and Photoshop sends them Lightroom and in Lightroom I can publish directly to Flickr. It works so smoothly it is almost scary.
Next I’m going to learn layers in PhotoShop. I’m interested in layering images on top of each other. Just of the heck of it at first but I also want to see what I can do creatively with the techniques.