I’m going back to the old days for my shadows this week. Remember 2014? No covid right? Ah, them were the days. I noticed that I posted the same shot for Shadow Shot Sunday twice in the last three weeks. If anybody noticed they were nice enough not to say anything. You know how us old guys are. We are forgetful, and lazy. So I’m going back ten years.
And I was a lot skinnier back then as well! Not so much bingeing Netflix and snacks back then.
Tulsa had this old pedestrian bridge across the Arkansas River. I loved it. A former railroad bridge that was deemed unsafe by the city and torn down and replaced by a fancy new bridge. I love the new bridge as well. At least I got photos of the old bridge. The new bridge is pretty sleek but its shadows are weak. You didn’t know I was a poet did you?
I love fire escape stair shadows. I don’t go to downtown much any longer so I dug this up out of archives.
So Friday afternoon I was going to a preview of the new Gilcrease Museum. I checked in with guard at the entrance to the parking lot and I was a little early and so he said you got some time so go ahead and park and make yourself at home. I never need to be told that. You invite me to your house, I’m going to check out your books, liquor cabinet, and refrigerator. I’ll be playing with your dog and tracking down your cat. So now you know why I never get invited anywhere. But at Gilcrease I parked and walked across the street to the Thomas Gilcrease Mansion. I love the formal garden there.
They had the fountain going so I was trying to make a slow shutter photo of the fountain. Doing that with a handheld phone is tough. I hope it doesn’t make you too dizzy. And then I thought, hmm, I’m going to check out that the green structure is over there. I don’t know what you call it but it is wrought iron and very ornate.
So it was like wow, those are some interesting shadows.
Then I looked up through the lattice and wow. This is really cool. I’ve been here a lot and I guess that I never looked up.
So then I looked to the side and I love this shadow of the structure plus the garden fence. I love the long shadows of autumn.
As I left the garden I found this plaque about gardens. I swear have never seen this before but it is perfect.
The other day I was poking around the parking lot of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum on a special type geocache called an Adventure Lab. As part of completing the Adventure Lab I came up on this thing.
What? A Human Analemmatic Sundial. Analemmatic sounds like some sort of embarrassing medical condition.
My best bud Mr. Google tells me that an analemmatic sundial is special sundial where the hours are arranged in an ellipse and hour pointer is vertical. A human analemmatic sundial is where you are the pointer. Also you have to stand on a different spot every month for it to work.
Rest assured I was not up and out of the house by 8:30. The other part of this special sundial is that you have to correct for daylight savings time yourself. I thought it was pretty cool.
It was not the first time I have ever seen a sundial like this. Tulsa’s Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness Area has one but it is labeled as a Human Sundial. Human is a lot easier for me to spell than Analemmatic.
It has been there eight years, just off the lower parking lot and still works.
It was an Eagle Scout project. God bless Eagle Scouts I say. They keep the world going around.
Anyway, I learned something. You probably knew all about it.
We went on a family outing to the Tulsa Botanic Garden. Lots of cool things to look at including this shadow featuring a handrail and other elements of steps in the garden.
I went hiking the other day and took a couple of shadow selfies. Here’s a fuzzy one. Do you see little old me? I think it is fuzzy because the image focused on the bridge I was standing on. That is coming in clear.
And here is a big selfie. I love how afternoon shadows make me look slimmer. And wrinkles don’t show up on shadow selfies either.
Appeal to the Great Spirit sculpture by Cyrus Dallin.
The sculpture has an interesting history. Their are lots of copies out in the world. The original is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Read the Wikipedia Article.
I have 27 photos of this sculpture in my archives. I feel drawn to it whenever I visit Woodward Park. These photos are from 2014.
So I used to be a runner. Not much of a runner but still I entered races. My big race of the year was the Tulsa Run 15K. I loved it, 9.3 miles from downtown Tulsa through midtown and then back in late October, Tulsa’s best season. It was like a meditation to me. I ran along and just took it all in, the sun and wind in my face, the beautiful fall foliage, the other runners, the bystanders and all the bands. It was a big event in Tulsa, thousands of runners, lots of spectators. Beer and candy bars at the finish. I think I ran something like 20 or more in a row. I was a very slow runner. I always finished in the slowest 10 or 20% of the field. My goal was to just enjoy it and finish. So this is a brief story of my blazing finish at the 2004 version of the race.
I was running along, enjoying myself, zoning out and like I said before just enjoying the sun and wind on my face. I was going along at a pretty good pace for me and I was getting close to the finish and there were these two women in front running together but I wasn’t paying attention to them. Now oftentimes at the finish, there is the finish line and just before is another line with a sensor that makes your name pop up and you can get your name called out. Well I was focused on the finish line but the two women stopped running hard at the line before the finish line and I didn’t notice that so I ran in between them almost knocking them over. They were good sports and everything and no boyfriend came over and punched me in the nose or anything but it wasn’t really a good look for me.
But, you will notice that I beat both of them by a toe! So maybe it was worth it. Instead of finishing 9,373rd in the race, I finished 9,371st. (I’m making those numbers up.)
The other thing is that may be the only running photo of me with at least one foot in the air. This is one of the thousands of photos I have recently found that I thought were lost forever.
Here’s Kodi the ornery Pomeranian hiding in the shadows of a tomato plant.
At the gym, a Kia Soul with eye lashes.
From twenty years ago, with family in Ventura, California celebrating my brother Bob’s retirement from the Navy. Looks like me and my lovely, and kind of ornery, niece Dana were having a photo shootout on the beach.
And my sister Ellen, Dana’s mom, joining in the fun. Ellen has a ornery side also.
And brother Bob with niece Dana to the our right.
As you can tell, it was an impromptu beach visit, and too cold in December for swimming suit anyway.
