Geocaching Picnik in the Heat

Last weekend was HOT and HUMID. I went to see my favorite MIL Nana and check into why her swimming pool filter wasn't working. I finally figured it out and got it fixed, grabbed a few of her cookies that were right out of the oven and then hurried on home to help Sweetie clean house went to find a few geocaches (don't tell Sweetie, OK).

There were four of them scattered down a trail along a turnpike. Have I mentioned that it was hot?



(I subscribe to Picnik.com now and I just love playing with it. I know that over processing photos can be annoying and I promise to be more subtle in the future but let me have my fun now, please.)

I found four caches in all, here are a couple of them.





Four caches was enough. I was cooked.



By the time this is posted the Yogi's will be headed for cooler climes. Hopefully I'll have more to write about than heat and geocaches when I get back.

"The Sorcer's Apprentice"

It's HOT in Oklahoma these days. We decided to beat the heat this weekend by going to the movies.



We were chilling. We got there early and got the special footrest seats.



Can you guess whose feet belongs to who?

We went to see The Sorcerer's Apprentice. It stars Nicholas Cage in what is for him a restrained performance, which means that he is over the top.

I could tell you what the movie is about but who cares. It is about saving the world from ultimate evil via a reluctant hero who has to learn what to do and at the same time get the girl. What else, oh, yeah, here is the girl, Becky:

Becky is very sweet, I told SuperPizzaBoy that he should be looking for sweet girls like Becky. I love the name if nothing else. He said that he is not ready. I'm glad to hear to hear that son.

Anyway, a kids movie that the parents can like. It has action, romance, wonderful special effects, great fighting scenes, dragons, special powers, and they keep the language cleaned up (Thanks Disney!)

I give it four stars out of four. Go see it!

Rascal Flatts - "Nothing Like This" Tour with Kellie Pickler, Natural Gas People, and Introducing "BOK Bingo"

Friday night Sweetie and I left SuperPizzaBoy in the capable hands of Anna the baby sitter and off we went to see Rascall Flatts in concert at the BOK Center in Tulsa. I am not much of a Rascal Flatts fan but I got free tickets from my employer, so off we went.

One of the openers was Kellie Pickler. Let me tell you something, she can sing. We had seen her before but I was really impressed with her this time. She really has a great voice.



Then came the guys of Rascal Flatts.



Left to right, Joe Don Rooney (from Picher, Oklahoma), Gary LeVox, and Jay Demarcus. Of course, I kept asking which one was Rascall Flats until somebody clued me in.

They put on a great show. The band was great, the singing was wonderful, but even more than that they really connected with their audience. They've made fans out of Sweetie and I. We'll be looking for our first Rascall Flat's cd. Here is a review of the show from the Tulsa World.

I guess that it was a night for the Oklahoma natural gas industry also.

I spotted Susan and Sonja in the audience. Former coworkers and dear friends. Except they'll kill me now.



Also, former coworker and fellow geocacher David, looking right at us.



Oh yeah, I almost forgot Sweetie and me.



You know I just can't get this "stick the camera out and take the picture of us" right. I need to work on it.

Hey, I'm going to start a new game. Its called "BOK Bingo." It's kind of like Walmart Bingo only geared toward concerts. I'm trying to come up with squares now.



Lets see, you have "picture taking", "giant cans of crappy bar", "cowboy hats", "short dresses with cowboy boots", and "leg tattoos". Anybody else have any other categories that you want to submit?

The concert is great, I give it four stars out of four. Go see it if you can, play some BOK Bingo!

Mount Yogi Observatory - Latest Research and Findings

Our Astronomers have been working overtime.



We had this to report:

2 Praise him, all his angels,
praise him, all his heavenly hosts.

3 Praise him, sun and moon,
praise him, all you shining stars.

4 Praise him, you highest heavens
and you waters above the skies.

Psalm 148:2-4 (NIV)
Biblegateway.com

Check out My Great Aunt B's site for other pairings of pics and verse.

Geocaching 101

I have been asked to explain what geocaching is and how to do it. Geocaching.com has this great little short video that explains the basics of what it is and how to get started. It does a lot better job explaining it than I can.



Be careful, it can turn into an obsession.

There hasa even been a movie made about geocaching. Its called Splinterheads and here is a trailer.



You need at a minimum two things to go geocaching. First is a free membership at geocaching.com, second is a GPS receiver. Base models cost less than $100 new. Check your local Walmart, Academy or other sporting goods store, Amazon, and I've bought several at huge discounts on ebay.

If you live close to Tulsa and want to go find a few let me know and we can meet up. There are well over a thousand caches in the city we'll go see if we can find some.

Weekend Reflections - Pepsi Lake on Turkey Mountain

I've been running and exploring the trails on Turkey Mountain after work.  There is a ridiculously fabulous complex network of trails and just a few of them are marked, there are very few people there, and so I'm lost half the time but I love the feeling of not knowing exactly where I am.

This was near my turnaround point, you can see the sun is getting kind of low. It was almost pitch black by the time I got back to my car.

Check out Weekend Reflections for other mirrored surfaces from all over.

Everybody have a great weekend.

Mowing by Moonlight

Its been hot here in Oklahoma. I've been mowing the yard after dark. What do you do to beat the heat?

Check out Skywatch Friday for amazing photos of the sky from all over the world.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I just finished the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a free download from Amazon onto my Kindle.

You know what I really liked it. Sherlock Holmes is really fun smart guy except he cannot let his super logical brain be diverted by any sort of female wanderings. It makes me wonder about him. He is also a cocaine addict and proud of it. It helps him sort things out. And he has been known to hang out in opium dens.

The stories are very clever and well written. I mean how many people actually have actually read the book? I never had.

Anyways, I give the books a three out of five stars. Three is worth reading. The stories get a little repetitive and I admit I only read about half of them. Sorry!

I'm changing my rating system because the whole world uses one to five.

Geocaching, Skirt Lifting, and a Drawing for a GPS

Its been sweltering down here in Oklahoma lately. I know its supposed to be hot here but it seems like a little extra hot lately. Friday evening our downstairs air conditioner quit working. Thank goodness for the upstairs unit. It is a lot smaller but it was the little air conditioner that could. It kept the house tolerable, especially upstairs. The repair company we used was swamped and couldn't get to us until Sunday afternoon. They got it fixed in short order.

Of course, since the house was cooling down I felt it was time to do a little geocaching outside where it was a 100 degrees.  First I had to replace a cache that had been missing since January. Our local reviewer, "General Disarray" had sent me a nice little email asking me to take care of it, or else.

I already had a geocache container. I gave it to my friend Baloney for Christmas as part of a Secret Santa Gift Exchange. She kept it for a while and gave it back to me. OK with me, she kept the cap, complete with cap light, and the Edward tshirt.

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You can tell, since she is paler than Edward, going outside is not her thing. She has lost her tan since then.

Anyway thanks to Baloney I had a container and went out and replaced my "Little Haikey Creek" Cache. The area is prone to flooding and the other caches have washed away and are probably floating around the Gulf of Mexico, soaked with BP's Macondo well oil, along with a bunch of green sea turtles. So I elevated the cache this time. It's going to be a little easier to find.



Of course, its a little hard to get to as you have to go down this creek about a quarter mile or so. The link to the cache page is here in case you want to try your hand at finding it. Let me know how you do.



For anybody out there who might want to get into geocaching. Heidi over at TheGoodStuffGuide.com has a post on geocaching with kids and has a giveaway going for a kid friendly GPS receiver preloaded with caches (it will work just fine for adults also). Just click here and leave a comment to enter the drawing. Of course she was smart enough to include a few comments from moi about geocaching with kids.

Speaking of kids, mine was at his Nana's house swimming. Smart kid. I was swimming also, in sweat and deet. While I was all stinky I decided to go find some geocaches. The first one I went to said was adjacent to a school and "technically not on school property." (Geocaches are forbidden on school property for various reasons.) I went looking for it and finally found it.



You can barely see it at the base of the pole. Dude, since it is attached to the school fence, I think technically it is on school property. I'm not going to rat you out though.

The next one was a little bit more clever. Do you see the container?



Do you see it now?



I love stuff like that.

By this time it was really hot and nobody else but me was out and about and I was feeling really hot and nasty. So it was time to do some skirt lifting. Sweetie doesn't approve of my skirt lifting hobby but hey sometimes I just cannot help myself. My favorite kind of skirts are short skirts. Something about them...

So here is a good example of a very short skirt I lifted on Sunday,



Isn't that nice? Who could resist that lifting that skirt? Underneath the skirt was something I was longing for, my 979th geocache find.

Sometimes when you lift skirts you are helping somebody out. Their skirt is not adjusted right and you can set things right when you let the skirt down. Here is a good example of that.



I mean if you had a skirt that was all askew wouldn't you appreciate it if somebody set it straight? I thought so.

The Back Alleys, Pizza Joints, and Wildlife Heritage Center of Antlers, Oklahoma

Last week Sweetie and I dropped SuperPizzaBoy off at his friend Nick's house and  drove down to  the city of Antlers in southeast Oklahoma to help MIL Nana with some personal business. We helped her remove personal items from a building she is leasing to somebody else. She and her late husband Charles operated a pharmacy in the building for years and years. Somebody else bought out the pharmacy and leased the building.

This is the back entrance.



Being a small town I think just as many people used the back entrance as the front. It always kind of tickled me. The new owners of the pharmacy aren't quite as inviting. So its kind of like "Welcome, now go around to the front entrance."

I'm a real fan of alleys. I think they are cool. The street front is what the building owner wants you to see, the alley is how they really are. Plus the back alley is how stuff is brought in to sell out the front. The back alley has the utility connections. I love utility connections, they show how we are all connected to each other technologically.



It looks like originally there were three windows and a cargo door with very nice arches over them.Now everything is all bricked up. Except oddly one window that was boarded up. Security over style. And look at that tangled web of wiring, both electricity and phone, what a mess. You know, if you have phone, you can connect yourself to the occupants of the building from almost anywhere on the globe. I think that's cool.

For lunch we ate with some friends at the nearby pizza joint. High Street Pizza, on High Street!

Here is Sweetie humoring her blogger husband.



I love this photo, even if it is a bit blurry. I'm not really into flashes unless absolutely necessary. So things get a little fuzzy now and then.



During a lull, Sweetie and I checked out the Wildlife Heritage Center that her Dad was instrumental in creating. There is a stone bench there in his honor.



It took years for Charles to get the facility built. He had lots of help but he was the driving force. The feature that he liked best was the live deer. He and Nana fed them almost every day. We view the deer as a living memorial to Charles.





So if you are ever in Antlers Oklahoma check out the Wildlife Heritage Center.

As a bonus SuperPizzaBoy and I have a geocache at the Center. You'll have to ask for it. It is called "Deer Capital".

Camera Critters - Suburban Barnyard

We have some family friends who live on acreage just outside the city limits. Subdivisions are going up all around them but they still have their critters. My favorite are their two peacocks. They don't let me too close though.





The sheep were staying in the shade.



Check out Camera Critters for more photographs of all kinds of critters.

Tight Squeeze

I had my day off today. SuperPizzaBoy and I hung out a little bit and ran a few errands. I decided to go find a geocache. It was so hot SPB asked if he could stay in the truck and listen to the radio. OK, but don't touch nothing, ok, you can touch the radio control, ok you touch the gum container if you need more, ok you can touch the door handle if the truck is burning and you need to get out, ok you can touch the seatbelt to get out of the truck when it burns, OKAY!!! You know, its a burden when your kid is smarter than you are, a lot smarter.

You know what else is a burden, a pot belly, that is a burden. I looked all over for the cache and then resigned myself to where it is:



Yep, I decided that I was going to have to go through that gap. I didn't know the cache was in there, I didn't know where else it could be. Luckily I didn't have to get my whole self through there. Just my manly sunken chest, arms, and big head. And there it was, right at the limits of my reach. I did get the cache, pull out the log, sign it, and replace. Well maybe I replaced it a couple inches closer for the next middle aged, pot bellied, sunken chest desk jockey geocacher to find.

It was worth it though. It was so danged hot, I said enough for geocaching. If it is too hot for me to go geocaching, then you know its hot.

Children's Garden at Tulsa Garden Center and Li'l Green Thumbs

Tulsa has a lot of well hidden treasures and I was shown a gem that is hidden best of all. Its behind this ugly building.

Are you familiar with this building? I hope not! If you serve community service time in Tulsa this is one of the places you used to report t in order to repay your debt to society. Can you imagine the criminals who have gone through those doors? Jaywalkers, Democrats, Liberals, Universal Health Care and Gun Control Advocates, and the like. Oh, it makes me shiver just to think of them. Such criminals allowed to run loose amongst us. Those gun control nuts, I'll tell you what the Okie method of gun control is. Its keeping two hands on the weapon at all times. Sarah Palin knows what I'm talking about!

Oh, I'm sorry I digress. And the criminals have to report somewhere else now. Now you safely visit the Children's Garden right behind this building. It is very cool.

SuperPizzaBoy at the Children's Garden

A little glimpse of Sweetie down the path.

The Tulsa Garden Center has a Li'l Green Thumb Program for gardeners aged 4 to 11. This Saturday, July 17 from 9 am to 11:30 am is their next event. Check the Tulsa Garden Center web site for details. Pre-registration is required. Sweetie is going to be there helping with the program. Come down and say Hi.

Skywatch Friday - Idaho Mountain Ranch Sunset

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Wordless Wednesday - Gift for Mom

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Ruby Tuesday - Children's Garden Shed

Fort Worth Botanical Gardens

Check out Ruby Tuesday for more red from all ver.