Getaway to Eureka Springs

This past weekend Sweetie and I took a much needed trip together to Eureka Springs, Arkansas.



In a town of great B&B's I think we stayed at the best. They brought a delicious hot breakfast to our door every morning.



We're going back later this year. Check out Evening Shade for details.

We had a great time. We saw some funky old buildings.



Sweetie found a yarn shop



We each got a new hat



We checked out the treasures at the local history museum.



We saw some of the local couture



Checked out a local watering hole



And tried some of my favorite adult malted beverage



Shoot, we even saw Humpty Dumpty



We had a great time this weekend. We're going back. Tell me about your last getaway.

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The Tourist with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp

Sweetie and I recently saw The Tourist with Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie.

Jolie's character is a really beautiful woman who likes to hang out with bad guys. When I saw beautiful I mean she is Luscious. Definitely not the girl next door. Depp's character describes her as ravenous. She says you mean "ravishing" and he says yes, but I know he meant ravenous because she is fixing to eat him and spit him out.

Johnny Depp is all growns up now but still has bad hair. I mean awful. I thought Hollywood has all those high fashion $400 a pop stylists. Don't you think that he could go to the same guys that work on John Edwards and Bill Clinton. Jeez Louise, the Day Center for the Homeless right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma gives better haircuts than Depp gets.

Anyway, this movie has both bad guys and good guys looking for Jolie's beau. She picks out Depp on a train and tries to make the bad and good guys think that he is the beau. Depp plays this sad sack, widower, loser math teacher who somehow thinks this beautiful English woman wants him. You can tell by looking at him that he is a typical liberal Democrat loser.

You know the concept, the corrupt European's trying to sully the pure naive American. It has been going on for years. Anyway he puts up with a lot of crap from Jolie, and Scotland Yard, and the bad guys until he has had enough. Then he's like Rambo without guns, kicks some butt, takes names, grabs his woman and heads off into the sunset to become a manly Sarah Palin Republican.

The movie has plot holes a mile wide but I don't really care. It is beautifully filmed, Jolie is absolutely stunning and just steals the show.

I give it three stars out of four, it is well worth seeing.

Purply Sunset

I know the photo is a little grainy but I liked the way the branches appear like veins on the sky.

Skywatch Friday

Watery Wednesday - Lake Bixhoma

Lake Bixhoma, Bixby, Oklahoma. Great fishing, hiking, and geocaching.

Check out Watery Wednesday

The Ten Things I Couldn't Do Without

The Ladies of the Real Housewives of Oklahoma have a little meme going on with the McLinky Monday where you are supposed to list the 10 things you couldn't do without.

Here is my list.

Number 1 My GPS devices!
I have five of them. Here is my primary Geocaching Device



The Magellan Explorist GC. I have two backups to it. One is a Garmin the other is a Lowrance. Plus I have a running GPS that tells me how far I run and for how long and a combination navigation and geocaching unit. You really cannot have too many of them.

Number Two are my Running Shoes!! Mizuno Wave Alchemy Rules.

I love to run. I don't run very fast nor very far nor very often but I love it. These shoes are a nice ride.

#3 is my Satellite Radio

I grew up with so called Classic Rock and liked it fine but I started hating it before hating it was cool. I've had satellite radio for almost 6 years and I'll never be without it ever again. Whatever genre, whenever. I haven't listened to commercial radio in years.

#4 is my Ipod Touch.

Its not an Iphone but it doesn't have any monthly fees. I can play Scrabble and Words with Friends just like my sisters at RHOK (but not as good as most of them). I've got over 100 apps on it plus its loaded with music. It is wonderful.

#5 is my Ipod Nano

I have about two thousand songs on itunes on my laptop. I rotate them in and out of my ipod. I have run hundreds of miles listening to tunes. Everything from Metallica to the Carpenters, Jazz, Classical, whatever. This thing just keeps on going.

#6 is Coffee

I love good coffee. I can't drink the swill at work so I have my own Keurig coffee maker. Sweetie has a Tassimo we use at home. Love it, love it, love it. I can't imagine a world without coffee.

#7 are my Cameras

I have a Canon Powershot sx120. I love it. It's not too complicated and has a nice zoom. I have a couple other cameras also. I'm still learning about photography and I love it. I marvel at the skill of my fellow bloggers.

#8 is our Electric Blanket

In the winter I like it cool at night for sleeping but I like to stay warm and I don't like a lot of covers on me. I cannot stand it. So Sweetie indulges me. I love it. Don't laugh at me, or even with me on this. I'm warning you.

#9 is my Fat Tire

I love malted adult beverages. Fat Tire by New Belgium Brewing of Fort Collins, Colorado is my favorite. Alas, they cannot sell it in Oklahoma. I called the brewery and talked to them a few years about it. The Oklahoma state liquor laws are such that can't for some reason. So when I go on business to the People's Republic of Kansas I stock up.

# 10 is Having Every Other Friday Off.

This is my favorite. I work 80 hours over 9 days so I get every other Friday off. I spend them with Sweetie. During the school year we take SuperPizzaBoy to school and roll him out the door. "Duck and Roll, duck and roll" we yell, why can't he get that straight? Sometimes he gets so banged up. It is his fault. Then we go to breakfast. If the weather is warm we ride our bikes, if not we go to the movies!! Thanks Gas Company.



That's my list. What is yours. Link up with the RHOKers.

Jungle Love Geocaching and other Guilty Pleasures

About a week ago on Sunday afternoon I dropped SuperPizzaBoy off at his confirmation class at his church. Usually I stick around in the lobby as a kind of security blanket but he does great without me so I sneaked off to go find a nearby geocache named Jungle Love. In the summer it would be hard to find with all the high grass and brush but it kind of stuck out in the dead of winter.



The kid never knew I was gone!! Its all for the best.



Nope, this isn't Moab.

Later in the week Turkey Mountain Wilderness Park showed a new cache on their Facebook post. It was called "Cache May Bite." It was about lunchtime so I drove to the park.



Thread the needle, go down the trail a ways and this is what you find.



Again, I was back before anybody missed me. Doesn't anybody miss me?

Third guilty pleasure: SPB participates in a Improv Comedy workshop at one of our local parks. He loves it. He doesn't need a drama workshop, shoot, he could teach drama, he is good at comedy but he has drama down pat. Sorry, I digress. I usually take my Kindle with me and read while he is doing his Improv thing. I mean I like watching him and the other kids but how much "Zip, Zap, Zup" can a guy take? Even if it is his son. Well you guessed it, somebody planted a geocache in the park. So I left the kid with his comedy and Sweetie with her knitting.



And off I went. I could show you where I found the cache but it would be a dead giveaway. It is close to this though.



A cover over a swimming pool. Kind of a Mid Century Modern thing maybe? There are people in town who just swoon and need smelling salts when they hear about Mid Century Modern. Its the new old, run down, and ugly is beautiful concept. All those smelling salts does something to their sense of humor also, either that or they didn't have a sense of humor to begin with. Oops, you can tell I'm off my meds this morning. Sorry.

This cache required some water. Why? I am not going to tell you except that if you have done this type of cache before you know exactly why and what kind of cache this is. Trust me, if you go looking for this bring some water.

Here is the cache.



As you can see, I brought some water.

Again, I was back in my seat with my Kindle before anybody missed me. That's the kind of life a geocacher leads when he is the only one in the family that likes geocaching.

Check out That's My World for other views of our planet from all over.

Check out Geocaching 101 if you are wondering what Geocaching is.

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes

I just finished Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. It is about a company of very grown up teenage Marines the northern part of South Vietnam in 1969 led by a brand new college grad lieutenant Waino Mellas. These Marines engage in some very horrific battles under some unnecessary deprivation. I say unnecessary because they were deprived of food and water by screwups by their officers behind the lines. These same officers were served great food by Filipino stewards complete with fine whiskey and wine while they discussed why Bravo company was not moving very quickly through the jungle.

I found myself getting very angry with senior officers who were putting Mellas' platoon in danger and depriving them of food, water, ammunition, and medical supplies and who refused to evacuate their wounded and dead.

Marlantes himself is a much decorated Marine Lieutenant during the Vietnam War. This novel took him 30 years to write through multiple drafts and revisions. Here is an interview where he discusses the process of writing it.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I give it five stars out of five.

Marlantes worked hard on this book and the results show. His characters are very real. Yes, they are are heroes but they are scared crapless heroes who do what they are terrified of doing and face down their fears. The writing is wonderful, it is the kind of book where the print on the page disappears, the book disappears, and I'm not aware of reading but I'm tearing off 200 page chunks with no sense of the passage of time.

Get this book, read it.

Meet LJ

This is LJ. He is our son's cat. The day we brought LJ home was a happy day for SuperPizzaBoy.



He is all grown up now and I have another name for him.



Kindle Cat

Pet Pride

Once a Runner by John L. Parker, Jr.

My brother Bob, a huge runner from when running wasn't cool, gave me this book. It was written back in 1978 and is recently back in print.

It is novel about running and runners written back during the days of "no pain, no gain" and "pain is what weakness feels like as it leaves the body," and "sweat is just your fat cells crying." The plot doesn't really matter, it is about running by real runners.

The book starts our really slow. One problem is that the author seems to have gotten a brand new thesaurus and is really giving it a workout plus he is pulling the stops on every simile, metaphor, adjective, and adverb he has ever heard about. About halfway through the book though the author starts writing in a more natural style and the story grabs you and pulls you through to the end.

The book is about obsession, dedication, and hard work and has the best description of running a race I've ever read (not that I would know a thing about running a race.)

Buy this book (or get it from your library), and read it. You'll like it.

I rate it 3.5 stars out of 4.

Guineafowl Bootcamp

Heads Down



Heads Up



Repeat

Camera Critters

The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras by Michael Orenduff

I just finished this book. I couldn't resist it. It is set in Old Town Albuquerque and involves ancient indian pottery, the University of New Mexico, and murder. I used to live in Albuquerque, got my first degree at UNM, and love Old Town. It is the mixture of the cheesy and the nice. Very very old adobe buildings, nice restaurants, lots of alleys and old streets. New Mexico has a charm to it that never leaves you.

The book is about an Old Town pottery shop owner, Hubert Schuze, who has been known to go dig up pots illegally. He doesn't much apologize for it. He is a laid back guy who has a wide variety of friends and enjoys life. He is accused of murder so he has to take matters into his own hands.

Orenduff is a natural storyteller. This is one of those books where the writing is so smooth and the story so compelling that you stay up till midnight and then get surprised when you look at the clock.

Hey, and it is on Amazon Kindle for less than $6.

I give this book 3.5 stars out of five. This is the first of a series and I'm going to read the rest.

Gulliver's Travels

During the holidays the Yogi's went to see Gulliver's Travels. Its a modern redo of the classic story with Jack Black playing an underachieving slacker mail guy who talks himself into a trip to the Bermuda Triangle.

Go see the trailer here.

I give the movie one star out of five. See if you can't talk your kid into seeing Tangled instead.

Sunset with a little Flare

My friend Sharon is married to Don. Sharon and Don are both chemical engineers (so you know they are extremely nice people, right, like all chemical engineers.) Sharon works in an office downtown, Don works at one of the oil refineries on the river. Chemical Engineers in love, something special about that. They are very romantic. I think they murmur to each other about subcooled reflux and isentropic expansion and the beauty and elegance of feed forward process controls.

Whenever I see the flare going at the refinery I call Sharon and tell her, "Call Don and tell him to get his butt out in the plant, something's wrong!"

Last several times I've called she hasn't picked up though. I wonder what's up with that.

Afternoon Legos

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Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell

I just finished Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell. This is another of her series of Kay Scarpetta books. Kay Scarpetta is a medical examiner who solves murders. In this one she has to solve a puzzler of a murder quickly under difficult circumstances.

She is at Dover Air Force Base to begin with doing autopsies on the bodies of soldiers killed over seas. She is like a reserve officer. She gets word from the Cambridge Forensic Center, her home office that she has been away from for months, that it appears that a murder victim may not have been dead when he was brought in. Oops, so she has to leave Dover and get back to Cambridge quickly to check out what was going on.

She gets there and finds out that all sorts of crap has been going on in her absence. Her assistant, Fielding, hasn't been taking care of business. She ends up playing catch up on everything, meanwhile she has to figure out what is going on with the murder. And where in the heck is the assistant, how come the military is there nosing around.

This isn't a linear detective novel. The process of solving the murder goes here, there, and everywhere, but it is very intriguing and compelling. I loved this book. It was a totally satisfying read.

I give it four stars out of five. I got my copy at the library!

A Walk Downtown

We had a cold spell last week in Tulsa. At lunch one bright, sunny, bitterly cold day I bundled up and took my new Diana, low tech, low res, 35mm film camera on a walk.



First thing was some crane action going by our building. My employer bought the building last year and has been making a bunch of updates since then.



A little bit further on is Tulsa's BOK Center designed by Cesar Pelli (Thanks Sydney for pointing out my error). Some call it the hubcap, others say it looks like a roll of duct tape. No matter, since it opened a few years ago we have had some wonderful concerts come to town that we were missing before. I love it.



The sky was very blue and very clear. I love it when fronts come through in the wintertime. Afterward its like the air was swept clean.



I'm not sure what is going on here. Somebody is putting a lot of work into this mural. I love murals. I'll be checking on this one to see what is going on.



A sculpture honoring firefighters. Firefighter's are awesome.



A sculpture put up by our local newspaper, the Tulsa World, honoring paperboys. I don't think they have had paperboys in the sense of kids who sell newspapers or run a route for decades but I guess that it is good to honor them. With my digital cameras I could put a little zoom action on the photo. With my Diana I just have to take what I can get. I didn't want to walk in the planting area or duck under their security gate to get closer.

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