Expedition Oklahoma

Tweetup at Rococo's in Oklahoma City

Last week I attended a tweetup in Oklahoma City at a very nice restaurant named Rococo's  . I will ask you to @ this to anyone who you may know in these photos!  
A tweetup is when a bunch of your "tweeps" from @Twitter meet up and see the people behind the avatars.  Now, I'm very comfortable expressing myself online.  I am not comfortable in groups such as this, I discovered.  No matter how well I "know" some of these people, I was still in a group of people in a restaurant.  Nope,  I escaped to class.   My social anxiety and shyness kicked in and I couldn't leave fast enough.   I'm so much cooler online.... 

I took a whole 23 pictures at the tweetup.   Its funny how well I know a few of these people, and they me. Some of them have been on my page for over a year now!  

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.  The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.  ~Henri Nouwen

True friends stab you in the front.  ~Oscar Wilde

You can always tell a real friend:  when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.  ~Laurence J. Peter

Cherish the friend who tells you a harsh truth, wanting ten times more to tell you a loving lie.  ~Robert Brault

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.  Before him I may think aloud.  I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

iPhotography at the OU vs. Missouri Game

Picked up my football tickets last Wednesday for the game....   

Saturday we went to the OU vs. Missouri game in Norman.  I took my youngest son.  We aren't really football fans.  Here are some examples of my iphotography on my iphone.   Not a bad little camera for point and shoot- music playing telephone.   

He was impressed with the crowd initially, especially the fact that everyone was wearing the same colors.   But he soon lost interest.    

OKLAHOMA....   OKAY... 

He hated the noise, he wasn't tall enough to see above everyone standing on the bleachers, and was not a happy camper.  

We watched the game start.... but we were home before it ended, and we live over an hour away.  

This was my first time at a college football game.  This is also my first semester as a Sooner at OU.  

Sunset at the stadium...now if there weren't all those people and the stadium and city blocking the view it would have been a beautiful sunset.   

I still don't understand the game...   

What a sunset.  

 

 

Okmulgee State Park

Here are a few photos from early July  of Okmulgee State Park.  It was about 105 out that day, but by July it was nothing new.   

I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.  My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music.  It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.  ~Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.  ~Russel Baker

In summer, the song sings itself.  ~William Carlos Williams

Then followed that beautiful season... Summer....
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit.  A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.  ~Ada Louise Huxtable

Love is to the heart what the summer is to the farmer's year - it brings to harvest all the loveliest flowers of the soul.  ~Author Unknown

September Sunset

  I've been slowly building a routine to my new schedule with Grad school and starting to run again. I'm slowly trying to get out and take some photographs again.  I'm slowly trying to maintain a sense of normal.  I took the camera out after my run (actually mid-run - but who is counting miles) and captured a few shots of the sunset.   

I love barbed wire fences about as much as open, empty highways...  the sense of the west, of that they go on and on.  I wonder what this land looked like before it was covered in barbed wire and you could roam across it with no fences.  I like the clean lines of the fences...something for your eye to follow in the distance....  as you watch the sun begin to dip down on the horizon.   

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden 

It doesn't matter how I feel all day, or how I wake up feeling... what matters is how I feel when I go to sleep sometimes.  And if I capture that sunset or have a good run, I'm okay.   

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.  ~e.e. cummings

Every now and then,
when the world sits just right,
a gentle breath of heaven
fills my soul with delight...
~Hazelmarie ‘Mattie’ Elliott, A Breath of Heaven

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.  ~Mahatma Gandhi

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it.  Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.  ~Vincent Van Gogh This is one of my favorite quotes... I love this quote. I also love the art of Van Gogh.  

 Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.  ~Jonathan Safran Foer 

The Divine does not like to be shut up in a building.  The Divine likes to be out in the open.  It is right here in this very body.  Each one of us is a miniature universe, a living shrine.  ~Morihei Ueshiba

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1892

There is nothing noble about being superior to some other person.  The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.  ~Hindustani Proverb I believe this.  

There is an unseen life that dreams us.  It knows our true direction and destiny.  We can trust ourselves more than we realize and we need have no fear of change.  ~John O'Donohue

As much as I like fences and highways...I really hate powerlines.  I mean I need them.  But as far as photography is concerned... they need to go away.  

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Dried Up Pond

I took a few minutes to walk down to the pond. I haven't walked back here in a couple of months and the difference was shocking. I really haven't spent a lot of time outside this summer with the heat.   

My Collie, Wren at the pond...she's appreciated that I've started my running routine again. I have happy Doggies now.  

It looks horrible...I've NEVER seen the pond this low... 

It is almost gone. Fortunately it has rained the last two days.  

Is photography truth? I am taking a class about research methods and the Professor said that photography could be used in research studies.  Is photography truth.  I know photography is what the photographer makes it. I can make you feel emotions in a photo that I may have never felt.  I can create an illusion of happiness or sadness.   Photography to me, although viewed by outsiders as documentation.  It is the world in my eyes.   

I read another article which analyzed two photographs.  I wondered how can you spend ten pages analyzing the authors emotions behind two photographs?   Will someone look at my photos and think I poured a huge effort into creating symbolism.   Are these photos documentation of Oklahoma's 2011 drought, or are they symbolic of something in my life.   

I was outside for about 15 minutes this evening to take these photos... 

Neal McCoy at the Choctaw Labor Day Festival

I will admit that I did not want to go to the Labor Day Festival on Friday. I  was having what I thought was about the most awful week I could imagine.   I was not in the mood to go to the concerts. I had never had the chance to see Neal McCoy in Concert and I truly enjoyed it.  Despite the hurt I was experiencing in my own life I found him to be entertaining and funny and I really needed it that evening.  Here is Neal McCoy's official Youtube channel. 

He was so funny!  He's great in concert, one of the best!  Better known for "Billy's Got His Beer Goggles On"  

"Hillbilly Rap"

 

Sunset at the Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival

I had to go find something to eat.... and it was the perfect time of day.  

Riding the Ferris Wheel at sunset 

I love this time of day! 

Sunset at the concerts...

Gary Allan Concert Photos, Part Three

Yeah, I know I've already done two posts of his concert photos.  Yes, I'm posting more.  So what? 

"Nothing on But the Radio"

As Long As You're Looking Back

Yeah, not zoomed...not three feet away from me.  Yeah... that is the way to go to concerts!

Gary Allan playing....  

Kiss Me When I'm Down

You might be able to tell that I'm a fan by now?  I've actually seen Gary Allan in concert five times now, he's tied with Sting and The Police.   That says a lot.   

This wasn't zoomed in fact the lens I had on my camera couldn't get him in the whole frame.  He was sitting right in front of me, during "Life Ain't Always Beautiful" - which, was awesome.  

Jamey Johnson at the Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival

Jamey Johnson played Saturday night at the Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival

You probably know his song "In Color" 

The steel guitar...  

"Mowin' Down The Roses" 

The cameraman stood right in front of me during most of the Jamey Johnson show.  

I like this shot.  Different...  

38 Special at the Choctaw Nation Labor Day Festival

38 Special played at the Choctaw Labor Day Festival  last Friday evening. I will admit that I didn't think I knew any of their songs,  but I was a pretty little kid when they were popular.   I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of hits that I knew.   

"Hold On Loosely" 

"Caught Up In You" You KNOW this song... listen to it! 

"Second Chance"  you know this song too.... 

"Wild Eyed Southern Boys"