Last week there was an air show at Tinker AFB.  The days prior to the show had the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds practicing in the area.  I took this photo from my front yard as the Thunderbirds were practicing overhead.  As enjoyable as it was to watch, it was very humid making it very uncomfortable to sit out for a long time.  I took many photos like this one on my Flickr page.  If you click on the image, you can see the whole group.

This afternoon I was watching the NBA game between the Boston Celtics and the Orlando Magic when it was interrupted by a weather advisory.  They were telling about a storm that was moving into the Northwest side of Oklahoma City.  I quickly grabbed my camera and went to take some pictures.  The photo above was of the approaching gust front when the strong, cold, North wind started to blow.

In this picture you can see the KFOR channel 4 helicopter checking out the storm as it was arriving.  This photo was taken at the St. Anthony hospital on NW 10th street.  In the picture below you can see the hail falling at Sunnylane and SE 29th Street.  This was only about the size of a dime although I hear it was larger on the North side of the city.

In the picture below you can see downtown fading out from the falling rain.  It was a good time as usual to follow this storm.  I have always enjoyed following storms and this one was nice because there was no tornadoes and mostly just rain and hail.    There was hardly any lightning in this storm.  I can only recall three or four strikes of lightning during this storm.

If you click on any of these pictures, it will take you to the Flickr site where all of the photos are uploaded.  There are more than 50 photos of this storm.

This morning we got out of the house to survey the storm mess.  I took some photos this morning to see some of the ice.  As you can see this picture was taken looking directly into the front door of the house.  I knew I better take this photo first thing in the morning because I have two teenage sons that would certainly remove these from the house and use them for swords.  I am sure you all can remember when  you were kids doing the same thing.  As pretty as the snow and ice are, I am ready for it to be over.  I am ready for some warmer, snow free ground.  This makes two major winter storms we have had this winter.  We almost always have a couple snow falls each year but nothing of this magnitude.  If you click on the photo, it will take you to my Flickr page where you can see the rest of them.

As much as I love my hometown, there is one thing that it really lacks in the winter time and that is color.  As the photo above is in black and white, it is representative of some of the days we have in the winter.  This is Ray Trent park in Del City on a cold winter day with no leaves on the trees and a slight fog on a cloudy day. 

Fortunately our winters are not too long and our wonderful colors return.  What brings this on is an unusual cold snap that we had this past week as did most of the rest of the nation.  We had temperatures that hovered around 10 degrees.  We went nearly a whole week where the temperature never climbed above freezing.  The colorful flowers were taken at the Myriad Gardens in Oklahoma City during the autumn transition.

I love taking pictures whenever I can but lately I have been so busy with work, family, and trying to fix things around the house.  We are looking to move in the next year so we are trying to get the house sellable.  This means taking my tower down and getting rid of it.  Though it is a bit sad to part with my ham radio tower, it will also give me some peace during storm season.  Every time we have lightning nearby, I cringe because one strike to my tower could burn the house down.  This is ironic because I love severe weather other than that.  People often say “just disconnect the cables” but if they only knew how many cables and how they were routed through the wall.  Well now they are removed and the tower is next after Christmas.

I can hardly wait until I have some time to go take some more pictures because it is enjoyable and I love to be able to share them on Flickr. By the time Spring comes around we will see a lot of colors with trees and flowers blooming.  I love to get out and take pictures then.  There is something psychological about the Spring time.  It is almost as if there is life for everyone to experience.  The birds singing, the flowers blooming, and it even smells fresh.  I love it and sure miss it when we have weeks like this.  I should be grateful because we use to live at Eielson AFB near Fairbanks, Alaska.  When we lived there, I could barely stand it when March would arrive and it would still be –15 degrees.  We are very fortunate to be able to experience all four seasons here.  It does seem that Winter is going to be colder this year since it is still not winter and we have already been as low as 10 degrees.  At least the cold will kill many of the insects and maybe next summer will not be as bad with fleas and ticks.  It has been a long time since we have had a real cold winter so I guess we are due for one.  Another good thing about having a cold winter is that spring is that much more pleasant after one.  I hope you all have a nice CHRISTtmas.    Thanks for stopping by.

Is there anything prettier than the changing colors of the trees during the autumn season?  Of course there is and it is my wife, but other than that, no.   I always love driving around this time of year to see the changing colors.  I have to hand it to the leaves this year for holding on as long as they have considering how much cooler the weather has been this year.  For the last month it has been mostly overcast with cold drizzle rain.  Our leaves usually turn in mid October on most years anyway but this year it seemed to get cooler much faster.  I really enjoy the scenery while driving out into the country side surrounding Oklahoma City.

This photo as well as most of them were taken East of Norman, Oklahoma.  The sun was struggling to come out during this time so it was difficult to catch the colors they way they should have been.

This grass picture was near Franklin Road and 156th East of Norman.  I was just playing around with some depth of field shots.  Life has been so busy with one crisis after another that I have not had time or been in the mood to take any photos. 

This final picture was taken on my own street this morning.  I knew that if I did not make time to take a few pictures this weekend that it may be too late to catch the changing colors.  This time of year it is not that uncommon to have some strong gusty winds that can remove these leaves very fast.  I looked into my hard drive and realized that I have not taken any photos for recreation since early July.  I really enjoy doing this because it is relaxing and non controversial.  Not a lot of politics involved in photographing leaves changing colors.  I took off today because my son was a witness to a crime and had to go to court to testify.  I am very proud of him for standing up and doing what is right.

This Independence Day 2009 my cousin Larry Cline asked me to go to the mobile Vietnam Memorial that was stopping through town.  It was amazing how many people showed up to see this.  I was only nine years old when this war was over but it seems as though it has been a shadow in the background my entire life.  It was a somber place to see because many people were clearly moved when looking at the names on this wall.  They had a ceremony where they called all the names of those from Oklahoma that were killed during this war.  You could hardly help being moved by it all even if you were not directly involved in the conflict.  It has always been a dream to go to Washington D.C. to see the real one among other things.  I thought this was worthy of sharing.

We are fortunate this year to have green grass in August.  It is not very often when the driest, hottest time of year ends up being very comfortable as it has been this year.  Oklahoma has a little of both cold and hot here being in the central plains.  We have about 36 inches of rain a year though July and August are typically very dry.  Most years our grass dies and turns brown during July and August and then eventually turns green again in September when it cools down and the rains return.  This year, we have been fortunately to have some rain in August to bring the grass back.  In the picture above is a series of water slides at Whitewater Bay near Reno and Meridian in Oklahoma City.  When I was a teenager this was one of my favorite places in the world.  I think most teens would love a place like this.  There are many other rides in this park that are not visible. It just looked very colorful as I drove by and so I had to stop and take this picture.

It is not that often that a person can get it so wrong that it brings fear to them.  Just 30 minutes ago I was complaining about the rain always missing us. This evening was shaping up to be another one of those evenings where there is a line of thunderstorms that goes completely across the state and then forms a hole just as it passes the metro area.  As much as I love storms I find myself getting mad when this happens.  Well I guess I insulted God, or angered him in some way because shortly after that, we had a downpour.  I would estimate that the wind was blowing nearly 80 MPH in the above photo.  You can even see a leaf blowing by in this shot.

In this picture you can see how the street was flooded near my home.  This is the rain that we never get.  I would say the water was about four inches deep in the center of the road here.

In the picture above you can see the tree branch laying in the road with the hail splashing in the flooded street.  The storm was almost over at this point and you can see the elementary school in the background is showing signs of the sun coming out.

This is the beautiful sky as the storm is moving away.  The large bird circles over head asking himself “What was that?”  I really enjoyed this storm and wanted to share it with the rest of you.  That wind did get a little scary at one point.  I missed some great shots because I was trying to keep the camera dry.  At one point the wind was blowing so hard and the rain was coming down so hard that I could barely see across the street.  I do not want to be known as the one that always complains when things are going bad and never give God credit when things are going well.  We really needed this rain and it was a real blessing.  I am very thankful to be able to get rain especially when two hours earlier it was 97 degrees.  If you want to see the rest of the pictures, just click on any one of them and it will take you to Flickr to see the whole set.  Thanks for stopping by.

Tonight a storm went by here and barely brushed by us to the East.  We did manage to get enough light rain while the sun shine over head.  The one good thing that did come from this was this pretty rainbow to the East.  I will take whatever rain we can get but we really need some more.  The rainbow was a real blessing to look at it.  Also it cooled the temperature from 97 degrees to about 85 in just a half hour.  I just wanted to share this image.

We went on our vacation a couple weeks ago and had a great time despite being dominated by a poison ivy breakout from an unmentionable place.  Among the many things we did while on vacation, we went back to one of our Air Force homes at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona.  What can I say?  I loved that place so much but was only able to stay there for 16 months before being moved to RAF Bentwaters in England.  Davis-Monthan AFB is a great base to be stationed as they are a training base for A-10 pilots.  I was a weapons systems mechanic when I was there.  I worked on MAU-40/MAU-50 bomb racks, triple ejector racks (TERS), and LAU-117, LAU-88 missile launchers, and AIM-9 launchers.  Lets not forget the massive powerful GAU-8/A Avenger Cannon, gatling gun.

This gun system is an amazing piece of machinery that I have torn down to the smallest piece and put back together again.  This gun system is an ugly monster though when it jams up and I have been involved in a number of them as well.  Although I worked on the A-10 at three different bases (Davis-Monthan, RAF Bentwaters, and Eielson AFB), it was Davis-Monthan where I got my start.  People affectionately refer to this great base as DM.  Amazingly I still have a remote connection to this base even today as I continue to work in a system program office (SPO) for a different weapons system that occasionally requires parts to be pulled from the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) at Davis-Monthan AFB.

My wife and I have some wonderful memories of this base and my oldest son was born here just prior to the start of the Gulf War.  Of course we had to make a point to come out to the base and take some pictures.  The above A-10 is one of the planes that was there when I was there.  We did not have a lot of time to stay because we had to be somewhere that evening but it was a great time.  The weather was cooler than normal and only hit 93 degrees one time during our entire vacation.  This is almost unheard of for Southern Arizona this time of year.  During our combined trip we took 722 pictures and during our Tucson portion I took 266 photos.  Although most of the pictures are uploaded onto the Flickr site, some 60+ did not make it on their server and I am not sure which ones that did not make it.  All of them did however make it onto my Windows Live site located here.  It is very time consuming to go through more than 700 pictures to verify all the photos especially when many of them are very similar.  I hope you enjoy the vacation photos as much as I did taking them.  Again, I had a bad poison ivy break out as you can see in some of the photos.  It was still a good time despite that.