Posts Tagged → ou
Poison Ivy Almost Gone
This morning I woke up to go to work and was still itching pretty bad though you could barely see it. This evening when I came home from work I noticed something was different. No itching at all! After four and a half weeks it is finally on its way out and all I can say is thank God! This has been a rough month with the never ending itching and even worse the allergic reaction to the medicine.
During this time I had two very big events my life and that was graduating OU and the other was seeing my family in New Mexico for the first time in 21 years. The enjoyment of both of these events were a bit lost because of having the most severe poison ivy outbreak known to the human race. For those of you that saw it, you know what I am talking about. For the rest of you, I will spare you the pictures but I do have some. 
While we were gone on our trip my oldest son Kevin was a hero. He did not get to go with us on our vacation because he forgot to tell his boss about it until it was too late to let him off. I was upset for a while but that was changed when some bad guys broke into our house while we were gone. My son captured two of the three and the police caught the other one. Everyone of them were over 18 years old so we are pressing charges. He walked in on them inside the house. Just yesterday he was at work and helped to capture a thief at his work. I told him that being a police officer may be his calling. The bad guys come right to him. I am so proud of him and the way he handled the situation.
Now that I am feeling better this weekend I have to work tomorrow. That is okay because it will be a short day. I am working a straight eight hours from 6:30 am to 2:20 pm. That should go fast and I will be able to squeak by with a decent weekend after all. Our WIN System repeater was blocked this week because of a stray signal that was mistaken for intermod. This happened once before in 2007 when a local ham was transmitting amateur television (ATV) on 439.25 MHz. This local ham is very close to the repeater antenna and has a very high gain antenna. I am not sure if that is what happened this time or not. Another possibility is that another new ham was trying to get into the repeater with a handy talkie (HT) and was not getting into the system very well. I am hoping that was the scenario because that is an easy one to fix. We have since been unblocked but we are reluctant to connect back up until we confirm the source of the signal.
Just the other day I posted about the new Microsoft search engine Bing.com and how cool it was. A story came out today that shows that in just three days, it has taken the number two search engine spot world wide over taking Yahoo. I have mixed feelings about this because I have always loved Yahoo and still think they are very relevant. At the same time I am really pulling for Bing to succeed. I really do like the way it operates. Well I have rambled long enough so I will get this posted.
Today Was The Big Day
After a long couple years, the graduation is over. Today I graduated the University of Oklahoma putting a lot of stressful times away. This is tough enough when you are 18 years old but when you are 43 and have a full family life and a full time job, it makes it even more of a challenge. This day was supposed to be a huge moment and it was to a degree. I feel like the whole event was under the influence of drugs. I have not slept for more than three continuous hours in a week and the doctor gave me some itching medication for my poison ivy that really made me sleepy.
It was a good day though and I have a wonderful family that was there for me. My beautiful wife Sunday shown in this photo has made so many sacrifices for me in our 20 years of marriage. She sacrificed so much for me in getting this accomplishment done that I really do appreciate her. She is testament to the Proverbs 31 woman spoken of in the Bible. She is so incredible that words cannot express.
Now that I have this behind me, I can get back to life again. The time involved in completing this goal has been amazing. Our whole lives have been adjusted to make time for this. God has been very good to us but has taken an unfortunate back seat to this goal. It is time to put HIM first again and remember where my blessings come from.
Pretty Cool Storm
I have been off work the last couple of days because I have poison ivy from cutting down some trees at my dad’s place. Since I usually have to go to bed early because I have to be at work early, I usually miss out on the good storms. Last night around 10:45 PM we had a storm come through with circulation near my house so we decided to go out for a drive and check it out. I live in Del City, a suburb of Oklahoma City and the circulation was two miles to the Southwest of my house. The tornado never did touch down but it was pretty exciting. I made seven videos lasting more than an hour and I uploaded one of them onto Youtube so I could share it with you.
It starts out with me and my son Kevin standing in the front yard with the tornado sirens blowing and lots of lightning. It sort of reminded me of the old days when I could do this all the time. It seems like the only time we have storms around here is in the middle of the night or when I am at work in a building with no windows. For this reason I miss about 90% of them that come through. Every day I hear people complaining about all the rain and how they wish it would stop. I cannot chime in with them because I rarely ever see it. Anyway, as I have told you before, I just love severe weather and always have.
I took this photo of some mammatus clouds that were at the leading edge of the storm earlier. At this time it looked as though the storm was going to miss us again. Later the line reformed and came across giving us an exciting night. I saw on the television advisory last night that their radar had detected over 1,000 lightning strikes in the last hour. It was very interesting to watch.
Well I am going to try to go back to work tomorrow because I have already taken off two days. I took off because of the poison ivy on the back of my legs gets really irritated by the pants rubbing against them. At least at home I can wear shorts. The rash seems to be getting better but the itching has not subsided and I only got two hours of sleep last night. I had one and a half hours the night before and only one hour the night before that. The itching makes it difficult to sleep.
The OU commencement is tomorrow night at 7:30 PM at the University of Oklahoma football stadium. The smaller convocation will be on Saturday. It should be a very exciting time. This has been a long time coming and I am glad to have it over. Now maybe we can get back to life again soon. Well I just wanted to share our little storm we had last night because it was a welcome sight. Do not get me wrong, I do not want anyone to get hurt or have their property damages but I do like to see storms when I can. I still kick myself for not becoming a meteorologist.
Poison Ivy
It has been a couple weeks since I have posted anything on here so I thought I may update what has been going on. As most of you know, I have been going to the University of Oklahoma for the last couple of years and I am going to graduate this coming weekend. I made an A on my thesisI picked up my cap and gown last weekend and had to stand outside in a thunderstorm. That may bother some people but not me as I love thunderstorms.
Last weekend, I helped my dad cut down some trees in his yard and it was a big job. While I was cutting them down, I was standing in poison ivy. I am just now feeling the effects of it and itching real bad. My wonderful wife just came back with some calamine lotion to help with the itching. I am terrible at not scratching. It is funny I tell my kids not to scratch while I have trouble restraining myself.
Last weekend we also tore down two metal buildings in my dad’s backyard so he could have one larger building. What a fun job though it was hard. We used a 15 pound sledge hammer to beat the metal and pull the screws through the metal. Those buildings were there for more than 40 years. I cannot remember a time when they were not there. It is strange seeing the open space.
Well I thought I better check in here so people would know that I was still around. I will try to make a point to post more often.
A Busy Week Complete
The last week started off with the dreaded call when I was at work on April 10th that my grandmother had passed away. She had been in the hospital for 45 days after having a severe stroke on March 1st. The previouse week my sister and her family was here from Illinois to attend my brother in-law’s Army graduation. She got back home just to have to turn around and come right back. We went to the funeral on Monday and got to see many relatives that we had not seen in a while. As sad as it was to lose my grandmother, it was comforting to know that she knew Jesus and was much better off afterwards. Also it was nice seeing relatives that I had not seen in a while.
The past several weekends I had planned on working on my final thesis for school but something had come up over and over again. Since my due date was this past Friday, April 17th I was running out of time. I decided to take off work the rest of the week and work on it. I worked all day Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday as I finished it on Friday. I turned it in and still have a little bit of natural anxiety as I await the grade. I really hope that he does not turn it back to me to correct a second time. I turned in my first draft on March 20th without even proof reading it once and my advisor had a ton of suggestions on what I need to do to improve it. I basically re-wrote the paper. Now I wait, hoping he will give me a passing grade since this is the last lesson that I do as an OU student.
This passed weekend the local meteorologists promised 100% chance of rain with severe storms likely. Friday night while we were sleeping we did receive a light rain that did not last very long. We waited all weekend and finally got a very small storm last night. The storm only lasted maybe ten minutes though it looked like it strengthened after i passed us. I took a few pictures as it passed us.
The photo above was looking to the Northwest after the storm had passed to the East. The clouds depicted in this photo are called mammatus clouds. Thes type of clouds usually look scary but they are not dangerous at all. They look like this because there is sinking air and these type of storms are almost always at the back of the storm. This storm looks far worse than it was as it only rained moderately for a few minutes. I was disappointed because I really wanted to see some storms. Later in the evening as this storm moved off to the Southeast it built up into a severe storm with lots of lightning. For the life of me I do not understand why I never thought to take any pictures of the lightning until the storm was at a distance.
The above photo was taken straight South as the storm was building over Cleveland county. You may have noticed the low flat clouds in the fore ground that are completely separate from the storm. These low clouds were associated with the cold front that came in after the storms went by. Had I waited any longer to take these pictures, I would not have been able to get this lightning becuase these low clouds would have blocked my view. I missed a grand opportunity last night because I was too busy pouting about what a dud the storm was . Again, it was a much better stom after it passed us. This morning we are on the back side of this low pressure with some hard North wind.
This spring has been cooler than normal as we have had one cold front after another. It seems to get up to 80+ degrees just to be followed by a 30 degree drop the next day. The trees started blooming two months ago and still have not completed. The poor trees cannot finish because every time it gets cold, the trees stop their blooming process. This has resulted in our allergy problems lasting longer than they should. With the powerful winds we have been dealing with wild fires resulting in homes being burned. About a week ago we had a wildfire that burned more than 100 homes on the East side of the metro area.
I took the photo above in Midwest City. This is just one of the homes that was burned as the 40+ MPH wind carried the fire more than five miles. I had a feeling as I got off work on that day when I looked out the front door of my work and saw smoke near Carl Albert high school. I had no idea that it was that big of a fire at the time. Hopefully the rain we received this weekend will help prevent any more fires.
Again, I have not been very active on my blog for a while because my school was approaching the end and it was my priority. Whenever I am paying thousands of dollars for college, it only makes sense that I take it seriously . Like I said before, if he says my paper is satisfactory then I am officially done. I will graduate in less than a month. Let’s just pray that it meets the requirements of my advisor. I realize this post is more of a rambling news report but since I have not been on in a while, I thought I needed to keep you up to date. Hopefully I will be able to keep the blog up to date now that I will have more time.
Light At The End Of The Tunnel
This has been an unusually busy month with many high priority things going on at once. I am on the home stretch with my University of Oklahoma degree as I just received my graduation application yesterday. This month is the busiest month of the year at my work. We have a conference that lasts this whole week with people coming from many different bases. The preparation for this conference has been intense with a lot of research, documentation, editing and then presentation. There is a lot at stake in this conference where some high ranking officers will be there.
For the next two months our lives will continue to run at a very high pace and that is why my presence on this blog has been very limited. I do have time to post to my Twitter as they are small posts that take no time to edit and post. You can read my Twitter posts on the right side of this blog. Also I do use my Facebook as well as I can post to it via mobile phone just like my Twitter.
I am hopeful that I will be able to finish the last part of my thesis paper with no hiccups involved. For some reason the closer I get to the end, the more difficult it is to find the motivation. It defies logic as you would think it would be easier. I am so close but feel so far. I hold the graduation papers in my hand but seem like I can never muster the strength to work on this paper. I will succeed though and this challenge will be over. This is going to be over in two months and life can continue as it did before. If you do not hear from me much, that is what I have been up to. You can always contact me via email if you need to get in touch with me.
Better Day
Anyone that has had something bad happen to them can attest to having good and bad days. As most of you know my youngest son ran away back in September and came home for one day on Christmas. I thought we had made a lot of progress when he was here. We have not heard from him since Christmas Day. This week was a bad week for me dealing with anger. I’ve had a very ugly attitude this week because of it. Yesterday was the worst day for me so much that I took off work to see if I could speak to the woman that is hiding him. I had no luch as she has moved away and was not at work. I was in a bad mood all day yesterday and was making sniping remarks to people on Twitter at anyone that mention certain topics.
I must say that we made a decision last night that we are not going to worry about him because we made it very clear on Christmas Day that we loved him with no strings attached. We did not preach to him about anything and gave him about the warmest welcome anyone could have asked for. I am confident and have faith that God is in control and that some day he will get past this point in his life and realize that he has a family that loves him. It is not worth being angry all the time. I guess what makes it the most difficult is that people expect teenagers to be rebellious but when you have adults that condone it and enable it, that is hard to take.
On another front, God has shown his greatness today. Some of you may remember my older son having an accident in December just one week after getting his drivers license. Well today we received our insurance renewal and to our surprise it went down $20.00 per month. After a confirmation that it was not a mistake all we could do is praise the Lord! I just want to say Geico has been really good to us and we have had them for 14 years. My wife had an accident a couple years ago, I backed into a car about a year ago and now my son had an accident and they never once raised our rates. That is a miracle in itself and I just want to thank God for this. It is so important to me to give credit where it is due. I just wanted to share this information with you and apologize if you were a target of my rage this week. I do not like being that way but I allowed things to get to me.
This week I begin my final Thesis for the University of Oklahoma. It has been a long and tiresome road but I am almost done. It is hard to believe I am on my last course and it is almost over.
Busy Life
I took this photo at the corner of Sunnylane Road at Reno Avenue in Del City, Oklahoma in the 35 degree cold wind. This is the OG&E power plant that feeds my house with electricity. This busy picture has been a description of our lives the last couple years. With trying to go to school full time, work in a new job and have a family life it has been pretty busy. With my graduation only four months away I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. It is funny how our human nature tends to see the negative in just about everything unless you make a conscious effort to see the positive. I have found myself actually a little sad that my kids are growing up and as soon as I graduate, my kids will be grown. It is almost as if I have been experiencing the “empty nest” syndrome before it happens. The truth is that we have a lot to be thankful for. God has blessed us in many ways. It is sad that despite these blessings we often only see the negative in the world.
This morning I submitted my proposal for my final thesis at Oklahoma University (OU). I am sort of excited to know I am on my final paper and ready to graduate. It would have been nice to have the Sooners be the national champions the same year I graduate but that is okay. I did not watch much of the game though because they keep putting these games on in the middle of the night when I have to get up at 4:30 AM. After seeing the results I do not regret not watching it. I wanted to spend some time taking pictures today and I did for a while but it is too cold to spend too much time outside. It was 75 degrees yesterday and a cold front came through just about the time the sun set. The wind peaked at 53 MPH at the Oklahoma City airport last night. This morning I woke up with garbage blown against my fence. Who knows what county that came from .
We did get the car out of the shop this weekend after the wreck in December. It drives pretty good and it is sure nice to have it back. The impact of the increased insurance premiums has not hit us yet. Our renewal will be in March so that is when we will have to get a second mortgage on the house to pay are auto insurance . Hopefully it will not be too bad. My son Kevin was hired at the Del City Wal-Mart yesterday so he is pretty excited about that. It is close to home and he knows many people there already. I went up there with him around midnight last night to check it out. I have to admit that I am excited for him because he is only 17 years old. Tonight I am in for a very relaxing evening watching television and having dinner with my wife.
More AP Bias
You may remember that I posted just last week about how irrelevant the AP is in reporting just about anything. I took a screenshot of Yahoo’s News this morning where it posted an AP story about Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford winning the Heisman Trophy last night. As you can see in the photo above it is titled “Oklahoma’s Bradford wins Heisman Trophy”. You may notice the picture included in the story is Colt McCoy, the Texas quarterback and the media’s love child. This is pretty typical of what you see day to day with the media. They are so angry that the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) has rated the Sooners number one by computers. They are so enamoured by the South Eastern Conference (SEC) and their poster boy that they cannot eve bring themselves to put the winner’s picture on the story that bares his name. Their dislike of the Sooners is displayed by their putting Mr. McCoy’s picture on there after we have heard about how Texas was cheated by the BCS. As I spoke before, there is no legitimate way to see who is the best when you only play a team once. Anyone can have a bad day. Again, the sports aspect of this is not that big a deal for me but rather the lack of objectivity on the news.
This should not surprise anyone as the AP is typical of the main stream media’s agenda reporting. I have noticed an overwhelming bias against Israel with the AP. Their vicious hatred for Israel is only surpassed by their hatred of anyone with conservative values. You can pick your topic and the AP will purposely only tell the side of the story that benefits their cause. They will misrepresent any cause they disagree with and never apologize when they get it wrong. They get it wrong more than they get it right so I can understand this because they would be apologizing all the time. I am not a crazy sports fan like many Sooner fans are but this story is just as blatant as they come.
This is precisely why I listen to virtually every news story I hear with skepticism. I rarely take what I hear on the news at face value even when it is on video. This is because they edit the videos to only show the parts that benefit their cause. An example of this is their coverage of the Rodney King beating. They only show the part where the police are beating him. They neglect to show the part where he was assaulting the police just prior to this. They barely even mention less than a year later that Rodney King was arrested for trying to run over a police officer in his car. Rodney King is a career criminal that was used as a tool for the media to complete their mission to drive a wedge between groups of people. In this case the entire agenda was to rile up the black population while failing to report the entire story.
I could go on all day citing events that are deliberately misreported by the left wing media and the AP. The purpose of this post is to illustrate examples of their blatant bias. I do not dwell on this too much because all it serves to do is keep everyone upset all the time. I think it is worthy of pointing out though I would not allow yourself to be sucked into their game. The media is not neutral in their reporting. They will almost always support the liberal side of story and belittle those of conservative Christian values. I would suggest you watch them with a critical eye as well and you will see it also.
Embarrassing OU Fan
As a Sooner fan I have pointed out this embarrassing behavior many times to people and they never seem to see it. The Sooner fans that somehow seem to make it on national television often tend to be the Jethro Bodine types that make our state look like we are all uneducated. This photo illustrates how the Sooners are playing the KANSAS JAYHAWKS and this gentleman on the right is displaying his upside down Longhorns symbol. We are not even playing the Texas Longhorns! If that is not bad enough, we lost to the Texas Longhorns just last week. This guy looks like he took a few too many drinks before showing up at this game. I really hate to point these things out because it looks like I am against the Sooners but it is some of the fans that make us all look bad. I paused the DVR and took this picture with my camera.