Weather...

We had some interesting weather over the last couple of days. I guess it is that time of the year again! Personally, I love severe weather. I have been fascinated with storms since I was a little kid growing up in west Texas. I took three semesters of meteorology while I was in flight school and ate up every minute of it. I'm trying to do a better job of carrying my camera with me everywhere I go so I hope to capture a few nice weather related photos this spring. I did get a few nice shots yesterday.

This was shot on the way to work yesterday morning. Storms were just moving out at sunrise and made for an interesting view.



Later in the morning, we had more severe storms move into the area. We had a couple of tornadoes in the area, but nothing too close to Tulsa. We did have heavy rain, flooding, lightning, winds, and hail.



They are forecasting more storms on Thursday so I'm keeping the camera handy.

Taken with My Nikon D80 using a Nikkor 18-55mm VR lens

Flowers...

I bought my wife an Easter bouquet (okay, I wanted it for photography purpose, too). I wanted to experiment with light sources so I used a incandescent bulb and my Nikon SB-400. I was very please with the results! Most of the photos were taken with my Tokin 100mm AT-X Pro Macro mounted on the Nikon D80. Hope you enjoy!

Lunch Cache

I had to run an errand at lunch today. I had a package that needed to be dropped off at the post office and it seemed to be as good of a time as any. I was a bit dismayed when I pulled into the parking lot as the place was packed. There was not a single parking spot open. I knew that the line would be terrible and I had a finite amount of time to get back to work. In light of that, I just drove on through. As I was preparing to get back on the street, I noticed a geocache on my GPS that was just a couple of blocks away. At least, I would get to have some fun on my lunch hour!! I headed to the cache and found it was located in a park that was completely empty. I parked the car and pulled the cache up on my Blackberry. It was called "Pipe Down". I figured that the name ought to make finding the cache simple. I was right! Of course, the hider, BasicPoke, always has dead-on coordinates and that helps greatly. Unfortunately, this was not a planned outing so I had nothing to trade. Mental note to self: Leave trade items in car. It was a very nice cache that was well done. I signed the log and headed back to work.

I think I need to do more lunch caches. It was a nice break and even though I was out there in the weeds in a suit and tie, it was a lot of fun. I definitely returned to work with a better attitude!

Okay, I couldn't stand it. I was sitting at cache number 99 after yesterday's caching. I just had to get out today and get number 100. It was Lake Front which ironically is only less than a mile from my home. I am not sure why I haven't done this cache so close to my home, but it seems fitting that it turned out to be my 100th cache.

A Caching We Will Go.....

Finally....Team ARC -1 got out and hit some caches. Mike swung by and picked me up and we headed out to pick up a couple of supplies before we started. In the process, we got a call from Mike's brother-in-law and he wanted to go with us. So, we swung back by Mike's house and picked Mark up. Mark is in from Arkansas visiting for the holidays. As we were headed back into Bixby, I saw a cache on my GPS so we headed that way. We got there and started looking around, but didn't see a cache. I pulled up the cache via the WAP website at www.geocaching.com and quickly realized that there was no cache there. It was false coordinates for a puzzle cache.

With that, we jumped back in the car and headed towards Bixby. Our first cache was R U Nuts. We quickly located it and signed the log. Next up was Bixby Cache #6. This was a micro and we quickly located it and signed the log. We then headed to a cache called Golden Arches that had foiled us earlier in the year, but we wanted to try again. This time, we brought along once of those mirrors on a pole that mechanics us. With our handy new tool, we were able to locate this one this time and sign the log. Our last stop was OBI-One. This one was quite a hike in and, of course, we took the hard way in through the brambles. The cache was quickly located and we made our trades. We followed the trail back out and walked to the car.

We were cold and ready for a break at this point, so we headed to Mazzio's and enjoyed a little pizza before wrapping things up. I'm sitting at 99 caches so I feel certain that I will need to get out and grab number 100 before I return to work on Tuesday. I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas!!