26 December 2001
Xmas Wrapup
Photos from Osage County, Oklahoma
We survived the Xmas trip to Oklahoma.
The trip on Saturday was uneventful, but long (almost 10 hours -- drawn out an extra hour because of time spent on I-45 trying to get OUT of Lee Brown's Disaster Area, once known as Houston).
Sunday, I gave Callie the grand tour of Pawhuska. And after that five minutes passed (I'm not joking), we checked out the Catholic Church, which has beautiful stained glass windows (I'll post some photos at some point) and is one of the few landmarks in Pawhuska (a relatively poor oil/ranching town of maybe 2,000 people these days). Then we took a long drive around Osage County on backroads, and snapped a few photos (above) along the way that are typical of the rugged country where I grew up. I was particularly amused by the coyote skin hung on a fence on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Osage County ranchers don't think much of coyotes.
I spent the rest of Sunday giving my mom's computer a tuneup, downloading Windows updates and IE and patches and drivers and fixing all of the problems (even some registry editing). And the virus software (McAfee -- vomit) got replaced by Norton, which required a trip to Bartlesville (incidentally, the Phillips building there was very festive, for one last Xmas before ConocoPhillips is headquartered here in Houston). The trip to Bartlesville was exciting, as the road is essentially a paved version of an old cattle trail (Pawhuska is ranch country) -- and we came around a curve in the middle of the night only to find a LARGE cow standing in the middle of the damn highway. We were fortunate it WAS in the middle, because a collision would have caused a hell of a lot of damage to us, never mind my truck. But that's typical of Osage County. Anyway, we got the software and also scoped out monitors, since my mom's monitor (only two years old, but no longer under warranty) had gone yellow for some reason.
Monday was back to Bartlesville to pick up a monitor, and more tweaking of the computer. And visiting with my parents. And food. Way too much food.
And Tuesday was the roadtrip back, with Callie coming down with a nasty cold all the way.
I've been dragging all day. The short trip back just wasn't long enough to get much rest (not to mention 18 hours or so of driving), and 6 am certainly came around much too early today. Anyway, I was much too lazy to do any blogging while in Oklahoma and didn't even follow the news too closely, so I have some catching up to do.
[Posted @ 10:51 PM CST]
