Todd's Blog

I moved to Wichita Falls almost exactly two weeks ago to take a weather forecasting job at Sheppard AFB.  I am renting a room on the south side of town.  I try to go home as often as I can, but since the part of central Texas where my house is located is still 230 miles away it's not practical every weekend.  So since I am here on a saturday I decided to check out the local environment.  It turns out there's a nice park about a mile away from where I'm living.



There is a walking/bike path at the park which is part of the circle trail, which you can use to go all around the city without having to get on a road.  I plan to pick up my bicycle next weekend when I'm at my house, so that I can explore a little bit further.  As it is, I only walked about 3 miles today.  I did see a little bit of wildlife along the way. 

However, since I didn't have my real camera or big lenses with me, I didn't get a chance to take pictures of any of the birds, turtles or small mammal…

Who would have thought that Oklahoma would have mountains.  Okay, so they are not mountain like they have in Colorado, or even the mountains that I spent the past 2 1/2 years traipsing up and down in Arizona.  But the Wichita Mountain wildlife refuge does contain some significant hills, the tallest of which is Mount Scott at almost 2500' above ground level.


I drove up to the top a couple of weeks ago, took a couple of pictures, then drove back down. 
But this morning it was all about the walk.  It's just a little under 3 miles, but basically all uphill, then all downhill, no real flat spots along the way.  Also, it's a paved road, so you have to be on the lookout for cars going up and down.  That being said, it really wasn't a bad walk at all.  
The views are great.  Especially since we were treated to some very interesting cloud formations this morning. 




In addition, since it just rained last night, even the mountain side of the road provided some nice scenery with qu…

Today one of my friends and I took a short hike down at the San Pedro River; but at a different part of it than I usually go to.  We parked in the lot near the bridge on Charleston Road, then made our way down the bank to walk along the river.  The goal was to find a wall of graffiti going under the old railroad tracks. 

Found it!

I wasn't out there for wildlife today, but I did notice quite a few birds (flycatchers mostly) along the river, so I'll probably head out there again with my 500mm lens soon.  We also discovered that there's a petroglyph site not far from here, so that's on the near-term agenda too. 

So last night I was really tempted to make myself a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner.  Not totally bad for me, but I knew that I had some better stuff in the fridge, and since I knew I'd probably write about what I ate, the veggies might be a better choice ... lol, this accountability thing might just work after all.   :-)

This was just a simple "pasta" dish using zucchini squash in place of the pasta, and tomato, onion, spices and olive oil instead of sauce from a jar.  I've cooked this dish before, both for myself and with a friend.  It's been delicious every time.  I suppose I could have just sliced up the zucchini, but a couple of months back I got on Amazon and ordered one of those Veggetti slicers  that you may have seen on TV.  It works pretty much as advertised.  It took me just over a minute to turn a medium sized zucchini into a pile of "pasta" strands.



Here is the entire ingredient list:
1 zucchini squash ... spiral sliced 1/4 red…

I'm a weather guy, so of course I like anything that will give me a quick look at what conditions might be expected at my location.  If I see something interesting, I did into the data a bit more.  This map is fun to look at just for the winds, it can be almost mesmerizing to watch the flow.

Jaiden and Joey share their thoughts about what daddy does at work ...