The past few days were spent in Oklahoma visiting the family. I left Austin at 3 AM on Thursday morning and made it up in record time. Very little traffic, and that was the point.
Despite repeated pleas to “eat more” by my grandma, I managed to put on four pounds between all the turkey and drinking of tea to stay awake.
Friday night I ventured up to Tulsa to visit friends, but it turned out to be a complete waste of time as I couldn’t sync up with anybody. I did wind up doing a good amount of driving around to see what had changed. Many of the businesses and restaurants I used to frequent were gone. Fortunately First Watch and Full Moon were still there.
The city has apparently put a considerable amount of effort into fixing up downtown. All new city feature signs, not to mention the new hugeass BOK Center. Last time I was up, that hadn’t even been started. I saw several bike paths had been placed, new bike/pedestrian bridges in place. Half of Riverside park was torn up, looks like they’re putting in dual bike and pedestrian paths. I guess bike traffic has really picked up, or they’re at least planning on it.
Nevertheless t’s still dead on the weekends, not a lot happening. I don’t think they’ll ever come up with a unified entertainment district that gains critical mass. There’s the whole warehouse district, Cherry Street, 2nd street, and some stuff elsewhere. I just don’t see it as a place people will want to spend a lot of time at yet.
Seeing the old office building at 8th and Cincinnati really kicked me in the gut though. So many good, bad, and stressful memories of winding down the old company. It was really a culmination of memories of living there and all the good friends I lost contact with as we all grew up, moved off, and went our seperate ways.
I discovered the “small wind” industry tonight. One piece of this is the Air Breeze Land wind turbine. For $600 I think it’s worth playing with at Burning Man. Southwest Windpower makes a pretty neat telescoping pole mount which has a base that’s designed to be parked on by a RV or vehicle to hold it stationary. It’s a neat idea, but I’d like to see how practical it is in the field. Then I saw the price, $799, which is more than the turbine itself. This is what leads me to think “I could build this thing myself.”
Southwest Windpower also produces the Skystream 3.7, a much larger unit. I question its advertisement showing the rancher+hippy promoting the 3.7 for “grid-connected homes”. It claims “Skystream can … reduce your dependence on foreign oil.” Last time I checked, we don’t use oil for electricity generation in the US. We certainly use a lot of natural gas, and the vast majority of that is domestic. The only way I can see this holding true is if you were using a gasoline or diesel powered generator, or using your new found source to power an electric car. I digress, this sort of thing is what causes people to accuse me of being too literal.
I’ve been kicking myself for not going anywhere on the weekends lately. Saturday afternoon I set off for Midland. My GPS was on CST, so it wound up being an hour longer drive than I had planned. It was very dark when I arrived and it was interesting seeing all the lit up rigs on the horizon. It reminded me of a bunch of Burning Man men all spread out. One of the first things I saw was a hugeass fire. At first I thought it was a rig burning off gas, but after I found it, it turned out to be some sort of tank farm burning off something. The smell of H2S was in the air, which smells like money being made!
At first glance, both Midland and Odessa around I-20 looked pretty old and run down. This morning when I went out to forage for breakfast I headed up to northern Midland. Much better area, clearly where all the new development and suburbia area. I also got a good luck at how utterly flat and open the Permian Basin is. Which makes sense, since it was an ancient sea bed.
I did quite a bit of driving around the oilpatch this morning. I drove down to Crane where some of the original fields were and it was quite dense with pumping jacks. Unfortunately all the roads were blocked so wandering on country roads was as close as I could get. The rigs were considerably harder to find compared to being lit up at night, not to mention being very spread out. I found one with a backdrop of wind turbines on a mesa I wanted a photo of, but it was deep in the middle of a lease I couldn’t get to.