Another Bump in the Road (Updated)

Posted on February 19, 2016 by ehurst

*heavy sigh*

Something broke on my Debian install. My research indicated it was just one of those things, but it made things unworkable for me.

So I tested Linux Mint but it does not like this hardware. So I ended up back on CentOS because I found out how to solve the problem that first drove me off of it. Back where I started.

I’m praying sincerely that this wrestling match is over and I can get back to work.

Update: It was not to be. However, this time the crash-n-burn of CentOS was far more instructive. I was worried some portion the hardware was failing, but the diagnostics from CentOS indicated something else.

So I went into the BIOS. A week or so ago I had to install Windows briefly so I could update the BIOS, which was waaaaay out of date. It’s one of the unsolved mysteries of computer tech support that the manufacturer manages to change BIOS settings when updating, and does not even give you the defaults in the process. Several things were out of whack. Once I restored them, CentOS was already broken.

However, it’s no secret that I vastly prefer Debian in the first place. So I’m updating this post from my netbook while I reinstall Debian on the workstation. And it’s going smoothly.

Thank you for your prayers.

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I Saw This One Coming

Posted on February 19, 2016 by ehurst

Just a reminder: Politics is a spectator sport for me. I have zero sympathy for any current political organization or agenda. No government on this earth does what God requires so there’s no point in taking sides with anyone.

Back when it first came out in theaters, I went with my sister to watch an afternoon matinee featuring The Pit and the Pendulum. At the climax of the film, our hero was strapped to a table beneath a massive razor-sharp pendulum swinging side to side. With each pass the whole thing dropped a centimeter or so, torturing the poor victim with the thought of his painful demise before actually taking several slices to be fatal.

That’s the image in my mind every time I think about our American political system. However, the sheeple aren’t even aware of the whole picture. They live under a fantasy that they can push the pendulum to their side and make it stay. They don’t realize that it will eventually slice them up. While I can’t pretend to know the names of powerful figures cynical enough to do this on purpose, there has to be a few out there fully aware that issues gaining popular notice aren’t that important. They are simply playing the assigned role by pretending to care about partisan issues. Meanwhile, the truly awful stuff takes place behind the scenes while everyone else is distracted.

It’s about time to switch back the other way. We see today a left-wing drive to press the advantage before the pendulum stops and begins swinging toward the right. I’m going to guess that the issue most likely to explode in their faces will be some attempt to confiscate personal firearms. I assure you that if government really intended to disarm American citizens, it would be done very quietly and very slowly because that’s the only way you could pull it off. No, whether the guns are taken or not isn’t the point. There has to be some kind of manufactured crisis right about the time the really nasty background stuff goes through.

Then we will be set up for the right-wing backlash. One of the people who plans to lead that backlash is Oklahoma’s Congressman Steve Russell.

As with everything else, I can’t possibly know all the pertinent facts, but I am compelled to maintain a clear conscience for myself by faithfully reporting my own experiences in seeking God’s favor. It’s all about that narrative. I was in the crowd at First Southern Baptist Church of Del City when Russell came home to a hero’s welcome, having been battalion commander of the Army unit that captured Saddam in Iraq. As soon as he rose to be identified, everything about him radiated political animal.

I became acquainted with his kids, heard his early public presentations and even helped edit some of his early editorial articles as he attempted to get his name out there in the public awareness. I was neither enemy nor fan, but simply wanted to see if my guess was accurate. So far, all my predictions about him came true. He’s no statesman, just a propaganda shill.

He has some charisma and worked on his propaganda skills, but he’s just not quite as talented as his ambitions. His early worked reeked of cheap manipulation, so all he ever managed to do was fire up those already sympathetic to his agenda. He’s always been the darling of the Rush Limbaugh fans. In those early days I feel certain he was a true believer. However, unlike someone of Ron Paul’s caliber, his convictions are fantasy that requires some amount of compartmentalized awareness. Ron Paul is apparently guileless, sincerely deceived about the usefulness of politics and Western Civilization. Russell is a little on the edge of wacko. He’s a hard-core Zionist, among other things. Not so much in what he says, but if you watch his actions, you’ll recognize this is his nature.

For example, he recently published a report on wasteful government spending. I assure you it wasn’t the money, but that said money wasn’t spent on his favorite causes. A retired Lieutenant Colonel? You bet he’s a war-monger, and would not hesitate to slice and dice a few harmless Muslims just because they are Muslim.

Recently there was a big local controversy when a bunch of unelected officials with nothing to lose decided that there would be a new turnpike running more or less along Peebly Road between I-40 and Turner Turnpike (I-44). But they pretend to care and hosted a presentation to answer questions. They claim it’s not mapped out yet, but one of the answers they gave to a question was that this is a done deal and they will be taking mass quantities of property to do it. These are not nice people; they won’t hesitate to sick armed troops on people who would prefer to keep their own land. You can bet some of them are making big corrupt money of this process.

So Russell showed up at the meeting in part because he owns property out there. He claimed his presence was as a private landowner. However, it’s been a long time and I sense that he’s far more cynical and less idealistic than when he first got started. Either he’s already been bought off or he’s fishing for some kind of political deal by showing up like that.

Given how he’s met every one of my expectations in the past, I see no reason I shouldn’t warn those folks out in eastern county that Russell is not your friend nor ally, so don’t trust him. He talks all cool and collected, but if you get in his way, he wouldn’t hesitate to ruin your life. At least one commentator has called him a “Shiite Republican.” When the rigth-wing backlash gets rolling, he’ll do his best to be in the front of the pack. Again, I’m not his enemy and totally insignificant in his world. All I can do is watch that pendulum swing and slice.

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Book Cover Art

Posted on February 18, 2016 by ehurst

Some of you have visited my Smashwords page where I list all of my free ebooks. I do my own cover art; most of it is a matter of using public domain or images licensed for free use under various Creative Commons formats. It’s not hard to simply add whatever blurb is required inside the book cover on the title page. Today I’m going to show you a couple of samples of work I did for a friend.
sample01
sample02
I left his titles on them but removed his name; the second one is under a license so contact me before you attempt to steal it.

My point is that this stuff isn’t hard to do. I use GIMP for this and simply crop and add text, sometimes fading the image so the text is more readable. I suppose the tough part is finding the images and deciding what seems to fit with the title and contents. Once or twice I’ve drawn stuff myself on paper and scanned it in, but I’ve gotten better over the past few years at finding appropriate images. As you might expect, I can also help with editing the contents, but that’s a lot more work. Still, if you have a book and struggle with the cover art, let me know; I may be able to help you.

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You Are the Gospel

Posted on February 18, 2016 by ehurst

The last thing we want is to fall into the trap of trying convince people. It is simply not possible to go there without sliding down into mere psychological manipulation. Changing someone’s mind accomplishes nothing eternal. We want to see people awaken their awareness of their hearts. We can afford to let God handle the problem of where that takes them. All we have to remember is that genuine redemption is an event in the Spirit Realm that merely manifests here, and that the most we can do is help people become aware of the heart-mind.

So the fundamental issue is the clarity of our message. We can’t compel people to receive it, but we are obliged to make it available. Humanity consist of individuals whose reasoning and processing of sensory input varies all over the map, and no one of us can reach them all. Each of us has our own target audience chosen by God. Some of us write, and we write about a jillion different things. Some of us express our faith in other ways. There is a sense in which the mere choice of what to consume is an expression of faith. What gives Kiln of the Soul Parish its identity is that we all share some form of digital expression for our faith.

This is not the Brother Ed Show. At the very most, some of you might imagine that I qualify as an apostle, but you won’t catch me using that title. If I manage to help you find your faith, it remains your faith. You are the gospel message. I’m here only to help you become a loud and clear expression of that gospel.

Portray for the world the difference it makes to shift the awareness into your heart. Apply it to everything you do; I assure you the joy comes across. What then must follow is training your mind to obey the necessary demands of that shift in awareness. As day follows night, you cannot avoid being some kind of witness for the truth, but a consciously celebratory life is by far the best witness.

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Cycling: Lake Hefner Routes

Posted on February 17, 2016 by ehurst

FriendlyRocksToday’s goal was to test different routes to and from Lake Hefner. The images are combined from two different trips. On the first a couple of months ago I took the lower route around the dam and it was just okay until Hefner Road took me back into the housing area. From then on it was a little frustrating. Today I stayed up on the dam and went around the lake clockwise.

KWTVtwranchorBut the first leg of this was the Katy Trail. Up at the north end there is a rock outcropping that always calls my name when I pass by (image left). Sometimes I stop for a break, sit and pray out loud because it’s isolated. Where the bike trail ended I got out on Grand Boulevard and stayed on it to NE 63rd. Instead of turning left, I went straight across and followed a quiet back road that eventually dumped me out on Kelly near KWTV (Channel 9). I remembered to catch a shot of this old tower anchor; before they took it down that sucker stood 1600 feet (488m). Not a single one of the towers now standing has anchors anywhere near that massive.

OKCskylineHefnerLkI headed west on Wilshire as my primary approach to the lake. It was far less busy than 63rd street, particularly in terms of trucks. The busiest spot was the intersection at Western Avenue where most cars waited to turn south, since the street narrows suddenly at the edge of Nichols Hills. That is a ritzy neighborhood that incorporated primarily so they could choke down the main roads and discourage through traffic. It works and I had a couple of quiet miles, then turned south and caught the last mile of Grand Boulevard to the lake entrance. To the left is a view across the lake back toward the city skyline to give you a scale of things. I stayed on the bike trail around the southern side, then up the west shore to where the dam begins in earnest.

HefnerDamFor cars it is one-way clockwise, but bikes and pedestrians are not limited. Something just over half the circumference of the lake looks like this.BluffCreekHefnerDam All this mass of earth captures Bluff Creek on its way to the Cimarron River quite some miles north of here. First I’ll show you the view from the bottom (left) and you can see it never was much of a water course. There are actually a couple of branches flowing down here on the valley floor, and off to the right of the image is a nice little park. However, the bike path runs past it, whereas all trails inside the park are pedestrian only. That’s common thing up around this part of the city.

BluffCreekfromaboveTo the right is the same creek viewed from the top of the dam. A portion of the park is visible in the left background. Maybe in a couple more weeks the grass won’t be so brown; some areas I’ve passed are already turning that way. Around to the northeastern corner is a very extensive park area commonly used for para-sail surfing. Maybe that’s not the precise term for it, but the participants hang onto a chute too small to lift them easily, connect to a tether on the shore, then allow the wind to drag them out onto the water and sort of side-slip back and forth on the water using something like a short surfboard. The angle would have forced me to shot into the sun if I wanted to be close enough to see anything, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

HefnerLighthouseThis time I rolled on down the east shore to the entrance at the end of Britton Road. The little lighthouse is purely decoration, standing on a spit of land artificially laid just for the purpose. Clustered around it on the shore are four or five obscenely expensive restaurants. Dodging around them I tried out Britton Road and decided it was too rough and too busy, just like 63rd Street. Coming from the west side, it looks Wilshire will be the preferred approach to Hefner in the future. I stayed on Britton as far as Eastern Avenue and headed south to pick up the Katy Trail again just past Remington Park. Nice hard ride today.

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The Heart of Church History

Posted on February 17, 2016 by ehurst

Church History as an academic pursuit is mostly a matter of grasping the politics of organized religion. It’s sheer idiocy to assume politics have no place in the church; our biggest problem is that people have rejected the political structure God designed for His people. When you understand that we as humans are hard-wired to benefit most from Eastern feudal organization, it’s not hard to see where the Church went wrong. A history of flawed practice and theology arises mostly from closing off the heart-mind awareness.

I’ve noted in my discussion of The Cult that a primary objective of the Judaizers was just that — destroying heart-led religion. The reliance on heart-mind awareness was simply a fundamental assumption in most of the cultural background of the entire Ancient Near East. This faculty is what lies behind the academic term “mysticism” that describes the non-rational approach of ancient Hebrew wisdom and scholarship. The rabbinical colleges didn’t simply go Greek, but they allowed the influence of Aristotle’s epistemology to turn their Hebrew religion into legalism. The fundamental element of legalism is making a god of the written record or revelation. Following this to its logical conclusion, you can find today Talmudic quotations that insist God is obliged to adhere to Scripture as if it took away His divine prerogatives to have it recorded. (Worse, the Talmud claims precedence over the Old Testament as Scripture.) This was an idea carried over from Medo-Persian imperial policy (the earliest recorded incidence of such thinking) and wholly foreign to a more ancient Hebrew approach. In the end, Jehovah is no longer the living God, but a weak caricature of Jewish imagination.

Being able to trace such influences is a fundamental element in History in general, and Church History in particular. The only problem is that we are constrained by the evidence, mostly written records. Against that we are weighed down by a massive burden of popular speculation that arises from some distinct agenda. Noting this is in itself a matter for Church History, too. Don’t let my blather here give the impression that I have some overwhelming expertise that you are not permitted to question. I’m quite willing to explain where my ideas come from because I don’t take myself that seriously; I don’t view my ideas and teaching as somehow the purest manifestation of God’s revelation. By the same token, don’t be offended if I happen to associate your contrasting ideas with something you might not like. Few of us are so completely original as to claim all our ideas as somehow born first in our imaginations. We choose what works best in seeking to obey God; that’s what religion means.

In my religion, if you indicate an affinity for subjecting your reason to the convictions of your heart, I have no fear that you will somehow develop a religion that threatens mine. In my religion, convictions are planted in your soul by God. You spend the whole of your earthly existence trying to make sense of those convictions so that you can obey them. That’s what it means to be heart-led. That shouldn’t be a threat to other religions, but you and I know that the majority of organized religion won’t tolerate that approach. That’s because most mainstream religion is about control, not setting you free from false moral constraints.

So you can see in my article on The Cult that a primary element in the collapse of genuine New Testament religion is the political impulses of the Pharisees who killed our Savior. While there was certainly some measure of vengeance and hatred behind their determination to stamp out genuine discipleship in following Christ, the impulse is wired into all fallen souls. We drag it out into the light so we can seek to understand it and avoid it. Most of humanity simply assumes it’s natural in a good sense and never questions the impulse. So we see the Judaizers and their sly efforts to lead new converts back into slavery to the Talmud. Part of that effort was smothering the heart-led faith before it really got rolling, and chaining the Christian religion to the same legalism that ruled Judaism.

That influence took deep root in organized Christian religion. Once religion was dependent on reason, there was nothing to protect the mission. The gospel rests entirely on awakening the awareness and moving consciousness into the heart. We look back across the ruined landscape of Church History and see the claw marks left by this beast. For example, who doesn’t recognize the stamp of The Cult on the Jesuits? Why does the Roman Church need their own FBI-CIA agency like that? What the hell are they protecting? There’s nothing heavenly about that. But somewhere along the path, the Roman Church concluded that whatever “the Fall” means, the human intellect is not fallen. Thus, the heart is replaced by reason once again, taking us right back to the Fall itself in Eden. So all you to worry about is bunch of bad habits that the Church hierarchy will gladly correct for you with their magisterial powers.

I’m not saying that the Roman Church is wholly evil and useless. I won’t tell you that your heart cannot possibly lead you to hang out in that system. What would happen if all the good people left the Church? Better that we have some heart-led folk infiltrate every part of the human world, not in secrecy, but wrapped in the mystery of God’s ineffable truth. We need that glorious witness everywhere, like salt and light.

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Technical Updates for Late February 2016

Posted on February 17, 2016 by ehurst

Consider the moral implications. Understanding the technology is one thing; knowing why and how it matters is another level entirely.

If your computer runs Win10 and you have some functional reason for preferring it over whatever was running before, but you still worry about all the snooping telemetry stuff, there are good safe tools to block that. Spybot Anti-beacon comes from a reputable source and will allow you to see all the options with some reasonable hope of grasping what they do. Be aware that shutting off the telemetry will break some common Windows functions.

Therein lies the real problem. I worry less about the snooping than the forced dependency. As I’ve stated often in the past: My primary reason for running Linux is control. I actually like the way Microsoft has managed to offer mostly sane defaults in how it anticipates typical computer user habits. Most of the things you are likely to want to do are often integrated into Windows and waiting for you, just a couple of pointer-clicks away. I could sincerely wish Linux UI designers would offer more restrained and utilitarian options for that kind of usage without all the senseless bling. What we get on the Linux desktop is almost uniformly designed to please developers and fanboys, nothing like us normal user folk. But I use Linux and accept some of the inconvenience because it allows me a level of control over things that really matter to me. Windows increasingly takes those things out of my hands.

We have no trouble figuring out why Linux developers do what they do and why they ignore our requests. They talk about it. Microsoft and the rest of the corporate world are not so forthcoming, and they have grown increasingly deaf to our complaints. They get away with it largely because the entire industry as a whole is moving in the same direction. That direction is toward handing more and more control over the machines and our data to folks who claim we can and should trust them to make it all convenient and profitable for us. I’ve been burned. I don’t trust them; these people have lied in the past. They’ve been caught lying and are unrepentant.

When I made so much noise here a month ago about wanting to move this virtual ministry more completely under my control, that had nothing to do with controlling people, but the data and the virtual interaction. Indeed, the whole point in taking a tighter hand on the technology is to offer you more individual freedom. I’m seeking to open myself and the data I control to your greater convenience, while protecting it from those who will inevitably seek to take that control from me and hinder my openness. We are doing something truly different here, and someone will eventually decide it’s a threat to their control over something. History is loaded with examples of that. Further, my heart warns me it’s coming and that’s the best guidance I have.

I took the time to investigate DD-WRT and other alternative router software. I’m now less worried about it being buggy, seeing the factory stock firmware is also buggy (and appears to be some kind of Linux itself). The real difference is that the former has more features, but the latter is much easier to use. I’d wrangle with the DD-WRT if it was needed, but after joining their forum and engaging in forthright discussion, I was advised it won’t help much in what we do. There may be a difference in security, but I assure you that’s something very hard to evaluate without it becoming an obsession that shoves everything else out of the way. I’m not turning this into a CompSec research station; that’s not my calling. I’ll trust God for the things He doesn’t put into my hands.

Right now the FTP service is working fine, so far as anyone has shown interest. I’ve also found out this router offers more DDNS options than I first thought, so that my be coming soon. In layman’s terms, that means my home network could become accessible in a more conventional way with an Internet domain name and reliable response. Should more services be needed, I’ll use the built-in port forwarding feature and run them from the workstation itself, not in the router. Again, in layman’s terms that means the router would hand off some of the workload while still providing a firewall for my computer. Meanwhile, no one has requested anything that calls for me to set up more services, nor do external conditions seem to require any changes just yet.

So right now I’m going to focus on the task of reformatting the materials on hand, rewriting a couple of things in the process, and continuing the daily posts of things that come to my attention. By all means, you should ask questions and request that I cover things you’ve been wondering about. Otherwise you are stuck with whatever rattles my cage.

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Holding the Door Open

Posted on February 16, 2016 by ehurst

Eden is a long way from Utopia.

The latter will ever remain a myth, a materialistic fantasy. It’s a demand that God mend His ways to match human reason. Eden represents what God designed for us, what He designed us for. So long as reason rules human aspirations, we will never approach Eden. Human reason cannot possibly desire to face that Flaming Sword of revelation. Human reason cannot bow the knee to God unless some other faculty awakens to overpower reason. Reason on the throne of human will is what keeps us under Satan’s authority, precisely because we imagine that we are free.

You may know that I generally hate videos. Some of it is entirely personal, but there is a broad background of factual evidence that the medium itself is a serious danger to our conscious awareness. On the one hand, it offers proof just how weak and vulnerable is human reasoning. You can’t trust your mind to remain faithful to the truth because it is not designed to handle the truth. On the other hand, if you strive to remain connected to the higher moral awareness of your heart, there is no doubt you’ll be better armed to handle the manipulative nature of most video presentations. But don’t fool yourself; just because you claim to be heart-led doesn’t mean you can watch all the videos your addictive flesh wants to see. If you are heart-led, you’ll be careful to avoid most of them in the first place. And the ones you do watch will be heavily filtered through a powerful moral awareness.

So yesterday I saw one that I knew was a lot of propaganda, but was struck by something portrayed that was morally proper. How factual the portrayal might be was not the issue. Sometimes the facts simply do not matter. What matters is that Kadyrov knows the moral truth on one issue in particular — forgiveness. He welcomed home a bunch of stray sheep who went off to join Daesh and found out what a huge fat lie it is. While these men did pay their penalties, there was a place for them to return to their homes and rebuild a life in Kadyrov’s domain. In the video, it was plain to see his brand of forgiveness was strength, not weakness. He put people first because such is the core of his earthly treasure.

Westerners assign way too much value to “principle” — making a god of some imaginary “objective truth.” Absolute truth is moral in nature, far beyond intellectual packaging. Ultimate truth is the Person of God. If you cannot imagine our Creator as someone who can change His mind, then you make Him a dead deity. He tells us flatly to call on Him and seek to persuade Him. Granted, a great deal of that process is aimed at changing us to His way of seeing things, but God is not steel and concrete. He lives and hears and considers what is in our hearts. Knowing God bears little resemblance to a memorized body of factual knowledge.

That you might be able to find alleged ethical violations in Kadyrov’s rule over Chechnya is mostly missing the point. All that really means is that someone refuses to understand how reality works. Don’t imagine that I idolize Kadyrov in any way. I’m not a Muslim, for example. If I admired Islam that much I’d be one of them. But Islam isn’t nearly as much a problem for me as it is for most Westerners. Nor is any other religion, or having no religion at all. I don’t stand on rational principle, but upon my best grasp of the moral ground of God’s Person while having to tolerate the sloshing sewage of fallen human existence. I recognize that I cannot take seriously whatever my intellect and reason might imagine is the ideal.

But my heart knows a scent of Eden’s flowers when it wafts on the breeze.

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Give It a Rest

Posted on February 15, 2016 by ehurst

Today is a good time for us to pray. As I was out on a long ride, I was generally praying out loud the whole time.

I have no quarrel with anyone, and I welcome all who can humor my blather as they seek to absorb a little of the good stuff that I might have to offer. However, that doesn’t mean everyone will be so friendly with me. I’m okay with a little carping now and then; I’ve written too often that we can’t possibly agree on everything. Most normal evangelicals aren’t interested in harassing me, much less folks representing other religions. I’m still your pastor when you need me. In the future, the greatest threat to this ministry will come from those who serve the Cult. More specifically, my heart still expects some defenders of Zionism to come after us eventually. They are getting more aggressive with their cyber-activism. Having this networking stuff hardened and ready for the electronic assault is simply the minimum responsible thing to do.

Things are okay for now. While I won’t go out of my way to provoke them, I doubt they will ignore me forever. They’ve got something ugly up their collective sleeves and the Mossad technically owns an awful lot of Internet security software companies. This should be interesting.

So let’s pray and each of you decide for yourself what God requires of you.

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Cycling: Lake Overholser

Posted on February 15, 2016 by ehurst

MeridiaBrdgWorkToday’s ride was ostensibly aimed at Lake Overholser on the far western edge of Oklahoma County. I had passed it once on that giant loop with Lake Hefner but today I wanted see the rest of Overholser. This was just a standard start from the apartment up Reno, over the NE 4th and up to Bricktown. Heading south toward the Chesapeake Boathouse I stayed on the north bank of the Oklahoma River Trail until I got to Portland and made the crossover to south bank. From there it was just another mile to Meridian.OldRRBridge While the recreational additions are still under construction (image above left), there was actually nothing happening up on top of the bridge. The apron matching the road to the bridge deck is still unfinished on the east lanes, but it was easily navigable on my bike. I had a safe and clear passage to the far side, where the construction crew carefully avoided blocking the Overholser Bike Trail, just visible running under the bridge on the far side (north bank of the North Canadian). I passed only a few cyclists, one of whom was a bicycle cop, all the way upriver and around north toward Overholser. To your upper right is the old railroad bridge across the North Canadian at the Mustang Road Electric Plant.

OverholserDamCtrlI figured it would be possible to walk my bike across the dam if the gates were open to pedestrian traffic. To my relief, it was open. However, it was not unobstructed totally. There was a mobile crank mechanism firmly planted across the path, but I simply lifted my bike over it.OverholserImpediment There was only one other pedestrian and I let him go in front of me.OverholserBermOverholserDamWorksOverholserDamWest

These five shots together were taken from the dam which is the south end of the lake, except the image lower right, which is looking east back across the dam. That shot of a path running up a berm is the separator between the river channel on the right (east) and the body of the lake on the left (west); it runs two miles northward. On the west side of the lake there is no nifty bike path, but a pretty decent two-lane road running around the entire shore of the lake and not much traffic.

IPHC-HQOnce I came back around the north end, instead of heading south on the east bank, I simply stayed on the old Highway 66 route into Bethany, a separate municipality pretty much owned by the Nazarenes. It began as a little town around the old Nazarene college now called Southern Nazarene University. There was no way for me to get a good shot of the facility, but given how Bethany is still a dry town, you should not be surprised to see that the International Pentecostal Holiness Church has their headquarters in the same town. There were few impediments to a good shot of the IPCH offices and their own college, Southwestern Christian University.

6730NW39thExpwyBethanyJust a short ways past all that stuff was this nifty pizza place with a lovely mural on their western outer wall. I was now working my way back home, but decided to pass the source of the Deep Fork River, which was just a couple miles east of there.SrcDeepFork The image on your right here shows an unremarkable low spot on a ragged city street known as Ann Arbor, and we are looking north toward NW 39th Expressway. The storm drain on the left runs west and north toward Lake Hefner. The storm drain on the right runs off behind the apartments there and begins the Deep Fork River. The sign on the left side of the street notes all of this. There really isn’t much to see of the Deep Fork so long as it runs through this urbanized area. Most of it looks like this picture on the leftUrbanDeepFork. About the only place it looks even remotely picturesque is where it crosses through Will Rogers Park, which straddles Interstate 44 between NW 23rd and 36th. I was riding along the latter and it was not a pretty view with all the Parks & Recreation maintenance facilities.CurvyStreetsOKC

So I stayed on NW 36th to Drexel and headed south. Once across NW 23rd, I was on a series of curvy streets laid out way back when OKC had streetcars. A few lines still ran when I was quite young, but I think it all went away in the early 1960s. Still, we have these lovely divided curving streets (image right) that hand off to each other all the way downtown. This is also a good view of the Devon Tower against the rest of the OKC skyline. Downtown you get to see some of the expensive stuff the city leaders began doing two decades ago.HarveyAveSdowntownOKC This is Harvey Avenue looking south across NW 4th Street. I’ve noted in the past this the 4th Street that takes me back across town to within a mile-and-a-half from home.

It was a decent workout as I tried to hold my maximum sustainable pace for long rides; aside from being longer than 30 miles, I am unable to estimate the actual distance for today.

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