EYEHEARTZOMBIES

Max asked me how Arkansas was. In case you don’t know, my wife and I recently moved to Arkansas so she could take on a new job. We moved from a little town south of Tulsa, OK, to a little town in northwest Arkansas. It started as a retirement community, so most of the residents are kind of old. Oh well, it’s nice and quite, so I don’t really mind.

Well, Arkansas is interesting, Max. It’s so similar and yet so different from Oklahoma. If you haven’t lived in either state, you probably won’t really care about this. Oh well.

Oklahoma is rather modern in it’s attitude (well, aside from the recent ban on gay marriage) but laid back in it’s movement. The city I grew up in just last year got an IHOP and still only has a 5-screen movie theater. The city Elaine and I went to college in and lived in for several years only has a 2-screen theater. It’s a great theater, though, except for the upstairs screen, where the metal of the seats sometimes carries an electric current.

Arkansas isn’t much different in those respects, though. Yeah, I’ve seen a few guys driving around in beat-up pickups with Confederate flags flying from the bed, but I saw that in Oklahoma. The closest theater to us only has 10 screens (only!) and the next closest has only one digital projector (several of the screens in Tulsa were digital).

Everyone drives fast in Arkansas, which I love. I hated getting behind someone driving 10 under the speed limit in Oklahoma. Haven’t noticed anyone doing that yet. One problem with this, though, is that if you do get behind someone going slow, you can’t usually pass them. Roads are narrow, two lane, and curvy; not the safest of passing zones.

Some of the things here are just perfect to me, though. We live up on a mountain (as just about everyone does) and there’s a great little store at the bottom of the mountain. I go there to do our shopping (as I’ve become something of a house-husband) and it’s great. Again, the downside is the slow people. In this case, mostly older folk who just can’t decide which brand of chips they really want.

There are three local sushi bars. I know some of you don’t care for sushi, but there was only one place in Tulsa until recently (and no where in Okmulgee) to get sushi, and I didn’t really trust it. So far all three places have been good, even the one attached to a gas station (pictures to come). There is also a great thai restaurant in town that has become habit on Wednesdays (Mondays are for sushi).

Also at the bottom of our mountain is a lake with a walking path around it. Elaine and I have taken Poly there a few times and it’s really nice, with lots of birds and a nice part of the path going through the woods. It’s a bit spooky, though, to look up at the mountainside and see GIANT trees laying balanced on other GIANT trees where they’ve fallen due to rotting or their roots being washed away.

There’s a lot of wildlife and wilderness around here, actually. Our back porch looks over a little gully where squirrels play all day long. Large dark-grey-almost-black squirrels that leap from tree to tree. I’m not usually a big squirrel fan, but these guys are impressive. We’re also getting a lot of birds at Elaine’s birdfeeder. She’s excited about that, wanting to put out more feeders when she can find some good ones.

The last thing I guess I’ll tell you about is the awesome park we went to a few days ago. Elaine went to it with Poly the night before, I stayed home, and she wanted me to come the next day. It had been storming and raining all day, but it let up a few hours before she got home and looked like it would stay away for awhile. We decided to take Poly on another walk/hike and off we went. The place is amazing. Miles of trails, waterfalls, fields, all sorts of great stuff to spend hours walking through, doing nothing. We think we might let Poly off her leash to run through the grass at one part of it when we have enough people that she trusts to corral her in. Here are some pictures of the place, on Flickr.