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Every year, both Fred and I take pictures that should be part of this album bu twhich don't belong on the album page for a particular trip or on the album page for all the pictures of the cats. This is the page on which those pictures will appear. They are grouped simply by date.

January 22: Fred Sits for a Portrait

I took a few pictures today- of Fred. And I want to include one of them here.

Fred in the Study

The reason for taking this picture was that I was testing out the little camera that Guy gave me when he got a new one. Guy's old camera was exactly like the one I currently use, and I am planning on taking it with me as a backup when Fred and I go to Europe in a few months.

Guy had told us that every picture he took had the same defect in it- a dark spot near the top of the pictures. I wanted to try the camera out to see if that was the case. It must have been a bit of debris or something on the lens or in the camera, and it must have been temporary, because the pictures I tood today were fine.

But as it turned out, the test pictures that I took (all of Fred sitting in the same chair, at different exposures and at different resolutions, were all fine. So I'll be packing this small camera in my bag- just so that if my main camera fails, I won't lose out on being able to take pictures in Berlin, Prague, and Istanbul.

February 22: Early Spring Blooms

As Fred often does throughout the year, he has brought some pictures of the earliest blooms from up at his place, and as I do a few times a year, I put some of them here on the "Miscellaneous Pictures" page

Over the years, Fred has acquired and planted a wide variety of plants, trees, and flowers on his eleven acres, and so, except for the dead of winter, there is usually something blooming.

The pictures he brought today illustrate the variety of beautiful blooms on his property.

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

But if there are blooms at Fred's house, fifty miles north of here, then spring should be peeking out down here in Dallas, too. And it was.

My Patio Fence and the Carolina Jasmine Climbing It

The Carolina Jasmine on my patio fence puts on a really nice show at this time of year, and I am always taking pictures of the plethora of bright yellow blooms.

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

The Carolina Jasmine isn't my only blooming plant, though. The roses that Fred planted in the island behind the garage and alongside the garage itself are also in full bloom:

February 27: You're Never Too Young to Go Online

After the Symphony this evening, Cynthia, Richard, Fred, and I had some supper at an upscale casual restaurant down on McKinney Avenue, and in the booth next to us were a couple and their young son. With the couple's permission, I took a series of pictures of the little boy, who seemed oblivious to me (and to his parents and to everything else). I can only imagine what he was looking at to cause the changes in expression, but I thought they were priceless. I've put them in the little slideshow below so you can go through them quickly. Use the little arrows in the lower corners to move from one picture to the next:

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March 5: Another Bookworm Milestone

A few years ago, Fred's stepmother, Nina, told me about a word game that she liked to play on her computer, and I downloaded it to my own machine. In Bookworm, the objective is to make words with the random letters that are presented; the game continues unless and until special letters reach the bottom of the grid without being used.

The first ten or twenty games I played were a learning experience, but then I began to get the hang of the strategy behind the game, and I got as high as five or six million before a "v" and a "q" tripped me up. But now I am in the middle of a game that has continued for over two years; you can see from the timer that during that time I have actually been in the game for over six full days (usually in 60- or 90-minute chunks).

So I am hopeful that I might continue for quite some time more; I suspect that if and when I finally lose this game, my score will be so high that to attempt to exceed it would be anticlimactic and I will delete the game. I actually just want to see what will happen if I am able to reach 100,000,000 points, as the score window seems to be limited to eight digits.

April 24: Spring at Downhill Run Acres

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Spring has come to Downhill Run Acres in force now, and many of Fred's rose varieties are in bloom- along with a number of other flowers and plants around his house.

He's brought some pictures from the past few days, and I've made a little slideshow so you can have a look at them.

As usual, use the little arrows in the lower corners of each slide to move from one to the next, and track your progress through the fifteen slides by referring to the index numbers in the upper right.

Enjoy!

May 16: A Landscape Walkaround

You can actually skip this section; I am just recording the pictures that I took as the Greenway Villas Board walked around the property to look at some of the landscaping issues that would need to be dealt with. These pictures won't be of interest to you unless you are a resident.

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June 20: Early Summer Blooms at Downhill Run Acres

We returned from Europe on June 7th. Fred went to his Mom's first, then went home on the 10th, having been away almost a month.

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When Fred next returned to Dallas, he came with a number of pictures he'd taken of the various plants and flowers that were now in bloom around his property.

And so, as I have done before in this album, I've taken the best of them and created a slideshow for you; that slideshow is at left.

As usual, use the little arrows in the lower corners of each image to move from one to another, and track your progress through the ten pictures by referring to the index numbers in the upper left of each one.

Enjoy!

August 1: A Trip to the Kimball Museum

This weekend, Prudence and Ron have come up to DFW to visit with Nancy and Karl, and we joined them on Friday for dinner at Bob's in Grapevine, a trip to the Kimball museum on Saturday, and dinner at a restaurant in Addison that same evening. We didn't take many pictures; photography in the exhibit we toured at the Kimball's Piano Pavilion was not allowed. But here are a couple of pictures I took outside the exhibit:

Prudence has been thinking about opening a small art gallery near her house in San Antonio, and she has begun the process of contacting artists whose work she likes to see if they would exhibit with her. One of these activities was to get with her good friend Vicki Pier to stop by an art exposition just up the street from the Kimball, so after we toured the Phillips Collection, we walked up there to have a look. I took a couple of photos, both of which include Vicki:

We also had lunch at the Kimball, sitting in the atrium with one of the Kimbell's sculpture pieces:

In the Kimbell's Cafe

December 22: Another Bookworm Milestone

Back on March 5 (see above) I wrote about the Bookworm game when I passed a milestone to get to level 84. Well, that level has been way surpassed, and today I reached another milestone.

I wrote then that I was in the middle of a game that has continued for over two years; you can see from the timer at left that during that time I have actually been in the game for over eight full days (usually in 60- or 90-minute chunks). This means that over the last 2 and a half years, I have spent over 200 hours on this single game- which is still in progress.

I also wrote that I was hopeful that I might continue for quite some time more; although I suspected that, assuming I didn't actually lose the game, the highest possible score would be 99,999,999 because, as you can see in the picture at left, the window for the total score is, apparently, limited to eight dights.

But when I got this screen today, passing into level 95, I got my first indication that there might not actually be an upper limit to the score, for I was informed that I would complete level 96 at a score of 102,850,000, and this made me think that something would happen to the total score window to allow an additional digit.

if and when I finally lose this game, my score will be so high that to attempt to exceed it would be anticlimactic and I will delete the game. I actually just want to see what will happen if I am able to reach 100,000,000 points, as the score window seems to be limited to eight digits.

I decided that I had to find out, so I kept playing, and about a half hour later, I got my answer. Here are the two screen images that told the tale:

So I guess I have my answer. But that makes me wonder: What will happen after another 72 days of game play? Is a billion points possible? At this rate, I may not live to get my answer, but you can keep checking back to find out.

January-December: Faces in the Crowd

That's it for this year's Miscellaneous pictures; use the link below to return to the Index for 2017.

Return to the Index for 2017