Return to the Index for 2023

On this page I will be putting those pictures that I want to include in the photo album even though they don't have anything to do with a specific trip or event, although you may also find pictures from the occasional trip or event where very few pictures were taken.

Spring - Summer

This first group of pictures were taken between April and June, both at my house and Fred's. What you'll see here are some of the beautiful blooms and flowers that we were presented with this year.

This is one of the rose blooms on my island out back.

My Peggy Martin rose has taken some time to get established and start climbing the trellis, and this is the first year for lots of blooms.

This is a lily blooming at Fred's house.

In the next group of pictures, the first red rose is growing by my garage, but all the rest are from Fred's house:

March 5: A Night at the Symphony

We still have our Symphony seats, and tonight the orchestra, chorus, and organ pulled out all the stops for one of the pieces being presented, and I took the opportunity to record the "full house".

April 9: A Room With a View

Two days ago, Fred had an appointment with a new pulmonologist, who was the first to diagnose why he was having difficulty in Ecuador and earlier. As part of the treatment, Fred was immediately admitted to Baylor hospital where he remained for two days getting intravenous diuretics and further tests. Fred was dramatically better when he left Baylor, and continued to improve on his new meds.

On the day he left Baylor, he took a couple of pictures out the window of his hospital room:

When we left, we stopped out in front of the hospital where there is a neat fountain that Fred wanted a picture of:

May 3: A Near Miss

Today we left for Florida, but we had an incident before we even got out of town. Over where Lemmon Avenue meets US-75, we have to turn right from a right-turn lane to get onto the expressway. I got in the turn lane early, but another car wanted to bypass the line forming behind me and forcefully nosed his way in a couple of cars ahead of me. But I could see that a few cars ahead of him, there was a stalled car, so I quickly moved one lane to my right, intending to pass the stalled car so I could get back in the turn lane. I happened to be abreast of the car that had forced its way into the line when he, too, discovered he was blocked by the stalled car. Without regard to me, he move directly into my lane, and I could feel his car scrape along mine. I slowed as he literally pushed me into the lane to my left, and he zoomed around the stalled car and sped through his right turn and down the highway access road.

I wanted to stop and see what damage had been done, but knew that we'd be heading on anyway, and fixing whatever had happened when we returned. So we waited to look at the damage until we stopped for gas at Tyler. This is what the car looked like:

I was quite upset- at least until I went to feel what looked like scratches in the paint. To my surprise, it was only dirt, and all of it wiped off right there at the gas station. I have no idea how the other car only left dirt on mine; after all, I felt the scraping when he forced his way by me. To this day I have no idea how this happened, but at least the car was not damaged.

June 12: At the Crescent

Today, we met with our investment advisors for lunch, and after that, on our way through the lobby of their building, we stopped to take a couple of pictures of the fountain and column that are right there in the lobby.

June 23: Movie Night

This evening we had Lou and Lynne over for dinner, a movie, and dessert.

A "Psycho" Moment

July 11: A New Acquisition

We returned from our last trip to San Antonio with a new purchase that Fred made at Art Gallery Prudencia. Since he is pretty much out of wall space, it now has an honored position in my house.

July 30: Ron Mathis' 60th Birthday

Ron's 60th birthday is actually on August 1, but the Saturday before Jay invited Fred and I, along with a number of Ron's workmates, to surprise him on his return from seeing family in Oklahoma. When Jay heard the garage door go up, he got us all to be real quiet- until Ron walked into the kitchen from the garage. As you can see in the movie below, Ron was indeed surprised!

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible)

I can't remember the names of all of Ron's work friends (only one of whom we'd met twenty years earlier when they were on the same plane that took Ron, Jay, Fred, and me to Las Vegas. So here are the few pictures I took during the party:

One of the gifts one of his engineer friends gave Ron was a submarine- made from a cucumber and a bunch of electronic parts (that's what Ron does- he is an electronics engineer). If you can't see the sub clearly in the picture above, right, you can see a close-up of it here.

August 6: Mario's Birthday

Today we are out at Mario and Steve's house to help Mario celebrate his birthday (which is actually on the 8th). It was just the four of us, and we went out to dinner and then returned to their house for cake. We actually expanded the cake ceremony to include Fred's birthday, which was actually today.

August 30: Moon over Van Alstyne

This picture showed up in Fred's gallery, and I wanted to include it here. He was out in the evening mowing at his house, and there was a particularly interesting moonrise:

November 18: An Evening with Ron and Jay

Every few months, we get to go visit with Ron and Jay up in Plano, and they asked us up on the Saturday before my birthday so they could help kick off the week of birthday celebrations for me around the nation.

Just kidding.

Jay had dinner for us, and he also baked a cake!

Since there were only the four of us, Fred volunteered to take the obligatory birthday picture.

December 4: Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling...

I may have mentioned elsewhere in this photo album that there is one oddity about the infotainment system in my Elantra.

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The oddity involves the display of song information on the infotainment screen.

There are times when the song title is too long for the space allocated for it. When this is true, one of two things happens. Either the title is truncated at the right and an ellipsis (...) added to indicate there is more to the title than is being displayed, or the song title actually scrolls so you can see all of it. (It continues to scroll as long as the song is playing.)

The oddity is that sometimes one thing happens and sometimes the other. And there seems to be no rhyme or reason to when one or the other happens. We've tried every combination of actions we can think of to make it scroll consistently (which is what I would like). One of these days I will have to try to contact a programmer at Hyundai, and send them a movie like the one at left, that shows the scrolling process. This movie also shows that if both the song title and the album title are too long to fit, one will scroll and then the other will scroll and then this process repeats. I had not noticed this before, which is why I wanted to retain this movie.

I did call Hyundai once, but only spoke to a general customer serviceperson, and he thought that the song titles wouldn't scroll when the car was in Drive mode because it would be distracting. But that didn't make sense, of course, since it does happen sometimes (perhaps one in every eight or ten times the car is started). And with the navigation system and phone calls and everything else, it's not like there isn't already plenty that could distract a driver. So the story isn't over yet.

December 26: A Truly Miscellaneous Picture

According to my phone, this picture was taken the day after Christmas, but I confess that I have no idea where it was taken (and I am not good enough at technical stuff to get into the metadata for the picture to see if there are physical coordinates that will help me figure that out.

But I know why I took the photo of the artwork- it shows a view of Chicago from approximately the time that I lived there, and you can see the building that I lived in at the extreme right.

March through December: A New House Goes Up Behind Me

This last section of miscellaneous pictures from 2023 will probably only be of some interest to me, as I intend to record, as much as I can, what is going on with the house just west of me, over the fence that surrounds Greenway Villas- where I live. From the day we moved in here in 1985, there has been a white, ranch-style house on the lot behind me. It has been a constant sight out my west windows- particularly from the master bedroom. Some years ago, as I understand it, the old couple that lived in the house both died, and the house sat empty.

As we watched the house slowly deteriorate, and the backyard become more overgrown, we did some investigation, discovering that the estate of the deceased couple now owned the house. Surprisingly, we found information that indicated the lot and house were for sale- for a cool million bucks. Certainly, the house would be a teardown, as Robin Road, the street behind us, was rapidly changing from relatively small ranch houses to "McMansions", as people discovered this neighborhood. So we supposed it would only be a matter of time before someone with enough money got desirous enough of a large lot on this rapidly changing street to meet the price set by the estate.

But it took years. Years during which the roof developed a hole or two, some of the large trees in the backyard toppled, and in general the property was something of an eyesore. But that changed in March of this year, when we were surprised to look out the window one morning to see the white house being demolished.

It was then that I got the idea that it would be fun to take a picture each day from the same window upstairs to kind of create a time-lapse of the destruction of the house and the building of whatever was going to take its place. That is what I tried to do. The only days I missed were those when we were out of town, of course. Sometimes, as you will see, not much happened during a short absence. But more often, when we were away for weeks at a time, the view changed dramatically, as progress on the construction of what turned out to be a house containing some 8-10,000 square feet of space progressed.

I actually expected the project, which began almost on the last day of March, to be completed this year, but as it turned out, work went much more slowly that I thought it might. For that reason, you will see a section of pictures and movies like this one on the Miscellaneous page for 2024 as well. I certainly expect the house to be completed sometime next year, but we shall see.

In addition to the pictures I tried to take each day, I occasionally went through the gate in our fence onto the property itself. I was very interested, for example, to see how the foundation for such a large house would be laid, what with all the piping and wiring that would eventually be sealed into that slab. Then, when the house was framed, walls went up, and interior spaces became more clearly-defined, I sometimes went over (now taking care to do so when workers were not present after the builder put up a fence at the front of the property) to walk through the house and take pictures. I'm not sure if the builder or the new owners (which I've seen occasionally from my windows) are aware of our gate, or maybe it just doesn't bother them if someone walks through the house under construction.

As of December 31 of the year, there are still not doors on the house- at least not in the back. Sooner or later, there will be, and at some point these doors will be locked, but for now I find it interesting to go have a walkthrough every so often.

So, in this section, I am going to have a series of slideshows. There won't be much commentary, as I don't really care what room is what (since it isn't going to be my house). One slideshow will be an automatic display of the daily (or mostly daily) pictures I took out the window, so I can record, and you can see, how the lot and house change over time. Then, I will put any pictures I took on one of my walkthroughs in a separate, manual slideshow, in case you care to walk through the house with me. These "walkthrough shows" will have a date; the first slideshow will begin on March 30 and end on December 29 (when we left for Florida).

Have a look if you wish, but like I said, the pictures may not be of interest to you; they are just a curiosity even for me.

Views from My Window- The Slideshow

In this first section, I want to take all the views that I took from basically the same spot by my bedroom window of the progress on the new house from March through December and put them in a slideshow.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

My slideshow of the house going up is automatic. When you click on the image at left to view it, I will open up the slideshow in a new window and the show will begin.

The first picture in the show was taken on March 30 and the last on December 28, just before we left for Florida.

I know that the positioning of the camera was not precisely the same each time; I have tried to smooth out the more obvious inconsistencies, but short of setting up a tripod and leaving my phone in the same position all year, I didn't expect the pictures to be perfectly aligned.

When you are ready, just click on the image at left. When you are finished looking at the house going up (when the show cycles back around to the beginning) you can just close the popup window to return to this page.

March 30: Destruction and Walkthrough

Today, the house behind me has been knocked down, and we went over and walked the site after the crew had left. I have a movie of the destruction in progress, and some pictures taken during our walk on the property.

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible) Taken from my house, they are in the process of demolishing the house.

June 8: Initial Piping and Plumbing

Today, I walked over to the site to see some of the initial pipes that are being installed- pipes that will eventually be buried beneath the foundation. I was struck by how much planning has to happen to ensure that the pipes that are being laid today will be in the right position for an eventual bathroom, say, somewhere on the second floor of the completed house. I also found that the builder had put up a sign that had a picture of what the house was going to look like.

June 17: Preparation for the Foundation

I was very interested to see how the site was being prepared for the foundation.

Foundation Preparation is Complete

I'd thought that slabs were a constant depth, but I found out on my walkthrough of the site today that this is not the case. And you can see from the pictures what I mean. Maybe this technique is for very large houses; I just don't know.

Take a look at this section of the foundation preparation. The earth has been dug out between ten-foot-square sections. The ten-foot sections have been taken down maybe six or eight inches on their tops, and then down about two feet between the sections. The earth sections have been "wrapped" in heavy plastic. Then a grid of rebar has been placed over the entire area, with another long rebar element down in the "trenches" between the earthen mounds.

I had no idea that these "trenches" existed, but I have some inkling that they only exist for very large houses (making me wonder whether our own foundation was done similarly). It may be that this technique is a new one, minimizing the use of concrete while maximizing the strength of the foundation. Again, I noticed that there were PVC pipes that ran through the mounds and the trenches, and these will be buried in the concrete when it is poured. How this might impact a needed repair way down the line, I also have no idea.

Here are some more interesting pictures of the foundation preparation:

June 26: Pouring the Foundation

Today was so interesting that I went over to the site while workers were there to watch the process of pouring the foundation. It wasn't anything like what I thought it would be.

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One change since I was here last week was that the piping for the house had been brought up above the level of the eventual foundation. You can see in this same section of the foundation that you saw in the earlier section how these pipes have now been added in. This is an obvious step that has to be taken.

I was actually alerted to the activity today when I heard the diesel concrete trucks on Robin Road behind me. I looked out my window and saw that the pouring process had begun. A specialized truck has been brought to the site. It is essentially a reservoir with a pump and long, extendable arm that extends out over a foundation. Again, I'd not seen this process before, but it is used in situations where normal concrete trucks can't get close enough so that their own little chutes can get the concrete to where it belongs. The normal trucks discharge their loads into the reservoir, and the specialized vehicle takes it from there.

This process was immensely interesting, and I naturally made a movie of the process, and you can use the player at left to watch the movie I made.

After making the movie, I took some still pictures of the foundation being poured:

The very next day I walked over to the site to examine the completed foundation.

If you look at the first (left-hand) picture above, you will see two flat depressions in the foundation, each with a pipe or two sticking up through it. You can see here a close-up of this section. At the time, I had no idea what this area was for, although it looked like the preparation for a shower or something. Much later, when I was able to walk through the framed house, I discovered that a family room fireplace would be about in this spot, but I still have no idea what all the pipes are for.

July 9: A Walkthrough of the Initial Framing

Framing for the first floor is underway, and this evening Fred and I walked over to take a look.

I am standing in the middle of the first floor of the house, and already we can deduce how it will be organized. The kitchen and family room are in the background, and I am standing it what will probably be a living room.

Here Fred is entering through what will be a back door out onto a patio, and now we can see that those two depressions will eventually be a bathroom or powder room. Fred is about to enter into the area that will become the kitchen.

Fred is entering into the kitchen, which is one of the extensions of this essentially U-shaped house.

This looks towards the other end of the house, where you see another small patio. This leads me to believe that the master bedroom will be located here.

This is at the front of the house, and while I don't know what the opening towards the front of the house will be, I am assuming from the concrete lip in the foreground that this will be a garage with a window. This jives with the picture of the house that is posted on the site.

This is the back of the middle of the house, and it appears that these two public rooms will either have very large windows open to the back or perhaps sliding glass doors. I am also assuming that something- perhaps a pool- will be built in this back area, as there would be no need for doors to open onto just a lawn.

July 16: The Floor of the Second Level is Complete

Today, I've walked over to the site since the ceiling of the first floor and the floor of the second has been erected. I can't get up to the second floor yet, though.

Looking in through the back door, you can see that the first floor framing is complete, and with the second floor trusses and plywood in place, the first floor is now pretty dark.

This is the front of the house, and I am pretty sure this is going to be the front door and entry. Obviously, there will be a double door at the front of the house.

We are looking out one of the public rooms at the back of the house directly at my own townhouse beyond the fence.

We are looking along the back of the house towards what I think will be the master bedroom.

On my way back home, I walked under the roof of what I think will eventually be a large patio outside the kitchen at the back of the house. I was interested in looking at the roof structure. It appeared that there was no support for the roof at its corners. Perhaps it will be cantilevered, but I suspect that, eventually, there would be columns built to support it. The current supports look very temporary.

July 19: My First Walk on the Second-Floor

Looking in through the back door, you can see that even more room framing has been done.

This view looks down the long hall through the kitchen to the front of the house. At the far end will be one of the two garages.

Well, we have the first set of stairs now, and I can get up to the second floor.

At left, you can see the basic framed stairs that lead from the front entry hall up to the second floor. And at the right you can see the view from the second floor down these same stairs. Above is a view from the top of the main stairs that looks across what will be a double-height entry towards what will apparently be a front second-floor bedroom.

This view looks out across some second-floor rooms at the back of the house towards Greenway Villas. I can't tell yet what these rooms will be.

This view looks from the second floor northwest. Apparently, there will be dual garages, and you can see that the roof trusses are in place for this one.

This view looks out again at Greenway Villas. So long as the one tree at the back of the property isn't taken down, I will be shielded from a second-floor view.

This view looks south across the framed rooms on the second floor.

July 31: Walls Are Going Up and Rooms Are Taking Shape

Two weeks later, I went over again late in the day when the workers had gone. Much progress has been made.

Here is the back entry and the entire back of the house. There will be large windows from the first-floor public rooms.

Between the kitchen and the garage, there is a set of "back stairs" leading up to the second floor.

This view looks from near the kitchen to the front entry and main staircase.

From the second floor, looking towards my townhouse, I will have to remember that the occupants can actually see into the master bedroom.

The front door will be arched, and it appears there will be identical rooms on either side of the entry hall.

I think we are looking the eventual family room adjacent to the kitchen. I am thinking there will be a fireplace at the back end near the powder room.

August 7: Rooms are Taking Shape

A week later, I did another walkthrough of the house to see how things were developing.

Walls are in at the back of the house.

The kitchen will be here, and beyond it stairs to the second floor, the laundry, a mudroom, and a garage.

The view above looks from a point near the kitchen through the public rooms at the back of the house. At right is a view looking up the back stairs to the landing and turn up to the second floor.

There is going to be a bedroom at the southwest corner of the house. That is the room of the garage in the background.

This view looks north down the main hall on the second floor.

Walking down that hall I am looking over the two-story entry at the clerestory windows above the front door.

At the end of the hall, this looks back south across the second floor.

The view above looks out the back windows of one of the second-floor rooms. I am not sure if this will be a bedroom or not, but I don't think so. Perhaps a study, media room, or reading room. At right I have come down the main stairs and am looking back up to the second floor.

August 30: A Tour as Plumbing and Wiring is Going In

The pictures I took today are really only of interest to me. They are views of work that is progressing, and pictures of whatever I found interesting or maybe was unsure about.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

I've decided to put these pictures in a manual slideshow. Where I think it needed, I have put a comment on the picture or on the slide as to what you are looking at, or what prompted me to take the picture. I hope that on later walkthroughs, I will be able to answer some of the questions that I have. Maybe if you are experienced in construction, you may already have the answers.

To view the slideshow, just click on the image at left and I will open the slideshow in a new window. In the slideshow, you can use the little arrows in the lower corners of each image to move from one to the next, and the index numbers in the upper left of each image will tell you where you are in the series. When you are finished looking at the pictures, just close the popup window.

November 28: A Major Tour

We have been gone for much of the last couple of months, but work on the house seems to have slowed in the interim- certainly as viewed from the outside.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

But much work has gone on inside, and today I went over to the house to do a complete walkthrough. I'll enter through the back, do the first floor, and then head up to the second; I think you'll be able to tell about where I am. In the slideshow, you'll notice the kitchen is defined, bedrooms and bathrooms are identified, both stairways are completely framed, and all the other rooms (for the most part) can be identified as to their function.

To have a look at the slideshow, just click on the image at left and I will open the slideshow in a new window. In the slideshow, you can use the little arrows in the lower corners of each image to move from one to the next, and the index numbers in the upper left of each image will tell you where you are in the series. When you are finished looking at the pictures, just close the popup window.

After this tour, not much seemed to progress on the house for the remainder of the year; perhaps due to weather or some other factor(s). We'll continue our look at this major home build in the miscellaneous pictures for next year. That's all of the miscellaneous pictures for 2023. You can use the link below to return to the index for 2023.

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