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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. Some of the pictures here are meaningful only to me, so skip what seems uninteresting to you.

January 25: Our First Visit To Southwestern Medical Center

Fred recently had a new pulmonologist added to his roster of heart-related medical professionals. Dr. Bartolome, who was helping with the management of his pulmonary blood clot, was out of the Baylor system, and worked at UT Southwestern Hospital over near Parkland Hospital. We made our first trip to see her one day in January. I happened to have my phone with me, and when we were done we braved the cold of the day to take some pictures out front of the complex.

The tall blue lucite structure is actually a fountain. It's running, but if it gets any colder untreated water will freeze, and that can't be good for the fountain itself.

April 5: Spring Flowers at My House

Thanks to Fred urgings, I have had a trellis for a couple of years behind my garage, intending to mimic that of my friend David, who has a unit like mine at the other end of my building. He erected his about five years ago, and for the last three years or so his 'Jane Austen' climbing rose has covered his trellis completely, and thus in the spring his garage is framed by beautiful pinkish-red blooms. The rest of the year, the greenery is almost a nice to look at.

Sadly, my roses (the same variety as David's) haven't covered the trellis as well as his. The reason seems to be that because of the crepe myrtle behind my garage, and the fact that just west of me, over our fence, there are tall, leafy trees, my roses don't get nearly the amount of sun his do.

Anyway, they are blooming now, I want to include some pictures of them here. At the left and right are a couple of vertical pictures of the roses on the left, shadier side of the garage. Below is a photo of the right side of the garage trellis, showing the same rose variety (mixing in with a different rose that my next-door neighbor, who put up a trellis also, has). The top trellis has not yet gotten significantly covered from either side, and I doubt the left side will every crawl up that far.

As usual, the roses along the side of the garage, and the yellow roses on the island, are doing very well, and putting on quite a show;

April 12: At the Symphony

This season, we have just one seat at the Dallas Symphony, which means eight seats over the season. Since we are travelling so much now, we've gotten in the habit of using four of the seats to take Al and Kathy on a Sunday afternoon. Then Fred and I go twice on Friday night at other times in the season. Tonight is one of those nights.

Photos and video recording aren't allowed during performances, of course, and so usually I don't come away with any photos at all from our Symphony performances. Tonight, however, it seemed as if there were a lot of new faces in the orchestra, and I basically took these three pictures so I could look some of them up on the Dallas Symphony website. The program tonight includes Also Sprach Zarathustra; you know the opening, but have probably not heard the whole work.

After the Symphony, as we were walking back to the car, Fred wanted a picture with the large yellow sculpture installed on the other side of Ross Avenue. After I took his picture, he took mine a few times in various directions. Much of what you see here is part of the Arts District.

June 6: The New House Behind Me

This section of pictures will likely only be of interest to me, so feel free to scroll down to the next section.

In last year's Miscellaneous Pictures, you saw a number of pictures and movies that I made throughout that year of the huge house going up on the lot behind Greenway Villas over on Robin Road. I continued to go through the gate in our fence to walk through the house occasionally, just out of interest as to how it was laid out inside.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

I would go have a walkthrough any time it seemed as if significant progress had been made, taking photos of what I thought was interesting. This continued until today, when a lock was finally put on the back door I had been using to get in. This often happens when a house gets to the point where there is stuff inside that someone might want to steal. Usually, it would happen before this point in the house's construction, but I assume that the construction folks thought that no one would get through the fencing they'd had in front of the house for many months now, and of course the front doors were already installed and locked. That they locked the back door in mid-June was of little consequence, since later that same month the fence for their back yard was built, and so there was no more access through our own fence. (Between the two fences is a city easement, but I think the new owners are going to have a problem as they built their fence so close to ours that it is actually on the city easement. One of these days, when the city needs access to the phone and power poles in the easement, there is going to be a problem.

Anyway, my picture-taking came to and end with my last trip through the house on June 6, my fourth walkthrough of this year. I am going to simply take the pictures I took, in chronological order, and put them in a slideshow, and you can have a look at them if you want.

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.

July 11: We Get a New Monitor

Early in July, the 32-inch television that we'd been using as a computer monitor gave up the ghost. Surprisingly, Fred already knew what he wanted to replace it with. He ordered it, and just a couple of days later it arrived- an ultra-widescreen model. We got it hooked up with no problem at all, and fired it up. Fortunately, the Dell desktop located it and installed the right drivers for it.

The New Monitor

The only problem was that it was such ultra-high-resolution, we had to do a fair amount of fiddling to get the desktop sized to something we could read, and I found that a few applications also needed to be adjusted so that they were also easy to read. The most important one was Microsoft Outlook that I use for email. Since my version of Outlook is so old, it took quite a bit of investigation (most of it online) to find settings that would work.

But everything eventually got set up, and the monitor works wonderfully. The only problem is that it is slightly wider than the TV was, and the monitor opening had not been made wide enough to accommodate it. I will have to find someone who can come in and widen the opening so we can push the new monitor into the opening.

This actually happened just a few weeks later when the carpenter I've been using to fix some of the outside siding on the townhouse came in to sand down the opening so the monitor would fit. Here they are getting ready to do the sanding:

Accommodating the New Monitor

August 19: My Shrubs Get Destroyed

Here are a couple of photos of interest only to me. Another resident was having a delivery from Lowes. They weren't sure where in the community she lived, and their truck (according to my neighbor, Floyd) came up in front of my townhouse, and when they realized the address they were looking for wasn't accessible from the front of our community, tried to turn in front of my unit to go around my unit and back out to Inwood Road. But their truck was too big to make the turn, and when I heard Floyd yelling at someone, I came out to see what was going on. What I found was that the truck was just turning behind my garage to go back out to Inwood, and what they had done is run over all the holly shrubs at the front corner of my townhouse:

I tried to catch up with them, but they turned onto Inwood and disappeared. I went back to talk with Floyd, and he told me they'd asked where 7063 Inwood was. Floyd told them, but wasn't quick enough to stop them from trying to make the turn by my unit. I went over to 7063, and found the truck on Wateka behind that townhome. Amazingly, the driver claimed that he hadn't run over anything!

I talked to the owner of 7063, who was renovating the unit for sale, and she said she would deal with Lowes and make things right. A few weeks later, some landscapers came by with some new shrubs to replace the ones so severely damaged. They will take a good while to grow back, but I guess that was the best outcome I could expect.

August 28: Garage Alteration

This morning, my carpenter is here to take down the window ledge above my garage. I suppose that this feature was added by the developer to units like mine to provide architectural interest, but to my knowledge no one, including me, has ever put anything on the structure; too hard to water, I guess. In fact, every other homeowner with a unit like mine has had these shelves removed already, so now it is my turn.

September 4: Richard Dawkins at the Opera House

A month or so ago, Lynne Richardson let me know that Richard Dawkins was going to be bringing his touring interview to Dallas to the Winspear Opera House (right next to the Myerson Symphony Hall. I made sure that Fred would want to come and then got three tickets for us for this evening.

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible)

Richard Dawkins is an 83-year-old British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008, and is on the advisory board of the University of Austin. His book The Selfish Gene (1976) popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and coined the word "meme". Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.

His "show" is actually a two-hour discussion with a moderator, and no two shows are the same, particularly because in the last half hour he answers questions from the audience; attendees are encouraged to write out questions before the show begins.

The show began, as do all events at the Winspear, with the light-filament chandelier that hangs from the ceiling is slowly raised to disappear into that same ceiling. It is quite something, and I made a movie of the process that you can use the movie player at left to watch.

A vocal atheist, Dawkins is known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. He wrote The Blind Watchmaker (1986), in which he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a creator deity based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation and selection are unguided by any sentient designer. In his book The God Delusion (2006) (which Fred gave me a copy of and which I have read) he argues that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and calls religious faith a delusion. He founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in 2006. Dawkins has published two volumes of memoirs, An Appetite for Wonder (2013) and Brief Candle in the Dark (2015).

The conversation itself was immensely interesting, as was his book. Unfortunately, the questions all seemed to have come from fellow believers (or non-believers, I should say) so there was relatively little controversy. I guess the people who would find Dawkin's views controversial would never attend a Dawkins lecture, so uncurious are so many people.

September 13: Fred's New Car

For a while, Fred has been obsessing with hybrid automobiles. Up until today, he has owned a Hyundai Elantra exactly, save for the model year being two years newer, like mine. But he couldn't stop wondering what a hybrid would be like, and concerning himself with the technology and the mileage he might be able to get. We went out to Freeman Hyundai, where I have my own car serviced, and Fred put a deposit down on a red Sonata Hybrid with the camel colored interior. The dealership schedule showed that one would be arriving in four to six weeks. It was actually about seven weeks, and on the 13th we went out to pick it up. The salesman pulled it up to the building, we took a couple of pictures:

The salesman spent quite a bit of time with Fred, showing him how to do in the Sonata the things he'd gotten used to in the Elantra. These days, this familiarization session is more and more important and takes longer and longer, since today's cars are essentially computers that move, and as we all know, the movement piece is as old as the hills, but the computer piece can be bewilderingly complex. Even on my own, 2021 vehicle, I don't know all that there is in all the menus the computer offers. I probably never will.

We took the car home, leaving Fred's Elantra as a trade-in, of course, and Fred drove his new car for about six weeks before he suggested that we take it on our Fall trip to Fort Lauderdale in late October. The morning that we left, Fred had me stop in front of the townhouse so he could take official pictures of him and his car and his new license plates:

And to make sure that anyone looking at these "official" pictures knew that the Sonata was a hybrid vehicle, he had me take one more:

September 18: I Get My Kitchen Cabinets Redone

I am a creature of habit, and rarely change things unless they need it.

My Kitchen in Late August, 2024

Take my kitchen, for example. When I first moved in, the kitchen had the oak cabinets that you see here. In fact, the kitchen in 2024 was, at least as far as the cabinets were concerned, identical to the kitchen in 1985.

Over the years, it remained the same, until I had a renovation in the early 2000s. At that time, the square tile countertops with wood borders had gotten not only outdated, but a number of the tiles had cracked and the grout between some of them stained. The same had become true of the backsplash, which was done in the same tile. Also, I had always wished that I had deeper sinks, and I needed a new dishwasher and microwave.

So in 2006, I had the kitchen redone. I got my new dishwasher and new sinks, the microwave was moved from over the oven to over a new ceramic cooktop, the oven/microwave combo was replaced with double ovens and, in the most dramatic change, the countertop was replaced with an earthtone granite to go better with the cabinets. The only thing that happened to the cabinets was that they were cleaned and I put new hardware on- black handles to go with the black cooktop, sink, and stainless steel appliances.

But, as I say, the cabinets were not changed, and over the years the kitchen came to appear to me to be darker and darker. It's a small kitchen anyway, and I started thinking that it would look larger with lighter, perhaps even white, cabinets. Fred got into the discussion, and we debated how best to redo or even replace them. We ruled out a total replacement fairly early; the oak wood was very good, and replacing the cabinets would basically mean gutting and rebuilding the kitchen.

Cabinet Detail After Refinishing

Eventually, Fred found a video online of a carpenter who demonstrated a complex, multi-step procedure to take Honey Oak cabinets just like mine and refinish them into almost white cabinets that still show the fine oak grain of the wood. It was a way to update and lighten cabinets without replacing them.

The process takes a while, but the results seemed well worth the effort. You can see at right (not to spoil the eventual result) what the Honey Oak looks like after the refinishing. This was not anything I could do, so I called the carpenter that had done the work in the study and also outside. He and his daughter, who helps him with estimating, came over and I showed them the video and asked if this were a project he could or would want to do. They did some investigating to make sure they could obtain the necessary products, and they worked to understand all the steps and give an estimate for the entire kitchen and the small desk area on the other side of the breakfast area.

Their eventual price quote seemed quite reasonable for all the work that would be needed, and so we signed a contract to have the work done beginning in early September and finishing before we left for Ecuador on the 1st of October. They began right away- Juan and three helpers.

The Living Room Actually Looked Worse

The first thing I had to do was to take literally everything out of the kitchen that wasn't actually built-in; all of this stuff- including the fridge (whose handles had to be removed to get it through the doorway) had to go in the dining room and living room.

This process took me a day, and before I started, the workers helped me remove the fridge handles and manhandle it into the dining room; at least I had a functioning fridge for the duration. During the time I moved everything out, I found a number of things I'd been looking for, and I also identified quite a few things I really didn't need anymore and was able to discard.

The next day, the first thing the workers did was to cover everything they could. While all the doors would be refinished in the garage, the cabinet frames would have to be refinished while still on the wall, and this was indeed going to generate a lot of mess- if only from the sanding steps.

Then work could begin in earnest.

Working on the Cabinet Frames

Actually, all the cabinet doors were the easy part. They were all simply taken off and out to the garage. There, the guys had set up a kind of workshop. They followed Juan's instructions taken from the video for the steps to do one of them, which he closely oversaw. Once they understood how each door had to be refinished, they could work along doing one door after another. I did have Juan put glass in two more cabinet doors in the kitchen to make things seem more balanced.

Work on the cabinet frames was harder, because they remained attached to the wall, and the guys had to work around things like the microwave. At left you can see Juan and one of the workers in the kitchen starting on the frames to the left of the microwave. The cabinets to the right aren't finished, but one or two of the stain-applying steps has been completed, and at the moment they just look as if they've been painted.

Once everyone had the steps down pat, the work just proceeded day after day for almost two weeks. I could still cook and of course I had a working fridge, but still it was like camping out, as only a few dishes and things got dug out of all the stuff in the living and dining rooms.

One of the biggest problems were the cats. I suppose we would have moved the litterboxes down to the front bathroom anyway for our trip to Ecuador, but we moved them early, so the cats could be confined to the front of the house, and we kept both of the doors to the kitchen closed so they couldn't go into the work area. The process continued until all that was left was for the guys to put down the shelf paper inside the cabinets. It was then that I took all the "after" pictures of the work that had been done:

I may not have mentioned that it was only the upper cabinets that had the complex refinishing process applied to them; we decided that the lower cabinets should just be painted a complementary color, which turned out to be a light gray/blue. We got this idea from some other videos that we watched online; and we even found the color we used in one of them.

While the process was intrusive and messy, the end result was just as we expected it would be, and the kitchen now looks a bit bigger and certainly a lot lighter than it used to. All in all a project well worth doing.

September 29: Some New Artwork from Prudence's Gallery

There is a new addition to the living room- an artwork I bought from Prudence's Gallery.

Theda Bara by Susan Riley Hanging Over My Fireplace

I've had my eye on this work by Susan Riley for some time, and the last time we were in San Antonio I went ahead and purchased it. We have just hung the work as a replacement for a Gerald Harvey print that had hung there for a long time.

A Closeup of Theda Bara by Susan Riley

Susan Riley actually acquired a love of photography in the early 1970s as a student at the Southwest School of Arts and Crafts in San Antonio under Tom Wright, who encouraged a free-wheeling approach to black and white printing. Susan's career as a full-time photographer began in the late 1980s with book cover work for several publishers. At this time, she also opened a studio where she explored her interest in black and white portraiture. She began hand coloring custom prints, and these proved very popular; she even added glitter to the prints she made for youngsters.

In 2003, Riley added digital photography to her work, sparking a renewed interest in stretching the boundaries of creativity. Early in 2013, a friend and client suggested to Susan that she begin making art prints for sale, specifically images of women from the 1910s and 1920s who made their names onstage and in very early films. Riley began seeking out black-and-white photos of those women (and men), and then reimagined them in full color, adding embellishments (like actual stones in a necklace) by hand onto the print surface to make them even more realistic.

That is what she did with the picture of Theda Bara that I purchased- a closeup of which you can see at right. With the light shining on it from above, it does indeed sparkle and the picture comes to life.

November 22: At the Symphony

The Friday before my birthday, Fred and I went to the Dallas Symphony for one of the two outings we do as a couple each season. Tonight we heard a program featuring Beethoven and Mozart.

As I've said on other pages, we usually take our 8 "person seats" and use four of them to take Al and Kathy to a Sunday Matinee in the spring, and then we go by ourselves twice- once in the fall and once in late January. This works out well; we travel so much these days that having 16 "seat nights" to use during a season got to be a chore, and we ended up having to let tickets go to waste. This arrangement keeps our foot in the door and gives us three Symphony experiences each year.

At intermission this evening, I had a fellow concertgoer take a couple of pictures of Fred and me spending our intermission people-watching on the bridge.

November 23: My Birthday in Dallas

My Birthday was as quiet a birthday as I have had since moving to Dallas. (Most of my birthdays prior to moving here were quiet, mostly because I didn't have a partner or a wide circle of friends.

When you get to a certain age, having birthday parties every year starts to seem like overkill. I think most folks feel this way, and so as we age, we tend to have actual parties only on milestone birthdays, which by my definition are the years when your age ends in a "5" or a "0". This year, my 78th birthday doesn't really fit that concept, and so that is one reason why it was quiet.

Another, sadder reason why it was pretty quiet is that the large circle of friends that we had two decades ago has really thinned. Some people have died, some are just no longer in our friendship circle, and a large number have moved away. Two of our friends had a weekend committment in Louisiana; two more were in Oklahoma with their own families for Thanksgiving. It seemed hardly worthwhile to try to organize a dinner and gathering for such a reduced circle.

So we opted for quality rather than quantity, and spent the evening with our very good friend Lou. Rather than doing dinner at home, we just went out, and Fred bought a really nice cake for us to share after we'd returned from dinner and watched a movie upstairs.

I don't do gifts or songs anymore; it is more than sufficient for me to spend a birthday with just a few close friends, and our evening with Lou was (as all our visits together) really nice, and a great way to turn 78.

December 15: Late Fall Blooms at My House in Dallas

Just a couple of pictures today of the roses out back putting on a late Fall show.

The yellow roses Fred and I planted in the island put on a Fall show. There aren't as many blooms as in springtime, but particularly with how warm our Decembers have gotten, they bloomed quite a bit this year (far left). Heck, even the Carolina Jasmine on my patio fence bloomed again (near left).

And if you doubt that it is actually December, look at the picture below of the trees in the yard of my neighbor to the west:

Those were the last miscellaneous pictures for 2024.

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