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On this page, I'm going to put those pictures that weren't tied in to a trip or some other event, like a birthday. Some of these are pictures brought to me by Fred from and of his house; I know him well enough now that I want to include them here.

January 1: My Kitties at Home

The two cats that I got from Fred's friends Frank and Joe have been great to have around. They have lived here since April of last year, and they are growing amazingly fast.

This is Chip, the partial Manx. He has very fluffy, long hair, and only the stub of a tail. He is very friendly, and takes to visitors quickly.

Oddly enough, though, he is not a lap cat, preferring just to flop down on something near where the people are. He follows me from room to room when he is awake, and already has preferred spots to relax. One of them is at one end of the living room sofa.

I have just awakened him from a sound sleep to take these pictures. Fred is here for the weekend, and I am trying to replace some of the pictures on the lost roll from Christmas. Chip's expression is always wide-eyed and amusing. He is a handsome cat, but he does shed quite a bit, and I have to keep after his habitual sleeping spots to get up all the cat hair. Fred says there is a particular comb I can get that will help keep his shedding under control, and first chance I get I will try to find one.

After taking Chip's picture, I thought I'd take one of Dale, too. I had to look around to find him, though. We had been going in and out of the garage this morning, and I finally found him sitting on top of my car.

Dale is quite different from Chip. He has a tail, of course, but his coat is also much shorter and sleeker. He is built differently from Chip, as he is long and thin. He has a more mysterious look, and is also usually the instigator of the minor mischief that the two of them get into.

Both cats seem to love to go into the garage and sniff around. Fred says it is because the garage is normally closed off to them, and cats love to explore places they don't go frequently. As soon as I get home from somewhere, they are anxious to get out into the garage to roll around on the floor and explore. Occasionally, one or both of them will get on top of the car, although I should try to stop this practice as they are putting very light scratches in the finish.

By this time, Chip had come out to the garage as well, and both of them were up on the car, so I decided to take another picture of each of them:

Dale

Chip

March 11: Ted Graduates from the Charlotte Police Academy

My sister Judy has sent me two pictures she took at the Graduation Ceremony for the Charlotte Police Academy. My nephew, Ted, was a member of the graduating class.

Ted (second from right) Pinning on His Badge Ted is another of those people who end up doing just what they wanted to. He has always wanted to be a policeman, and now he is- for the Charlotte Police Department.

At the Graduation Reception Here are Ted, his friend Kelley, and my niece Jennifer.

May 8: From Fred

This year, I occasionally got a few pictures from Fred that he took up at his house, and this is the first of them.

Right in the center of the picture is a clutch of Killdeer eggs that Fred found on his property in Van Alstyne.

He found the nest when he was mowing his property this month in Van Alstyne. Living out in the country, sights like this are probably a common occurrence for him, though I don't get to see this kind of thing in the city much.

The Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) is a medium-sized plover. The adults have a brown back and wings, a white belly, and a white breast with two black bands. The rump is tawny orange. The face and cap are brown with a white forehead. The eyering is orange-red. The chicks are patterned almost identically to the adults, and are precocial — able to move around immediately after hatching. The killdeer frequently uses a "broken wing act" to distract predators from the nest. It is named onomatopoeically after its call.

The range of the killdeer spreads across the Western Hemisphere. In the summer, killdeer live as far north as the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta,the Yukon and Quebec, as well as the southern parts of the U.S. state of Alaska. Killdeer hold a year-round presence across the southern half of the United States and parts of Peru. The killdeer winters throughout Central America.

Although killdeer are considered shorebirds, they often live far from water. They live in grassland habitats such as fields, meadows, and pastures- which certainly describes Fred's place. The nest itself is merely a shallow depression or bowl in the ground, fringed by some stones and blades of grass. The nest is well camouflaged, as the spots of the eggs disguise them as stones, and the simple structure of the nest resembles its surroundings. Like many other waders, killdeer hatchlings are precocial birds and are able to see and forage soon after hatching.

June 11: A Weekend Event in Las Colinas

I work now at Ernst & Young out in Las Colinas, as you may have learned elsewhere on this year's album pages. It's an easy commute, and sometimes I can even get home for lunch.

On Saturday, June 11th, Lowery and Ron asked me if I would like to join them at a volleyball tournament in Las Colinas. Fred and Prudence were off in Santa Fe, so I met them out there.

I parked in the garage of the building where I work. Incidentally, there are rumors that we will be moving in the Fall to a different location (I hope not downtown).

Apparently, there is a volleyball "tour", similary to a golf or tennis tour, where "professional" teams play each other (who knew?). The tours are sponsored by national and local firms (you can see some of the logos here), and one of those firms was GTE, the company that Ron works for.

The sand is trucked in and they try to set it up to look like a beach in California or something. On this particular day it was quite hot, but there was a breeze and I wasn't uncomfortable. Lowery and Ron, however, were. It took some wrangling and a bit of storytelling, but Ron got us entrance into the VIP seating area, which is that covered, raised area in the center of the picture. To keep the VIPs cool, water mists out of the pipes that hold up the canvas roof, cooling the air under the canvas. It's not like air conditioning, but it did help. I spent most of my time in the bleachers trying to get some sun. I'm not a volleyball fanatic, so this was the only picture I took.

June 12: Fred and Prudence in Santa Fe

As I mentioned above, on the weekend of the volleyball tournament Fred and Prudence were in Santa Fe, and Fred brought me three pictures that they took while they were there.

Prudence and Fred go back to college days, and they have been the best of friends since then. A couple of times a month, Fred will leave me for an evening to go to the movies or dinner with her. I have met her twice, but the relationship that they have is a very close and somewhat private one- and one that I am happy that the both of them share.

At one time, I think that both of them had assumed that they would get married at some point, but that never came to pass, and is very unlikely now. Prudence is a wonderful person, though, and would make almost anyone a great life-companion.

Prudence, who comes from a wealthy family, works as a librarian in Fort Worth. One of these days, I hope to see her at the library. I have had Prudence over for dinner one time (the time that I also invited Ron Drew's wife, Lynne), and I have been out with she and Fred once. The picture at left was taken in the garden of the bed and breakfast where the two of them stayed in Santa Fe.

In the first eighteen months that I knew him, Fred spoke of Prudence frequently- of how they had known each other since junior college. So I looked forward to meeting her, and, when I did, found her to be a thoroughly nice person. Fred tells me that after having met me a couple of times, Prudence was very approving of me, too, and that was nice to know.

Fred had Prudence take the picture at right, as Fred doesn't have all that many pictures of himself. Plus, he knew that I would like to have another one as well.

Prudence had hurt her wrist at the library the week before she and Fred went on their trip, and she was a bit uncomfortable with her hand bandaged as it was.

November 29: Fred's Christmas Pictures

Each year, Fred likes to take a picture to include with his Christmas cards, and this year he brought me four of the best he had taken. He takes these pictures in one of the Crump's Garden greenhouses where he works. On a typical work day, he looks like this. (This is an odd picture because it is out of time sequence. Fred gave it to me with the previous group, but it was actually taken in 1991, at about this same time of year. The note he wrote on the back says "...my 12th yr to grow poinsettias at Crump's Greenhouses..." Of course, the biggest difference is that he is missing his beard. He must have started growing it back right when this was taken, because when I met him, about a month later, he had one.)

When Fred takes his Christmas pictures he comes in on a weekend, nicely dressed, and uses one of the larger greenhouses for his backdrop. Crump's grows over 100,000 poinsettias each year, and is soon to expand that substantially, Fred tells me. I have been to see the greenhouses when they are full of these plants, and it is quite a sight. They even have a tour when the houses are full of the colorful plants. Anyway, here are the four pictures that Fred brought me:

(Picture at left) Fred Nabors in one of the poinsettia houses at Crump's Garden.       (Picture at right) This is the picture that Fred chose for his cards; it was my first choice, too.

Although Fred thought he looked too serious here, I liked this picture a lot. But then I think Fred is very good-looking no matter what his expression is.

I think this would have been my first choice had Fred's face been lighter. Fred has a really nice smile, but you have to catch him off guard, because if he knows you are taking his picture, the natural smile seems to disappear sometimes.

December 3: Fred at Prudence's House

This Saturday was one of Fred's meet-ups with Prudence, and he has brought me a copy of a picture she took of him.

Prudence didn't center Fred in the frame, so I've cropped the picture (which is why its not four by three).

I think it is a great picture of Fred, and I can only imagine that an instant later he broke into a really nice smile!

December 25: The Lucas Family in Arlington

I was not with Fred for Christmas this year, having gone home to North Carolina, but I do have one picture that he brought me.

Although I have met Prudence a few times so far, I have not had the opportunity to meet the rest of her family, and Fred brought me this picture so I could see what they were like.

I know a lot more about all of them now, of course, since I am writing this in 2016, so I can tell you who they all are.

You should probably start with Fred, who is, of course, standing at the right. Standing next to Fred is Mr. Lucas, Prudence's father, who I actually never met; he died by the time I had gotten to know Prudence and her sister well enough to visit them at their parents' home. To the left of Mr. Lucas is his wife, also named Prudence (and who the family call "Pru" in order to differentiate her from her daughter. I met Mrs. Lucas a number of times in the following years before her death about eight years ago.

Next to Mrs. Lucas are Mr. Lucas' sister Leah Bott, and her husband.

In the front row are the next generation. In the middle is Sam Bott, son of Leah and her husband. Sitting on either side of Sam are Mr. and Mrs. Lucas' two daughters- Nancy on the left and Prudence on the right.

At the time this picture was taken, the only person other than Prudence and Fred that I had met was Nancy, and I had only met her once when Fred and I ran into them shopping in Neiman-Marcus over in NorthPark. Since then, I have gotten to know Nancy quite well; for a time, she, Prudence, Fred and I "double-dated" for a movie and dinner every few months. We did this on through the 1990s until Prudence married Ron Ruckman in 1999, and Nancy married her third husband Karl shortly thereafter. Fred and I continued to see Prudence and Nancy frequently, even after Prudence and Ron moved to San Antonio to open their bed and breakfast. Nancy and Karl stayed in Grapevine, although Nancy eventually bought a house in San Antonio to have her own place to stay when she and Karl went down on their frequent visits.

I met Sam Bott and his mother when Prudence suggested to him that he let me help him get his first personal computer. I found one for him and was out at their house a few times helping him get it set up and teaching him a bit about some of the software programs he needed to use. Mr. Bott had passed away by that time, so I never met him. And, actually, the first time I met Pru was at the funeral service for her own husband, Jim.

This may not be the place to say so, but over the years Prudence and her sister, and their husbands, have become like an extended family for Fred and I. Since neither of us have much family left, that has been very, very nice.

That's it for this year's miscellaneous picture.

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