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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.

February 13-17: The Deep Freeze of 2021

The first week or so of February had not been particularly cold or stormy, although I did notice towards the 10th or so that there was a lot of talk about a winter storm that might affect Texas. It was about then that the cats started spending more time in the study with me- and the space heater.

February 14

February 15

Fred came down on the 11th, and we played online bridge that night. The 12th was very cold, and the news started reporting the arrival of a winter storm, complete with temperatures that might set records. By the 14th, the temperature was well below freezing, and we had the first snow in quite some time.

On the 15th, we awoke to a different world. Yes, there was more snow, but also the power outages had begun. Online we discovered that much of Texas was in the dark due to the failure of numerous generating stations. Millions of homes were without power. Amazingly, however, for the first time in as long as I can remember, my power stayed on while all around me- including most parts of Dallas and its suburbs- the power was out. Early in the four-day ordeal, I thought it would only be a matter of time before my power failed as well, but remarkably it never did.

I have wondered in the past why the power to my house, most of the rest of Greenway Villas, and the neighborhood south and west of me, was so unstable. It seemed to fail at least for a time during every thunderstorm or windstorm. But this time it didn't. I have no idea why, although one could speculate that the proximity of a major grocery store as well as Love Field Airport might have had something to do with it. But I've always been near these locations, and that hasn't stopped my power from being notoriously unreliable.

But it didn't, and I recognize that I was very, very fortunate. I had learned another lesson from the past, and two days earlier, when the temperature had gone below 20, I started almost every faucet in the house dripping. Every faucet save for the kitchen in the center of the structure. I thought that its pipes would be OK, as none of them were on an outside wall. Or so I erroneously thought.

For the next 24 hours we followed the plight of so many Texas residents so much less fortunate than myself. With no power there was no heat. Firewood quickly disappeared, and we started seeing stories about house fires caused by fires being built for the first time in decades in fireplaces that hadn't been inspected in recent memory. We heard about families huddled together in a single room to conserve heat. We hear innumerable stories of burst pipes and frozen waterfalls inside apartments and homes.

A Screenshot of the Online Oncor Power Outage Map

The next morning I thanked my lucky stars that the power was still on and I came downstairs to make coffee, only to find no water from the kitchen faucet. Then I realized that water for the kitchen came via a pipe in a common wall with my neighbor, and while my breakfast area was on my side of this wall, her outdoor patio was on the other side. That pipe had frozen. A minor inconvenience, particularly compared to the hundreds of thousands of homeowners who collectively suffered close to a quarter of a trillion dollars in damages. All because greedy politicians and corporations deregulated and then defunded maintenance for the state's power grid- and disconnected it from neighboring grids to avoid "government regulation".

During the day, we spent a good deal of time on the Oncor power outage website, discovering just how many families had lost power. I took a rather bad picture of the screen, and each of the symbols on the image at right represents, according to Oncor, the number of homes reported to be without, or known to be without, power. The numbers are in 1000s, so you can see that just in the few square miles of my area of town, more than 100,000 customers were without power. It seemed that we were right on the edge of a large area centered on Love Field that kept its power all during the ordeal.

Temperatures moderated by the 17th, power generation stations were slowly brought back online, and a week later things were back to normal. Except for the hundreds of thousands of homes damaged so severely that they were essentially unliveable. I am positive we will be suffering from the effect of, and paying for the damage caused by, Winter Storm Uri for decades. It was the most expensive disaster in Texas state history. A year later, Greenway Villas property insurance bill doubled.

March 8: New Wheels

After driving my 2011 Elantra past 170,000 miles, I figured it was time for an upgrade, so I've been looking for a new one. I finally found a red one out at Vandergriff Hyundai, one with all the bells and whistles. Here is the spec sheet and a picture I took of it on the showroom floor:

I am looking forward to a backup camera, lane assist and blind spot warnings, and an infotainment system I can actually read.

It is also supposed to get even better mileage than my 2011, and I am looking forward to that, too. I suppose people will look at someone like me driving a bright red car and immediately think "mid-life crisis", and maybe there is an element of that, but I am just so tired of all the cars I see that are either black, white, or some version of silver/gray that I wanted something that would stand out. I certainly got that.

April 26: Roses in Bloom

While some of the roses that Fred has planted for me around the house haven't been all that satisfying, some certainly have, and the yellow roses planted on my island out back are the best of that bunch. Here are some pictures of them taken in late April:

As you can see in the first picture above, the groundcover that froze in February is going to be a while coming back.

Not only were the roses on the island in bloom, but the roses that we have planted on either side of the garage door to climb up the trellises that Cynthia and I have built were also blooming.

You may recall that some years back, Fred drove his then-new Elantra GT down to San Antonio on one of our visits there, and some a-hole ran into it when it was parked on the street, damaging it severely.

Well, on our last trip to San Antonio a month ago, it was my turn, as someone backed into the right rear quarter panel on my new Elantra. It was fully driveable, so when we returned to Dallas I took the advice of Ed Wallace, the auto-show radio host that we listen to on Saturday mornings, and took it to Sewell Collision Center. Actually, I got a couple of bids for the insurance, and Sewell was lower.

Click on the Image Above to View the Slideshow

They had to order the parts and that took over a week. (I am not complaining, because six months hence at the height of the aftermath of the pandemic, supply chains were so fouled up that it would routinely take three months to get parts to fix a car- if the body shop could get them at all). But then they called me to bring it in and it spent two weeks there getting repaired. What with all the sensors and electronics on your average new car, repairing them when a body panel has to be replaced is a difficult job, and damage that might been fixed for a couple thousand dollars ten years ago now costs four times that. That's what my repairs cost- a little over $8,000. On a car that cost me $26,000. God forbid it had been hit in the front and they'd had to get into engine repairs.

Anyway, I came over one afternoon as the car was getting ready to be repainted, and I took a series of pictures just for my own interest. These pictures are in the slideshow at left. Just click on the image to begin with the first pictures, and move from one to another using the little arrows in the lower corners of each image.

May 21: A Florida Condo Mishap

This section is only here so I can record what happened in the condo on our early summer trip. I have a new neighbor upstairs in 316 and she has been doing some renovations.

One afternoon, when we came home to the condo, I happened to notice something that might have slipped by me earlier in the day. There appeared at first glance to be an avant garde mural on the living room wall in the alcove, but as soon as I examined it up close, I could see that some kind of viscous liquid had come down the wall- presumably from upstairs.

The first thing I did was go into the bedroom closet to see if the same thing had happened there. Indeed it had. It was messier there, as there were things attached to an against the wall, but it didn't look as if anything were actually damaged- except for the wall.

Knowing that my upstairs neighbor had been putting down new flooring, I called her to ask if some sort of liquid sealant or noise-deadening had been put down, and when she confirmed that it had, I told her that apparently some of it had leaked through cracks in the concrete floors and oozed down my walls. She came down to look, confirmed that it must have been stuff her flooring guys had been using. She said she'd put them in touch with me to come clean my walls.

I was not contacted on this trip, but when we came down in the Fall, I got a bid from a different company to come and clean, retexture, and paint the walls. The bid was high, so I got with Tara again and this time told her that if her people weren't going to repair the walls that I would expect her to pick up the cost of my having this other company do the work.

That got her to put her flooring company in touch with me, and one of their people came out- the same workman who'd done Tara's work upstairs. I told him of the bid, and it was so high that he said he would bring a fellow to help him and they would do the work themselves. We decided to change the wall color and so I went and bought the paint.

A couple of days later, they arrived to clean the gunk off the walls, seal the area, and repaint. The job was done in a day. Towards the end of the day I discovered that Tara had blamed the flooring company for the damage, when they had no way of knowing that there would be a crack in the concrete floor. And the flooring company had blamed the workman for not knowing the same thing!

I thought this was unfair all around. Either the flooring company or Tara or both should have paid to have my walls fixed, but it turned out that the company told the employee that he should fix the walls using his day off and not get reimbursed for his time. We ended up giving the workman $100 for his work. I know that it wasn't our fault but that we ended up paying, but sometimes that's what you have to do when faced to people who refuse to accept responsibility and try to shove it off on someone else.

If I had to guess, I would say that Tara and the owners of the flooring company are all Trump voters; that's just the kind of unfair, bitch move he would make.

August 7: August Birthdays

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible)

The pandemic has screwed everything up; like many of you, Fred and I rarely saw friends. But by the late summer of the pandemic's second year, Ron and Jay in Plano felt comfortable enough, what with the vaccines and all, to have us come up to celebrate Ron's birthday (August 1) and Fred's (August 6).

We did go up to visit, and it was like old times, save that we were the only guests- unlike years past when we might have had ten people or so. We played pool, Jay fixed a great dinner, we played some cards, and we shared a birthday cake. With just four of us, I didn't get a big sheet cake that would have been large enough for two names, two ages, and a shitload of candles. So just to record the fact, Ron turned 58 and Fred ushered in 67.

I didn't take any pictures at all, but I couldn't resist making a movie, and you can use the player at left to watch it.

November 1: Runaway Roses

I probably mentioned earlier in this album that two years ago Cynthia (my next-door neighbor) and I had a trellis built that surrounded our garage doors, and Fred and I planted some yellow roses, hoping that in a few years, my garage would look like David's at the other end of the building. His has thick, solid greenery all around the garage, and in the spring lots of beautiful blooms.

The rose was slow to get started, and it wasn't until this summer that it really began to grow. At first, I did what David had someone do, and periodically came out and intertwined the rose with the trellis. But there were two problems. First, the rose we picked turned out to have long runners, not tight vines that could easily go in and out of the trellis. Even when I came out frequently to try to control the vines, they grew so big and thick and straight that I could never get the effect of a solid green border for the garage. The long runners stuck out from the trellis, and even when I tied them to the trellis rather than intertwined them, they didn't behave. Secondly, the left side of the garage gets much less sun than the right, due to trees in the yards of houses behind me, and so the rose on the left side looked anemic compared to the one on the right. And lastly, this was the first year we got any blooms at all. We will keep up with it and see what we can do, but I am beginning to think we will have to plant the exact rose that David did. I prefer yellow, but pink will do.

December 23: End of an Era

Early last year, Fred's mom's health took a turn for the worse after a fall and she had to be situated in a nursing home in Stephenville. Fred continued to go down to her house to take care of it, but it was beginning to become apparent that she would never return to it, nor would Fred or his brother Troy ever make much use of it. Then, in February, Mrs. Nabors passed away.

In the spring and summer, Fred came to the conclusion that selling the property was the best thing to do, and he was fortunate in that there was a ready buyer- a group of investors who were putting a large tract of land together for a hunting reserve. Fred knew what the property was worth, and so did the investors, and so they reached a very fair price early in the fall. By November the deal was closed, although Fred asked for, and was given, time to get his nephews and their parents down to the house to take what furnishings and mementos they wanted. None of them knew Mrs. Nabors much at all; while Fred and Troy share a father, Troy and his sons are not related to Mrs. Nabors. But the oldest nephew was moving to his own place, a good-sized house, and he needed lots of stuff.

Just before Christmas, Fred rented a U-Haul and we met the boys down in DeLeon. I helped Fred get the things he wanted to keep while the boys, their mom, and a bunch of their friends got the furniture and things that they thought they could use. Leaving that afternoon was really the end of a very long era; Fred has been going to his Mom's house every two or three weeks for as long as I have known him, but this was the last time.

On the way back to Dallas, we stopped at Fred's aunt Charlotte's house to give her a few things, and that's where these two pictures were taken:

On returning to Dallas, we drove directly to Fred's house to unload, then brought the van back to Dallas to turn it in late that evening.

I could tell that Fred was affected by the finality of today. It has been a tough year for him, with his Mom's passing and now the end of a routine he's been doing for so long.

Those are all the miscellaneous pictures for 2021, and you can use the link below to return to the 2021 Index Page.

Return to the Index for 2021