Scattered Thoughts . . .

Although I am not ready to start building my little railroad in our newly designated "train room", I am working on a plan whenever I feel up to it and I am envisioning it in my imagination. I also buy products as I find them on sale or, if previously used, at a great price. At this point, I have quite a collection of trains so much of my focus has turned to designing a layout plan for this small room. There are a few issues to overcome because the room is so small and, subsequently, some track would need to be lift out or portable but last night I found an unexpected problem with some of the track I plan to use for this model railroad layout. Some of the track will be handlaid simply because no commercial manufacturer makes what I need for my dual-gauge mainline track. So, I'll be gluing down wood ties... then actually spiking rail to the ties just like in the real world. For the remainder of the track which will run through villages and down by the docks, I will use

Before the absolutely crazy and unseasonably warm weather hovering around 60 degrees which has caused a mid-winter mud season this week, we somehow managed to get some snow!  As this snow started slowly inching its way down our metal roof, it slowly changed the profile of our roof... Typically, once that snow hangs off the roof by about a foot, it breaks off and crashes down onto our deck. This time, however, we had some freezing rain before getting this latest 14" of snow so that snow sliding off the metal roof was pretty solid underneath and supported by some ice this time. Within a day or two of inching its way down off the metal roof, the snow from the roof had created a sort of natural awning covering our windows and our front door!  The snow was hanging down so far that it was covering more than half of our front door! That was a lot of snow hanging down in one giant piece! From inside the house, this hanging snow awning looked like a giant frozen wave. When

I haven't been eating much lately because of a stomach bug and typical Systemic Mastocytosis complications due to any added cold, flu or bug. I really haven't felt like eating and quite often I find myself holding back puke. Fun.  Anyway... I did shoot some food photos recently and I thought I would share them here while I have some time. Sloppy Joes served over mashed potatoes. We had Sloppy Joes a few days ago. To be honest, I'm really not a fan of Sloppy Joes (mostly because good rolls are hard to find around these parts) but we do make them occasionally just for an easy change of pace.  After having this for dinner the other night, we had leftovers as usual... I pulled out the leftovers the following day at lunchtime... I took one look at the Sloppy Joes and I just could not stomach another one of those things! I decided to find some other use for these leftoevers. The garbage can came to mind but there wasn't much else to eat in the house at this time!

For the past few weeks, we've been experiencing some internet issues, mostly with our wireless internet. However, there have been times when our wired internet was a pain in the butt as well.  For a little while, I was having difficulty deciding whether or not the source of our problems was due to a bad modem (Comcast's hardware) or a bad wireless router (our hardware). Most of our problems were related to dropped wireless so I was focused on our own router rather than Comcast's modem. There were times when we would lose all internet though. There were times when our FireTV wouldn't startup because it could not find internet and, unfortunately, we have our FireTV hardwired so I knew that particular problem wasn't due to a wireless problem but it still could be a problem with that wireless router since the wired connections are routed through there.  Even considering some of the wired internet problems we were experiencing, the source of our problems seemed to

Yesterday, while all the ladies were out bridal dress shopping, Lukey and I had some nice quiet time at the house. Naturally, we ran some trains on Lukey's layout while it was so quiet in the house... four different trains to be exact. That was fun. We then headed to the kitchen for some lunch.  After lunch, we knew the ladies would be back home before long so we didn't want to jump into anything time consuming. I then had an idea... I asked Lukey, "do you want to learn how to play a song on the piano?"   He enthusiastically replied, "YES!" while jumping up in the air like a little jumping bean. First, I attempted to teach him something simple... where to sit in reference to the piano... how to identify that middle group of two black keys. I doubt he'll remember this but he seemed to understand and it was his first introduction to this concept.   Then I figured we'd start with trying to play something simple like "Jingle Bells"...