Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e were in Portsmouth two weeks ago for Sheila's mom's burial at sea and it was a nice, and exceedingly rare, weekend out-of-town.  My health is caused us to cancel many, many planned weekends out-of-town over the past four years.   This was our second visit to this historic New England coastal city so we had a pretty good idea of the things we wanted to do.  We've always planned to visit this city again and this burial at sea provided us with this opportunity. On our first night in town, we went for a walk around the downtown area and even walked across the Memorial Bridge into Kittery, Maine.  We did the same when we were here the first time about ten years ago and this was something we really wanted to do again especially since the weather was beautiful.  This walk was really nice and I ended up with many photos. As a lifelong student of architecture, I have to say that this city is quite beautiful with a lot of character... I have a few photos in this blog entry of The

I n my previous blog entry, I wrote about my custom designed, homebuilt truss bridge that I have been working on lately for my little garden railroad.  I had applied far too many coats of paint in varying colors and shades in an attempt to get the color I had envisioned.  I eventually landed on a pale olive color for this bridge like many truss bridges in real life. After writing that previous blog entry, I also applied additional shades of green to this bridge to add some tonal depth to this paint job.  The single shade of green was a bit "flat".  I'm not referring to the finish of the paint...  ie, gloss, satin, matte, flat...  but referring to the tonal depth of the paint job.  I had applied one or two more shades of green lightly with a dry brushing technique to add some tonal depth.  Today, I applied some reddish washes very lightly to give the impression of rust developing on the bridge. In this photo, below, my locomotive is just departing the long curved trestle b