Scattered Thoughts . . .

A s you've probably seen in recent blog entries, I'm still working on the homemade truss bridge I designed and built for our little garden railroad.  Although this bridge is looking pretty good, I felt it was still lacking something (see photo at right).  After painting it a few different colors and thinking long and hard about what is bothering me about it, I had decided to add some details in the form of truss plates and bolt/rivet details.    I thought about making these truss plates out of wood but cutting wood as thin as I would need would make them very susceptible to warping and splitting so I ordered some brass stock to make these truss plates.  I also ordered some round head brass nails to make bolt details.  I'll drill holes in the plates where I want the bolts and then glue everything in place.   The brass stock I had ordered earlier in the week arrived on Thursday.  So, yesterday, I cut the shapes needed for truss plates.  Although brass is a rather soft metal,

I 'm still feeling rather lousy so I stayed indoors again today.  I happened to find a small project to keep me busy for a short while so that was good. Since the time that I felt I had finished painting the new truss bridge for my little garden railroad, I've been thinking something isn't right.  I couldn't put my finger on it but I was left feeling the something wasn't right.  Part of me thinks the color isn't exactly right even though I've painted it and repainted it about a half dozen times.  I don't know if I should go lighter with the green or go darker toward a greenish charcoal.  I also realized that maybe I'm just feeling as though it is not "complete" yet and needs more detail.   In an attempt to add more detail to this truss bridge, this morning I decided to order some brass stock and tiny round head brass nails to add some detail to this bridge.  I plan to cut the brass stock into shapes depicted by the white paper in the photo

M y health has been quite lousy since returning from Long Island last weekend and it is still lousy...  perhaps even worse than I had thought it was this past week, actually.   Sometimes I don't realize just how poor my health is until I either get worse or start to improve.  Then I can better gauge just how miserable my health is or has been.  In this case, I'm very slowly improving (I hope) but, as I can think more clearly, I am beginning to see just how poor my health has been this past week.  A few days ago I couldn't think clearly at all! At this point, mostly, I am worn out...  too exhausted to even stand for more than a few short minutes.  I could easily sleep away each day and night.  The only problem is that I want to accomplish something!  This is a frustrating place to be...  wanting to accomplish something and not having the energy to even begin to accomplish anything. Today the weather was beautiful...  sunny, warm, big puffy clouds in the sky, good visibility.

A fter a week of exceptionally lousy health, I managed to have a fairly productive day today.   We went out-of-town last weekend and that took a lot out of me especially since we went out-of-town two weekends prior to that too.  Between the two weekends, my health had had enough and I spent all week in bed and on the couch.  I couldn't think straight...  I couldn't see clearly...  I had great difficulty breathing most of the time... I was often lightheaded...  my bones and joints were more painful than usual... I slept a lot ...  and I generally felt exceptionally lousy.   I was hoping things would be back to normal yesterday but I had significant problems shortly after getting up out of bed so I aborted my plans for the day.  This morning, however, I felt more "normal"...  my new normal, anyway...  so I jumped into setting up a new WiFi system through our house (which was supposed to be yesterday's project).   This WiFi project involved pulling out our living roo