Scattered Thoughts . . .

After our visit to the Newport Aquarium, we started our walk back to Ohio.  For our route back to Cincinnati, we chose to walk a slightly different route across a different bridge.  This time we chose the Taylor Southgate Bridge across the Ohio River. Below, we have a view of the aquarium from the bridge.  The aquarium is the large blue building all across the entire center of the frame... Now we are looking northeast toward the Purple People Bridge... Kenzie amused herself (and us) by having one foot in Ohio and the other in Kentucky at the state boundary line on the bridge... As we approached the Cincinnati Reds' stadium, the ball game was in progress so we could clearly hear the announcer on the PA commenting on the game.  I think this area in front of us was the General Admission gates.  We actually could have paid and entered at this time if we felt inclined.  The thought did cross my mind but, at this point, it had already been a rather long and busy ...

I had a bit of a list of tasks to complete today before the temperatures drop below freezing.  I didn't get any of that stuff done though.  It was far too cold and wet outside today to spend any amount of time out there so I had no desire to head outside to work on everything that has water in it.  Instead, I stayed indoors. I did straighten up the house a bit...  did a load of laundry (although, now that I'm thinking about it, my laundry is still sitting in the dryer)...  and I installed the interior window of our kitchen garden window.  So, I did accomplish a few small things before sleeping all afternoon.  Actually, I didn't start on the garden window winterization until after my long afternoon nap.  Whenever I plan to accomplish something on any particular day, it must be right after waking up in the morning or after a nap.  I run out of energy far too quickly to wait an hour or two so I always jump on any tasks that must be done immedia...

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 ...

I spent much of the day yesterday working on our garden railroad again.  I stained all of the bare wood for two reasons...  first, bare wood looks unfinished but I wanted more of a finished look and next, the deck stain that I used will help to protect the wood from the elements.  I also primed the new truss bridge.  Right now it is primed black but I will probably finish it with a medium gray color and then weather it. I plan to add some gravel to this front section of the railroad to be used as ballast.  In an effort to keep the gravel from inevitably falling off this elevated train station section, I needed to add some short guard rails along the edge of this decking to keep the gravel up where it belongs.  Once I had cut and installed all of these side rails, I was ready to do some staining. There is a rather stark difference between the unstained wood in the above photo and the stained wood in the photo below... I also primed the new truss bridge....

S o, the other day, I built a retaining wall for the front side of our little garden railroad and wrote about it here  in this blog previously.  That new "model" retaining wall looks great and I have to say it was a brilliant idea to add this detail.  Today, I started working on building a truss bridge for the back side of the garden railroad.   I've been sketching different ideas over the past couple of months because I always knew I wanted one of these bridges on this garden railroad but I finally decided on a plan this morning.  Once I had the plan sketched and figured out all the dimensions of each of the parts, I immediately headed outside to start cutting lumber and building a truss bridge.  My civil engineering days are long behind me but, if I remember correctly, this would be a Warren Truss bridge due to the equilateral triangles across each side of the bridge. Designing this bridge required me to test my geometry and trigonometry skills (and ...

I put together another short video of our train trip this past weekend. I had previously shared a short video of all of us waiting for the train to arrive in Waterbury so now it is time for a short video shot on board our train.  I'm glad I have these clips but, to be honest, these are not my best work and even I find this particular video a bit boring. The problem is that I didn't really have a plan... I just turned the camera on and recorded video hoping that something interesting would happen. There are a few decent memorable moments but nothing riveting... so don't expect anything exciting... it is short though and there are a few memorable moments that I'm glad we had recorded.  At one point, you can see Conductor Adam giving the kids tickets... He had previously come over to us to let us know we would be crossing a river over a bridge soon and that we should look out for it. He explained to Lukey and Kenzie that the bridge was home to a well-known troll. He sa...