Scattered Thoughts . . .

Today was a rather slow day (poor health through the night) so I took a little time to shoot a photo of a tank car I picked up on eBay recently. There is some significance to this particular tanker though... it has the name "Gramps" written in large lettering across the car like it is a special production train car rather than a true model of a real train.  The moment I first saw one of these unusual freight cars, I thought of my own grandfather, whom we affectionately called "Gramps", and how he is one of the main people to get me interested in model railroading as a young child. Dear 'ole Gramps is no longer with us but he is in my thoughts often. Both he and my grandmother were responsible for providing piano lessons for me... for my sailboat... for my love of antique wood boats... he got me started in photography... he is responsible for my nautical knowledge and interest in boating... my grandmother is responsible for much of my cooking skills and ab

Sheila and I had a nice weekend and actually managed to get out of the house again. We said goodbye to a friend on Saturday... had a few drinks and some food... but my health crashed quite quickly near the end of our socializing. I spent the following 24 hours sick as a dog begging for some relief. For the most part, I have a fairly good handle on balancing my health with a lot of medications. When my health gets really poor, however, there is nothing that can be done but to ride it out and hope it passes quickly. Even though I say I have a fairly good handle on balancing my health, this still happens weekly but which symptoms appear seems to be quite random and experiencing this weekly is far better than daily! So, Sunday was a down day for me. It was pouring rain outside, windy, with thunderstorms all day so I knew I would be staying indoors anyway. I decided to take advantage of being stuck indoors and worked on some of my model railroad locomotives.   I pulled out some tool