Scattered Thoughts . . .

T his year, it seemed like all the grandchildren were really excited to be watching the garden railroad which was nice.  It definitely held their attention for quite a long time!   Lukey enjoys running the trains so he definitely enjoyed himself with this little garden railroad.  Then again, that should come as no surprise since he has always been interested in trains.  I ran one of the trains for a bit but Lukey spent quite a bit of time running both trains. These trains run on battery packs rather than power through the rails.  I made sure both trains were fully charged the night before the barbeque and we had no problem running the trains all day long without a hiccup.  They still had power when I brought them back indoors at the end of the night.  Lukey and I control the locomotive and trolley using apps on two of my tablets so it is all wireless which makes things very easy. This year, the grandchildren got to see a few new structures around ...

I 've been feeling worse today than yesterday so I assume I overdid it yesterday.  Some of the ear infection pain has returned and I just feel kind of lousy.  Today was just the second day of antibiotics so I know this will take some time even though I seemed to feel great yesterday for some reason.  Plus, the antibiotics will do nothing for the COVID symptoms that I'm still feeling.  I'd really like to get beyond this ear infection pain though. So, while sitting on my butt today, I managed to put some paint on the couple of buildings I built yesterday for the garden railroad.  They are looking a bit more appropriate now. I applied a Barn Red stain on the little train station and painted the windows and doors white.  It is looking much better now even though I still need to install corrugated roofing panels and some trim... You can see the coal storage silos behind the station in this photo below... I applied a brown stain to the upper structure of the silo...

I don't know if I've mentioned it here in this blog, if so, I'll be repeating myself a bit.  Sheila and I had COVID again.  We both tested negative but at this point we're absolutely certain we've had COVID yet again.  I was at the doctor yesterday and they agree that we've had COVID again. When I got up out of bed yesterday, I was exhausted because I couldn't sleep the previous night due to significant pain.  The entire left side of my head was in unbearable pain.  The pain was radiating from my left ear and affected the entire left hemisphere of my head. I was so dizzy that it was making me extremely nauseated.  I took some Meclizine for the dizziness and some of my usual anti-nausea medication.  Then I took about 1000mg of Tylenol.  I was already loaded up on Aleve but that didn't seem to be touching this pain.  After calling the doctor to make an appointment, I even used a warm compress on my ear.  The combination of everything made...

W e had some friends and Sheila's dad over yesterday to christen our new grill.  The weather was great and it was nice to catch up with some old friends that we haven't seen since before the pandemic. I started the day by preparing some shish-ka-bob skewers.  Cutting up five filet mignons, red onion, an assortment of peppers and fresh mushrooms was time consuming and a bit painful with my broken cut-off thumb.  Skewering everything took a bit longer and was bit more painful than anticipated too.  I left the potatoes and cherry tomatoes whole on their own skewers.   Usually, people assemble the skewers with all ingredients on each skewer so that each person can simply eat a whole skewer of grilled shish-ka-bob.  I don't like doing that though.  Each of these ingredients requires a different amount of time on the grill so I prefer to separate them by the amount of time required on the grill.  The meat and potatoes require the most time... ...

W e've had nothing but rain for the past ten days or so which means nothing was accomplished outside.  And, before these past ten days, I had one half of a day to get the lawn done.  We had about two or three weeks of solid rainy weather before that one clear day.  Since it has been raining for the past ten days, this also means that the lawn was very overgrown and needed attention before I did anything else so I spent two or three hours working on the lawn. After getting the lawn done, I pulled out the table saw so I could do some work on our garden railroad.  This was the first bit of work that I've done on the railroad this year.  I have a few things I'd like to accomplish in detailing this little garden railroad which I hope to get done little by little throughout the summer. Today's project was to cut a bunch of long ties to make a deck for the long compound curved wood trestle bridge.  I needed about 90 long ties.  Fortunately, I had enough scrap...