Scattered Thoughts . . .

A fter our absurdly long drive to Long Island the previous day, we got up early the following morning to catch a train on the Long Island Railroad.   Our hotel was backed-up against the railroad tracks so Lukey spent much of the night watching trains go back and forth past our windows.  There was only an alley between our hotel window and the elevated railroad tracks.   Most of the Long Island Railroad is electrified but I had forgotten that the far eastern end of Long Island still needs diesel engines to run trains.  I hadn't heard a diesel run on the Long Island Railroad in decades so was shocked to hear a diesel pass by the hotel that night.  The following day, my dad reminded me that the eastern end of Long Island is not electrified so they need to pull the passenger cars with diesel locomotives.  The sound of that diesel passing by our hotel instantly conjured up visions of Long Island Railroad diesels in the 1960s and 1970s though! In the morning, we were all ready to go a li

T his past weekend, we headed down to Long Island with Lukey and Kenzie in tow to visit some of my family.  It is always a lot of fun or perhaps just "more amusing" traveling with Lukey and Kenzie but the drive down to Long Island was brutal and far too long this time!  We arrived completely spent, exhausted, and hungry. What should have taken less than six hours of drive time, ended up taking us over ten hours.  We had detours due to washed out roads and bridges, we had construction traffic, but mostly, we had significant problems with traffic volume.  The traffic volume problems started the moment we entered Connecticut and we crawled all the way through Connecticut and onto Long Island.  There are simply far too many cars on the road today.  Clearly, the cost of gas is far, far too low.   We eventually got into town just in time to get some pizza before all the restaurants closed.  We actually drove straight to a local pizzeria before checking into the hotel because the pi

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