Scattered Thoughts . . .

My two newly procured Atlas F9 O scale diesel locomotives arrived in the mail today. (Thank you to our friend and mail-carrier, Christine! By the way, we all need to get together for a few drinks soon!) These two fairly large locomotives were packaged very nicely. When I finally unwrapped all of the protective wrapping, they were in much nicer condition than I had imagined. They actually look significantly less used than my previously procured Atlas F9 diesel. This was great news! Next was to set up a test track so I could see how well they run... I pulled out some 2 rail, O scale track... I assembled about a dozen straight pieces to make a 12 foot test track... grabbed my old trusty power pack (these are old analog DC locomotives)... I quickly dug out a couple of power leads with alligator clips... connected the clips to the track... plugged in the power... and placed the first locomotive on the track... The lights came on and it runs very nicely! It runs smoothly at slo

Our next scheduled trip is to the lake house this summer and we need to start gearing up for that as soon as the weather allows us. We might also try to squeeze in a short weekend trip to someplace outside of Vermont to do some much needed shopping but that will be more of a spur of the moment thing. We are, however, planning to make a quick trip out to Dayton in the coming months. This next Dayton trip is finally on our schedule and we are asking around to see if anyone might want to join us. National Museum of the US Air Force We're way overdue for a trip to the Dayton area and the National Museum of the US Air Force. Since we were there last, I've been honored on the "Wall of Honor" and missed an official dedication ceremony due to my poor health so we'd really like to see this new "Wall of Honor".  Although we've been wanting to visit Dayton again for years, this particular trip was put on hold over and over due to other commitments using

Back a couple of years ago, I happened to win an O scale (the old Lionel size) diesel locomotive on eBay for about $25. It runs on traditional 2 rails rather than 3 rails and can even run well on the tight curves necessary in a relatively small room (I have no room for large sweeping curves). I wanted to find a few more of these EMD F9 locomotives. About a week ago, someone advertised three of these locomotives up for auction on eBay. Finally! Long story short... I won the first one... was quickly outbidded for the second one... and then won the third one! The two diesels I won are still in the hands of the US Post Office but I'm already putting together a plan for this small fleet of locomotives. First, I needed to come up with a numbering scheme. There is a big "853" on the side of each of these diesels. Repainting is too much work so I decided to just add a suffix to each number...  853A, 853B, and 853C. This morning, I set out to create backlit numberboards for

I bought a couple of "My Passport" external drives a few days ago so I could backup all my years and years of files and photos. I had these files strewn across numerous external drives and I recently started to have problems with one of these drives. It was time to upgrade. These 2 terabyte "My Passport" drives arrived a few days ago... I immediately started copying all the files from all these drives... then, yesterday, I backed up this new drive onto a second "My Passport" drive.  This morning, I randomly checked the drives to ensure everything copied accurately... it all looked good. Then came the scary part... deleting files on my computer which I had already backed-up redundantly on these two new drives.  This process of deleting took much more time than I had anticipated but it resulted in freeing up about 75% of my desktop computer's hard drive. After freeing up all this disk space, I ran a registry cleaner to tie up all the lose ends

I wrote a couple of days ago about making a couple of hot dogs for lunch. I had created a new recipe but felt it was missing a couple of things. Today, I decided to give it a shot again while it was fresh in my memory.... Hot dogs in oil in a pan until slightly browned and crispy... a slice of crispy smoked bacon on each bun... add the hot dog... squirt on some horseradish sauce...  add some shredded lettuce... add some sliced tomatoes... add some crisp dill pickles sliced crossways... and, finally, sprinkle with salt and pepper...   It was delicious so I'm sticking with this recipe!

In today's digital world, it is extremely important to back up all your work. Any computer could fail in an instant leaving you with a feeling of doom in the pit of your stomach and missing weeks, months or even years of work. Back about a year and a half ago, I decided to purchase an online backup service for my desktop computer (after my previous computer failed instantly). All the files on this desktop are backed-up daily. I've been comfortable in knowing that if my computer becomes inoperable, for whatever reason, I still have all my files stored in a safe place. I also had three external hard drives of old photos, videos, music and documents sitting around on my desk. The good thing about this is that I had photos on external drives. The bad thing is that none of these drives were backed up.  I tried to access one of these drives a few days ago and found that this particular drive was behaving erratically. This instantly reminded me that I never did backup any of the

This is almost not worth writing about but I'm still pretty excited by this so I felt I should write something. Plus, I'm worn out enough to keep me a bit sedentary and at my desk today. I'm so worn out, actually, that my vision is a bit lousy today too. Anyway, I'm here at my desk and figured I should write a little bit. I've been evaluating my lens and camera needs over the past few weeks. I'm not going to bore you with all of the details of my decisions but this evaluation process got me looking at what is available at this moment in time. I found a couple of Hasselblad lenses on clearance... at a fraction of their original cost... brand new... at prices so low that I could not walk away from the deals. I picked up a Hasselblad E 16mm f2.8 pancake lens. I actually needed to replace a Sony version of this lens that I had dropped and I accidentally found this one on clearance.  The image quality created by this new Hasselblad lens is far better than the

Today I needed to search the house for things to eat for lunch... I'm not in much of a mood to wander out into our lousy weather today...  I knew we had some Hebrew National hot dogs in the fridge but I didn't want a plain old typical boring hot dog. I needed to come up with something more interesting. While searching the fridge, I started collecting ingredients that would work for a hot dog. I started with some bacon... I added some horseradish sauce to each of the buns then placed a crisp slice of bacon onto each bun... and I sliced up a couple of dill pickle spears to add on top of the hot dogs. After I fried some shoestring fries in oil, I added two of the hot dogs to the oil and fried them until crisp (the only way to truly cook a hot dog)... then finished topping these hot dogs with the dill pickle slices. After my first bite, I added more horseradish sauce to the top of each hot dog.  This improvised hot dog was very good but, in hindsight, if I had a tomato and so

Sheila celebrated another birthday this weekend. Well... actually... Sheila's had about a month of birthday celebration since she started receiving her gifts almost a month ago!  We attended a nice little dinner party at Tom and Karen's on Saturday evening. It was a beautiful weekend so we spent some time out on Tom and Karen's big new deck... then we moved inside and had a really nice dinner. As is the case at every one of Tom's dinner parties, the food was delicious. It was a fun time... and, after months of being quite sick (Sheila, as well), it was nice to socialize and laugh a bit. Actually, we laughed a lot! It was a really fun time! On Sunday (which was Sheila's true birthdate), the weather was even more beautiful than the beautiful weather we had on Saturday... bright, sunny and temperatures hovering close to 70 degrees all day... so we got some yardwork and housework accomplished before Tom and Karen visited us with a present for Sheila. As we were pr

We've had a stench coming from our range and it has not been my cooking! Unfortunately, anytime we turned out the stovetop or the oven, we would get a strong smell of rodent and urine. Something needed to be done! I pulled out the range when this odor first presented itself a few weeks ago figuring that maybe some mice had taken up residence behind the range or under the range since it is a warm place... I found some mouse poop and urine stains but I didn't think this was the source of our problem. I was hoping, but I wasn't sure. While I had the range pulled out away from the cabinets, I vacuumed and then cleaned and then painted... I wanted to seal up any of the urine smell. Our problem was mostly minimized now but there were still some really stinky times especially when we used the broiler. Then we attended a dinner party at the house of some close friends. They have the same model range as we do... a Frigidaire Gallery line... with a full commercial quality coo