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    Well, as I was saying before being so rudely interrupted by being able to upload only 6 photos per post..... (and here are the remaining photos that I wanted to post with the original topic.....)
Working through the design and construction sequence with Rusty, we were able to catch some glitches that might have found their way into the final design and production run. It's a great little kit, HO scale, and was a lot of fun to build, even if I was working with pre-production stuff and had to do several things over as we made changes.
Anyway, that kept me occupied during much of this past month. And now I'm going to get back to work on an 1970's vintage Finescale Miniatures engine house that I started a kitbash on and then stopped to work on Rusty's boarding house kit.
Changing subjects once again.... this week my wife and I are keeping our granddaughter while her parents are on a cruise in the Carribean. Allie is almost 3 now and is a truly amazing little kid. She's very bright and is always happy. She's got a great sense of humor already and loves to make her Papa laugh! As a result, she's very easy to take care of. As I said in an earlier entry, I pick her up at her daycare every Wednesday, so she's already used to being around Grandma and Papa and being at their house. Likewise, she's used to staying with us at our lake house for an occasional weekend, so she's never a problem child for us.
A Curmudgeonly Thought for the Day.... Some minds are just like concrete - all mixed up and permanently set.
      I can't believe a whole month has gone by since my last entry. Time's fun when you're having flies, I guess. I've been keeping busy with a lot of different things, so maybe this update will summarize a bit of that.
One thing that has been keeping me busy is cleaning up my lake property after all the winter and early spring storms. This winter was especially rough with the big ice storm in early December and then the snow storms that followed. As a result, there were lots of tree limbs and branches down on the ground everywhere. So I spent the better part of two weekends cleaning all of that up and hauling the debris over into the woods. In the back of the cove, two large trees had floated in and then got caught cross-wise to the shoreline. So I had those to get cut up and burned as soon as the lake level dropped enough that I could get back there. If I left them there, a lot of driftwood, trash, and other debris would float in all spring and summer long, get caught behind the tree trunks, and provide a haven for snakes and other unappealing creatures. So cleaning up the cove was high on my priority list. That was another whole weekend. Ahhhh..... the joys of owning a lake home.
On the home front, I kept busy with one thing and another.
On the modeling front, I finished up a "test build" for my good friend, model railroad kit manufacturer Walt Gillespie (aka "Rusty Stumps). I've been after him for at least 3 years to start producing a line of kits based on a 4-part series of articles by Al Armitage in the Narrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette in 1987. Walt finally decided to go ahead and produce the first one. "Kelly's Boarding House" is based on Al's drawings for "Frenchies' Montmarte" in the first article of the "Kemtron Waterfront" series. Once Walt had enough of the design done to start laser cutting the parts (walls, windows, etc.), he sent me a test kit and a rough draft of the instruction manual to look for flaws and errors. Working through the design process with him, we were able to find several things and make corrections before he put the kit into production.
All of the photos attached to this blog are of my final test build of Kelly's Boarding House. I used moderate weathering because it's supposed to represent a running-down waterfront flop house.
(Apparently, I can add only 6 photos per blog - at least that's all that this blogger.com software will allow me. So this entry will be continued on a separate page.)
Like about 5,000 others, I listen to the Scotty Mason Show, a free podcast for model railroaders (available directly from Scott's site: http://www.modelrailroadpodcast.com/ or from the iTunes Store). Unlike most of the 5,000 others, however, I'm way behind on my listening.... as in I'm still listening to the December podcast, and here it is, the end of February. Oh well... I'll get through January and February's editions in due course. Of course, by then, March and maybe April's 'casts will be available and I'll still be way behind. Anyhoo.... In one of the segments of the December issue, the guys were discussing how they got started in the hobby. As I listened to Dave Frary remembering the Lionel set he got for Christmas one year, a flood of memories washed over me - which wasn't good, because I happened to be walking on the treadmill at the time and I almost lost my balance. But I digress. I began thinking about a very special Christmas, perhaps my favorite Christmas of all, 1952, when I was in second grade. For weeks, after the Sears Christmas Catalog had come in the mail, I poured over the pictures and description of a 105-piece army set. It came complete with little soldiers in various firing positions, a couple of separate .30-cal and .50-cal machine guns, and a small cardboard fort. I lusted mightily for that army set. Like Ralphie trying to draw his parents' attention to the Daisy Red Rider bb gun in A Christmas Story, I did everything I could think of to attract my parents' attention to the army set. But it seemed to be to no avail. My mother's only comment, and the only indication that she had even looked at the catalog page with the pictures of the soldiers, was, "It's pretty expensive. I don't think your dad can afford that." The other thing I lusted for that year was a Lionel train set, but I knew that was way beyond the realm of reality. It cost at least twice what the army set cost. Then one morning about a week before Christmas, my grandmother, who lived with us at the time, overslept and didn't get me up in time for school. On top of it, we'd had about 6" of snow during the night. It was going to be a long, cold walk to Francis Willard Elementary by myself - and I was going to be really late! A half hour later, I was bundled up in my winter coat and my stupid buckled galoshes and starting to trudge up the sidewalk toward Woodland Ave. Suddenly my mother turned the corner in her old DeSoto and headed down the street toward home. I thought something was wrong because she was supposed to be at work. She stopped alongside me and rolled down her window. Why wasn't I at school? "Well, get in... I'll have to drive you... don't you dare look in the back seat!" But it was too late. I had already glanced in the back seat and had seen the box! 105-Piece U.S. Army Combat set, it said on the top. It was all I could do to sit still and look straight ahead while my mother drove me up to the school and let me out. If she suspected I had seen the box, she never let on. And I wasn't about to tell her I had! For the next week, my mind was in a whirl! I couldn't sleep at night. I didn't hear anything the teacher said to me at school. I didn't even care that I was the last kid picked for the kickball teams at recess. I was going to get a 105-piece army set for Christmas and nothing else mattered! Finally, Christmas morning arrived. Needless to say, I was in a fever-pitch by that point, and I wasted no time tearing into the wrapping around the large box that contained my soldier set. Pushing all the crap that Santa Claus had left me out of the way, I began setting up my fort in the living room and inspecting those great looking green machine guns and little figures. I was deep in war game strategies two hours later, when my father said it was time to go pick up my other grandmother and bring her over. My grandfather worked for KC P&L and was "on duty" until Christmas afternoon, when he would join us. So off I went with my dad to get his mother. She met us at the door and asked me to carry a couple of packages out to the car for her. My dad picked up a large cardboard box and headed back to the car. He slid the box across the back seat, and as he did so, I read out loud what it said on the end, which hadn't been wrapped with gift paper. "Marx Electric Train Set. New York Central locomotive. 5 cars. 32' of straight and curved track. 110 volt power pack included" My grandmother, who had walked up to the car right then, spun me around and started laughing, saying "Why, Mikey, I didn't know you could read that well! I should have wrapped the whole box, Mr. Nosey Boy!" I think I must have gone blind with excitement all the way back home. An army set.... and an electric train set! All in one Christmas! My world was complete! Later that day, after my grandfather arrived, he and my dad got down on the living room floor with the train set and started running the train around the oval. In fact, they spent so much time playing with my train that I remember wondering if it really was my train. The morning after Christmas I carried all of my soldiers and the train set upstairs to my bedroom and set it all up on the cold, hardwood floor. All the rest of that Christmas vacation was spent setting up the fort inside the train track oval, watching the train go around and around the fort and soldiers and under the tunnel I built from shoe boxes and gift boxes... it was the perfect Christmas vacation! In the next couple of years that followed, my father and grandfather added to my train set. A new Lionel power pack that had Reverse, Smoke, and Whistle controls - although my Marx NYC steamer had no whistle or smoke generator, and the controls were useless. A tall red/green yard beacon which revolved around a hot flashlight-type bulb. A set of brown plastic Lionel telephone poles. And so on.... As the years went by, though, I lost interest in the train set and boxed it up, and the soldiers were slowly lost or traded off to my friends or blown to smithereens with firecrackers on the Fourth of July. But of all the Christmases that followed, of all the gifts I received, none equalled the Christmas when I got my soldier set and the electric train - and I got to see my dad and "papa" on the floor playing together like they were kids. As noted above, the soldier set is long gone - as it should be after 50+ years. But I still have my Marx train set. It's on a shelf in my basement. One of these days I may get it back out and see if it even still runs. A Curmudgeonly Thought for the Day.....Adolescence is that period of a child's life when parents are most difficult.
    Last night I got out my old Mac PowerBook 3400c laptop, which I haven't used in several years, to see if I could find an old Filemaker Pro database file I needed to update. Not only did I find the data file, but I discovered a treasure trove of photos and other files I had completely forgotten about. For whatever reason, I had never copied any of them over to my iMacs when I upgraded. Included in my "find" were all of the construction progress photos of my Railroad-Line Challenge I freight house project (2003) as well as a number of work train construction photos from 2001-02. And all this time I thought those had been lost or deleted over the years. So I'm going to copy all of them to a 2GB compact flash card and then burn them to a DVD. This morning I spent well over an hour poring over the various folders and files that are still on the laptop's hard drive. I was amazed at how many things I had thought were long lost. I'm glad now that I've kept the PowerBook plugged in and in sleep mode all these years, so the battery would stay up. It's over 11 years old but is still in great condition. A few of the "missing" photos are attached.
I don't know if anyone has even discovered my little blog here since I started it a few days ago. So for all I know, my entries could be going completely unread (except by myself) and slipping into the electronic abyss that is otherwise known as "oblivion." Oh well....
As I stated in an earlier post, I'm the administrator of a 3,800+ member internet forum which caters to craftsman/finescale train modelers. As a rule, the membership is generally upbeat, rather than nasty and negative. We don't seem to attract the angry young men with tough guy attitudes the way many other model train forums seem to. I think it's because we (as a group) tend to be older (read: more mature), more assured in our own abilities as model builders, and more accepting of those whose approaches to the hobby may differ from ours. We also seem to be more willing to learn from others as well as teach others, rather than simply criticize and tear others down in an effort to build ourselves up.
So, in my travels around the various model railroad forums, both large and small, I have noticed these are the things which seem to set us apart from the others. However, there are also some similarities. Unfortunately, one of those is the propensity for magazine bashing.
For whatever reason, just the mention of Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman, or any other of a half dozen model train magazines unleashes a torrent of criticism aimed at any and all of the magazines. It about drives me NUTS!
I become greatly annoyed when these discussions get started. Everyone's got an opinion; everyone's got a boxcar load of reasons (which are really opinions stated as fact!) why he hates such-and-so magazine and why he hasn't bought a copy in years.... (and if he hasn't bought or read the magazine in years, how does he know it's still bad?)
I suppose it all wouldn't be so annoying if anyone ever had anything fresh or actually factual to say. But month after month, discussion after discussion, the same tired opinions are tossed into the fray.... 1. Magazine X hasn't changed its format in more than 25 years. It sucked then and it still sucks now. 2. Magazine Y has gotten so dumbed down over the years that only a 12-year-old moron could get anything out of it. 3. Well, Magazine Y has to appeal to all levels of the hobby.... but it still sucks. 4. The editors aren't real model railroaders. They're just corporate flunkies trying to climb the ladder. 5. Magazine X is okay.... if all you want to read about is eastern railroading. 6. Magazine Y is okay.... if all you want to read about are huge basement-sized layouts. 7. Magazine Z publishes the same kinds of articles over and over. It's boring. 8. Magazine [X, Y, or Z] (take your pick) never runs articles on [N scale, O scale, garden layouts, traction, scratchbuilding] (again, take your pick). 9. Magazine [X, Y, or Z] (your choice) is always about HO scale. 10. Magazine [X, Y, or Z] never has anything about [steam, diesel, transition era]. Their stuff is always about [steam, diesel, transition era]. 11. Well, I quit reading the rag when they dropped the [insert name] column a couple of years ago. That did it for me! 12. I quit reading the rag because they publish the same authors and photographers all the time. 13. I quit reading the rag because they've lost their way. 14. I don't buy their rag anymore. I'll read it at the [newsstand, library, hobby shop, my buddy's house], but I won't pay for it anymore.
And so on and so forth, ad infinitum ad nauseum.
On some train forums, the magazine bashing threads are almost a staple topic. You can count on at least one each month, and it will run up to as many as 5 pages before it peters out. Fortunately, on my forum it's a topic that rears its ugly head only once or twice a year. Even so, I and the moderators have to read it and keep tabs on it, because it's one of those topics than can turn "south" very quickly. Like I said, everyone's got an opinion, and no one else's matters..... if you catch my drift.
So why do I dislike the magazine bashing threads? First of all, they serve no useful purpose. Everyone's just pounding sand and blowing hot air. As far as I know, the various editors and publishers pay no attention to internet forums and never see the comments being made about their respective magazines. (The one exception may be Kalmbach's Trains.com, although it's hard to tell how often MR's editorial staff reads the online discussions.) So, it seems to me, that the best way, the most useful way, to air one's complaints about a given magazine would be to write a letter to the editor! Let him know why you dislike his product. If that gets no response, write the publisher. If that gets no response either, then start writing the advertisers. Posting the same complaints month after month on an internet forum isn't going to change anything.
The second reason I dislike magazine bashing threads is that they're boring. There is no other way to put it. They're boring.
Enough of that....
A Curmudgeonly Thought for the Day.... Elections make it possible for the people to find out what politicians stand for and politicians to find out what the people will fall for.
     I spent a little time yesterday "fine tuning" my blog page in Freeway. I added two clickable graphics to the bottom of the page: one, the Central Missouri & Southern logo, is linked to my website - if anyone has an interest in craftsman-level modeling and train layouts. The second one, the "Made with Freeway" logo, is a link to Softpress.com, the publishers of Freeway Pro and Freeway Express - again, if anyone has an interest. You do need to be a Mac user, though, to use either of their web design programs. Okay.... on to other things. As I have mentioned already, model railroading and craftsman-level modeling are among my primary hobby interests. The other is photography, and I really enjoy finishing up a layout scene or a diorama and then taking lots of photos of it. One of the outlets for my photos is, of course, my website. Another is the Railroad-Line Forums (www.railroad-line.com), where we discuss all things related to model building and railroading, and we post photos of our latest projects.
My last completed project, finished a little over a year ago, was one of my most satisfying. Completely scratchbuilt, the diorama depicts a 1920's-era Ozarks "tie hacker" and his son.
Tie hacking was a major source of income for many farmers and their families, especially during the winter months. With the railroads needing approximately 3,000 ties per mile and paying the hackers 10 cents per tie, a farmer with a strong son or two could earn as much as $.80 a day. The ties were typically stacked on the farmer's property or delivered to a designated collection point. In the spring, when the Osage, Current, and Black Rivers were swollen with rainwater, the ties were dumped into the water, lashed together into rafts, and floated down the river to the railhead. There they were snagged and plucked from the river, typically using Barnhart loaders. Tie rafting was an "art" unto itself and very dangerous. The rafts frequently were made up of literally thousands of ties and could stretch for miles down a river or stream.
My diorama, "The Tie-Hacker's Yard," is based on historical accounts as well as historical photos of the living conditions in the Ozarks before and during the Great Depression of the 1930's. As a way of life and an economic factor in the Ozarks, tie hacking pretty much came to an end by 1928. The great oak forests of southern and central Missouri were pretty much played out by then, and with the fall of the stock market railroad expansion began to decline.
Additional photos - if anyone is interested - can be found on my website.
A Curmudgeonly Thought for the Day.... It's not surprising that most political candidates can give you all their good points and qualifications in a 30-second TV commercial.
A few months ago, one of my high school classmates started a free MyFamily.com site for our class as an alternative to the Classmates.com site. One of the discussions started shortly after was what have we been doing during the 42 years since we graduated high school. The following is my reply. Much of it will make no sense to anyone who does not know me personally, but that's okay. It's my life summed up in 8 paragraphs. And we're all really strangers here anyway. I've been debating for the past couple of weeks whether to reply to this topic. First of all, I wasn't sure I could sum up the past 42 years in a few paragraphs. More importantly, though, like everyone else I've had a few triumphs and a few sorrows in my life. But in between those two extremes I've lived a pretty mundane existence. Put another way, I wasn't convinced most of you would find the summary all that interesting. Nonetheless.....
I graduated from Central Missouri State in 1969 with a degree in English and married a Sedalia girl a few months later. (We just celebrated our 38th anniversary a couple of weeks ago.) During that summer I applied for a teaching position in Liberty and was hired immediately by Boyce Smith, who remembered me from his teaching days at Center.After a year at Liberty, I resigned to enlist in the U.S. Air Force. Over the course of the next four years, I was stationed in Japan, Taiwan, Viet Nam, and Las Vegas as a munitions specialist. When I left the Air Force at the end of the four years, I held the rank of Staff Sergeant (E5). Both of our daughters were born during my time in the Air Force, one in Taiwan and the other in Las Vegas.
In 1974 I returned to teaching in Liberty and spent all the rest of my professional career there. I completed my Master's in 1978 and worked on the Doctorate after that. Also, back in those early years of my career, I coached track and got to see Center coaches Bob Smith and Vic Bland and Blue Springs coach Wayne Hines (a Center 64 grad) every spring at the various relays and meets. For the last 15 years of my career, I taught Advanced Structural Grammar, American Literature, and Contemporary Literature. I chaired the Language Arts/Journalism Department for 10 years until my retirement in 1999.
My wife has a degree in bank administration and worked in that field for many years before moving on to other positions in the financial sector. The older of our daughters was her class' Valedictorian in '90. She is now a certified gemologist specializing in diamonds and is a diamond buyer for a large national jewelry chain. She and her husband have one daughter, Allie, who is 2-1/2 and the delight of my life! Our other daughter graduated with degrees in psychology and religion and worked for several years as a county juvenile officer in the Division of Abuse and Neglect before burnout got her. Now she is the full time youth director at a large Episcopal church. She's in her mid-30's and still single, although it looks like she and her boyfriend are finally starting to talk about marriage.
My wife and I both have a life-long love for the Lake of the Ozarks, and we've had a home there for many years. Now that we're both retired, we spend about half of each week at the Lake year-round. The other half of each week we're here in the city. We frequently babysit Allie while we're here, and every Wednesday I pick her up so she can play at Papa's all afternoon.
A few of you may recall my sister Vicki (Center 67). In May, 2000, she was diagnosed with kidney cancer. That following fall and winter I was her stem cell donor in two highly experimental procedures, last-ditch attempts really, to save her. They didn't work, and Vicki died in March, 2001.
This past April I was diagnosed with a very aggressive, rapidly growing melanoma on the back of my right arm. (For those who know about melanoma, the pathologist measured it as Breslow Thickness 3.6 mm and classified it as Clark's Level 4.) Subsequently, I had two surgeries on my arm and 5 lymph nodes removed from under my right arm. I was very, very lucky - we caught it in time. The cancer had not spread beyond my arm, and the wide-area surgeries got all of it. In July a metastatic squamous cell lesion was removed from my forehead before it could spread. Of course, for the next 5 years I'm on a 3-month recall with the skin cancer specialist and a 6-month recall with the oncologist to make sure there are no recurrences. I don't complain, though. I just consider the alternatives.
My primary hobby is building "finescale" railroad models (HO scale), and I'm the Administrator of a 3300+ member internet forum for craftsman/finescale model builders. I also have a personal website devoted to my modeling activities. If anyone is interested is seeing how the old fool wastes his time, here is the URL for the site:http://homepage.mac.com/michael21/CMShome/cmshome.html
Well, that's enough about me - and probably far more than anyone really cared to know. As I said at the top, all in all it's been a fairly mundane life. I raised two kids. I taught school and coached. I retired and spend my time puttering around the Lake or building models. That's about it. Oh, one other thing: those of you who remember me as a weird, immature kid... your memories are accurate. And I apologize for that. But somewhere between college graduation and retirement I did finally grow up.
Okay... enough of that.
A Curmudgeonly Thought for the Day.... The ups and downs of our economy are the result of having elected too many yo-yos to public office.
Well, after some trial and error and dealing with a faulty internet connection as well, I now have my custom designed blog template installed and the "old" Blogger template disposed of. It was simple to design in Freeway Express 5; it was less simple to get installed until I realized that the graphics would have to be uploaded to my iDisk (part of my .Mac account for you non-Mac users) so that they could be "remote linked" by the Blogger server and called to the page by the html in my template. But that's all behind me now.... No more head-banging failed FTP uploads to the Blogger server.
A Curmudgeonly Thought for the Day....
An 8-ounce glass contained 4 ounces of water. The optimist saw the glass as half full. The pessimist saw the glass as half empty. I saw it as just one more thing to load in the dishwasher before I could go to bed..... Mr. C.
This is my first entry, although I'm not sure what I'm going to say. I set it up primarily to test the "Blogger Action" commands in Freeway Express v.5b2. I was interested in setting up my own page design rather than being restricted to a pre-defined template. How often I use this blog site to express myself remains to be seen.
And, yes, in spite of what I wrote above, I am using one of Google's pre-defined templates for the time being. I have my own template roughed in and am in the process of refining it. Once I'm happy with the overall layout, I'll upload it here and replace this current layout.
If anyone should happen to read this and has any further interest in what "I'm about," here's the URL for my personal website: http://homepage.mac.com/michael21/CMShome/cmshome.html
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