A month already, pt. 2

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.

A month already?

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.)