Sunday Morning

I listened to NPR this morning. There was a story about a National Guard unit in Pennsylvania going to Iraq that decided to march through town to the train station as the unit has done since Civil War, even though they were leaving from the airport. The high school band marched with them. I was in tears. I'm in tears now, writing this!

Link to story and audio.

Train Stuff

I am BUILDING a short (52 feet) trestle to replace a plate girder bridge.

I am using the trestle from "Building Yancy's Coal Yard", an article by Ben King in Model Railroader a couple of years ago, as a guide.



The white plastic thing is the jig for building the deck of the trestle. Not shown is the jig for assembling the bents.



You can see the tie pattern from the article stuck in there to help locate the ties in the proper spacing.'

Those ties are supposed to be a scale 8 x 8 inches, that would be .092 in our big world, the stock measures .097 inches on my new Harbor Freight $20 digital calipers. Can I even SEE .005 of an inch? Can YOU?



Notice the second "fence" on the jig, on left? I miss-read the drawing in the article, did not used a magnifying glass, and so glued the fence in the wrong spot. So I had to glue another one in. The funny is, it took me FOREVER to figure out why the ties were not lining up correctly.

The wood is stained with brown shoe polish (from a can) mixed with alcohol. Not good, alcohol doesn't really thin the shoe polish. I should have DRANK the alcohol! (No, no, not really, it was rubbing alcohol, you can't drink THAT!!) Also a bit of black ink thinned with alcohol. THAT works well!

Here's a picture of two cats eating...



... and a Library Raid shirt from the Unshelved Store. Link goes to the jacket, the shirts are not available anymore, I guess.

Sunday Rantings

Ran across this link on Reddit.com. This Is Your Nation On White Privilege, by Tim Wise.

Anyone want to argue his points?

Also from Reddit, If All Women Lived In Sarah Palin's America.

Let the games begin!