Monday, October 16, 2006
Post-alanche
I sure wish I knew what to do about being on this Wellness See-saw. I start feeling better, so I try to catch up, and then I start feeling rotten again. But no symptoms good enough to take to the doc, you know? I mean, not unless I want to be called a big giant whiner....
Oh well. So, not a very eventful week. The big news for Lamar is that Oprah drove through on her vacation and dissed the town and area on her website. OK, yeah, the Cow Palace is a fancy dive, but that's what she gets for picking the biggest motel instead of scoping them out a little first. In other shocking news, feedlots don't smell good. (Ya THINK, city girl? I bet I could find a spot or two in Chicago that ain't exactly springtime fresh, either.)
Mike scored big time this week. I don't remember if I mentioned that at one of the auctions we went to this summer (the one where it was still 105 at 5:30 pm!) we won a boxful of old model train parts. Probably from the 40s or 50s, I'm guessing. Mike had a good time laying out the tracks and pushing them around in the dirt while we were there, but once we got home he wanted to plug them in and make them GO. And sadly, that was beyond my scope of practice. But where I was right up to the mark was in knowing that when you have a specialty collectors' item, you go see the FAN.
There's a guy in our town, retired (but he heads up the volunteer fire department), who has a nice little model train shop. We showed him what we had, and I asked him if he could find a buyer, then give us a percentage of what he got in store credit. This sounded like a plan to him.
So he finally tracked down a buyer, and on Wednesday Mike took delivery on a pretty nice little beginners' hobby set, a Santa Fe engine with four or five cars and a caboose, and a lot of little fiddly bits like signs you have to cut off the plastic struts and glue together and OMG kill me now....
Mike and I had a talk about how expensive this train was, and how he needed to be very careful with it. He swore he would, in his exact words, "treat it like a child." Unfortunately, I assumed too much in regards to his track assembly skills. Also, my idea of being careful is to treat a delicate object like it was made of spun glass, and his seems to stop right after "don't take an axe to it." So we learned the hard way that there are these teeny little copper fittings on the ends of the metal rails in the track, and if you don't take them apart JUST like the instructions say, those teeny bits go sproinging off, and then the train don't go.
Luckily the train shop guy sells spare track pieces, and the railroad has run successfully all weekend.
We got through the week without having to light the pilot on the heater, but I think we may have to sometime in the coming week.
I missed Tune Tuesday again, and I even had a download link I could have used, since I had put it up for someone else by request. So before it goes stale I will put it here. If you want a copy of Peter, Paul and Mary doing the Gilbert and Sullivan classic, "I Have a Song to Sing-O", here it is!
http://www.yousendit.com/download/BUhppCIeBIc%3D
Oh well. So, not a very eventful week. The big news for Lamar is that Oprah drove through on her vacation and dissed the town and area on her website. OK, yeah, the Cow Palace is a fancy dive, but that's what she gets for picking the biggest motel instead of scoping them out a little first. In other shocking news, feedlots don't smell good. (Ya THINK, city girl? I bet I could find a spot or two in Chicago that ain't exactly springtime fresh, either.)
Mike scored big time this week. I don't remember if I mentioned that at one of the auctions we went to this summer (the one where it was still 105 at 5:30 pm!) we won a boxful of old model train parts. Probably from the 40s or 50s, I'm guessing. Mike had a good time laying out the tracks and pushing them around in the dirt while we were there, but once we got home he wanted to plug them in and make them GO. And sadly, that was beyond my scope of practice. But where I was right up to the mark was in knowing that when you have a specialty collectors' item, you go see the FAN.
There's a guy in our town, retired (but he heads up the volunteer fire department), who has a nice little model train shop. We showed him what we had, and I asked him if he could find a buyer, then give us a percentage of what he got in store credit. This sounded like a plan to him.
So he finally tracked down a buyer, and on Wednesday Mike took delivery on a pretty nice little beginners' hobby set, a Santa Fe engine with four or five cars and a caboose, and a lot of little fiddly bits like signs you have to cut off the plastic struts and glue together and OMG kill me now....
Mike and I had a talk about how expensive this train was, and how he needed to be very careful with it. He swore he would, in his exact words, "treat it like a child." Unfortunately, I assumed too much in regards to his track assembly skills. Also, my idea of being careful is to treat a delicate object like it was made of spun glass, and his seems to stop right after "don't take an axe to it." So we learned the hard way that there are these teeny little copper fittings on the ends of the metal rails in the track, and if you don't take them apart JUST like the instructions say, those teeny bits go sproinging off, and then the train don't go.
Luckily the train shop guy sells spare track pieces, and the railroad has run successfully all weekend.
We got through the week without having to light the pilot on the heater, but I think we may have to sometime in the coming week.
I missed Tune Tuesday again, and I even had a download link I could have used, since I had put it up for someone else by request. So before it goes stale I will put it here. If you want a copy of Peter, Paul and Mary doing the Gilbert and Sullivan classic, "I Have a Song to Sing-O", here it is!
http://www.yousendit.com/download/BUhppCIeBIc%3D
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