Afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the birthday wishes.
Tranquility has once again returned to most of the Southland. Nice blue skies and cool today. It looks like one person was killed in a tornado right across the state line in Georgia but it's amazing there weren't more fatalities given the size of the tornado outbreak. The NWS is investigating about 40 possible tornados in 10 different counties in Alabama. It looks like most of them were either weak or hit in mostly unpopulated areas.
My neighbors are now even more convinced that I am personally responsible for bad weather here since the tornado last year was the day before my birthday and now we had another tornado outbreak on my birthday. I'm pretty sure I saw a couple of them knotting up some ropes last night.
Rex, glad to hear the truck and trailer were spared. Sounds like the boys acted like typical dogs during a storm.
It's a little disturbing to hear we are now both the same age since I'm obviously much younger than you.
BOC, there are a bunch of car card templates available. Check out
http://www.gatewaynmra.org/articles/essence-of-ops.htm for a very comprehensive article about car cards and waybills. It's easy to create them in MS Word or Publisher.
Karl, looks like the whole East Coast except Florida is in for a few days of clear weather finally. Sounds like you had a good time at Ken's place.
Corey, I've done the can of treats and bowls of food thing but they are on to me now. They have to go into two big pet taxis once I get them in the basement or they would destroy the layout in about 10 seconds flat and they hate being caged up. I'm thinking about a giant shop vac with a three foot diameter hose so I can go around the house and suck them all up at once.
BNSF, sure sorry to hear about the hours being cut. Unfortunately, with the government having announced almost a trillion dollars in new spending in the last three days and the market still at it's October lows, it's hard to see this getting better soon. Chris, the new whatever they're calling the $800 billion bill that got signed Tuesday is supposed to have about $200 billion to backstop state and local government budgets so maybe there's more hope for you.
Ken, I'm glad the ops session only had the normal amount of gremlins pop up. The software that Rex uses really is nice. No car cards to lose and you get a nice printed list of your manifest that you slap on a clipboard and check off as you pickup and drop off cars. Car cards do work but I'm the world's best at dropping one and losing it under the layout. I can screw up a whole railroad as one car sits blocking other cars because I never picked it up.
Larry, I hope your shoulder is doing better. No snow down here yet but Saturday night still looks interesting.
Dan, I hope the wisdom teeth came out without too many problems. Don't work on your car while you're doped up on pain pills though. I've done it and the results weren't good, even though I
thought I was doing a pretty good job.