Running Bear's Cofee Shop LI

[GarryCBQ]

Good morning ..

I finally had time to work on the layout a while yesterday. There is much work remaining.

Regarding roads, I often force the perspective making them wider in the foreground and narrower in the background.

In this scene, the bridge trusses are closer together on the other side of the tracks than in the front of the scene. The road behind continues to narrow as it goes off into the distance. ... Of course, it reaches a point where it is too narrow for vehicles. Some of my background roads have N scale vehicles, but not in this scene.

 

[BigE]

Morning fellers.
Tough night for me. Woke up around 0400 hours with massive cramps in both calfs and it about had me in tears. Now I'm walking around like an arthritic Frankenstein with a double-limp. Still hurts.

Thanks for all the kudos on my recent efforts. Sure couldn't have done that without you all's help. My Marine buddy, CJ, was over last night so I showed off what I'd been doing the last few days. Last time he saw it I had just ballasted all the track and it was still drying so I couldn't even run trains. I had take up all the buildings and all cars and engines off the tracks so it was pretty naked. Yesterday's efforts brought it all back to life. We spent about an hour in the train room last night and I ran some trains. Apparently, he had never seen me run two trains at once - he was blown away and took a bunch of pics. He kept admiring the yard with all the new lights and the corner where I put down the grass cover and the trees. He kept commenting about how "it really brings it all to life!"
Now he's really excited and really wants me to put that mountain on it. He wants to come watch me do it.
What I think I really need to do is to start populating it with people and vehicles and the like.
He also wants me to create a logo for my "Palmer Valley Railroad".
He has sat he and watched me build model kits, do some painting, lots of wiring, spend some more money, so he knows what it takes to make this all happen.
I have to admit, it does bring a lot of joy to me seeing someone else's enthusiasm over my efforts.
Sure does go a long way to keep the fire lit. At least it does for me.
E.

 

[BigE]

Worked late last night trying to resolve a down hard issue that required a Sev 1 call ticket. Sat on almost 3 hours without being transferred before I hung up and got the thing working again. (Still is this morning) Tech emails the boss at 8:00 am this morning (12 hours after the ticket was set up) ready to assist us. He forwards it to me and I replied that this isn't what I expected on a down hard call, especially after being on hold for over 2 hours waiting for the next available engineer. Having worked with this company before, I don't know why they remain the largest Virtual Machine provider (I know their only competition is Microsoft, and they can be as bad).

Are you talking about a cloud service or just a regular virtual server machine like Rackspace et. al. provides?
Maybe AWS? That's the last one I worked with.
I bypassed all their front-end cutesie web interface crap and would just remote connect to the desktop and did all my work on that.

XTrkCAD is also free but I can't seem to get my brain around that one either.
In fairness to both that and SCARM, I've never spent the time to watch any of the tutorial videos.
Guess I don't have the attention span.
E.

 

[Trussrod]

Good morning ballast tampers, LoL, that's something I haven't even done yet myself!

Hi Flo, where's Francine this morning, of she detained for the moment. I'd like some coffee and toast with real butter & and Apricot Jam if you would, thanks.


Lets see what WW has to say?
It's Clear st 96.3 °F - Feels Like 97 °F;

Winds are from the SSW at 2.7 mph.

Today
High 107 | Low 75 °F
0% Chance of Precip.

Hum-i-dity is 30%

Thanks Patrick.

And you'd think a 30+ year software engineer and sometimes land surveyor (throw in a little civil engineering on roads) would have access to some sort of AutoCAD type program - nope.
I just can't seem to get my brain around SCARM or XTrkCAD.

Nothing wrong at all with drafting by hand. I love it. It's becoming a lost art (might already be) - just like writing proper cursive, or just writing at all for that matter.
E.

Say Eric: I also can't seem to grasp SCRAM or XTrack cad to much of an extent either.

Good evening. 73*F and calm here in central MD, with clouds rolling in slowly from the west. Last time I checked, TWC had downgraded the predicted severity of the T-storms that we'll be getting tomorrow.

TrussDavid - In your state, I'd be more concerned about the Water Police citing you for wasting water...


Ken: That might be true if I lived in city area but I live in the country on acreage like most every one else in the area as I think 2.5 acres is the smallest size parcel of property you can have as most everyone has to have their own water well as I do and we paid to have it drilled into the hard granite rock below. A Whicher found a location where three strata crossed and drilled straight down from above so I have three sources of water dumping into the 8" diameter 160' deep well hard rock well. I only pump what I need to use at any given time and there is no excess runoff. What most folks don't seem to realize is that the water flows through the fischers in the granite rock and as it gets to a well hole that been drilled it fills up the 8" diameter hole and once filled it continues to run on down hil toward the valley below. The little amount of water I use, as I hand water the front lawn which is only sparce patches of grass and I water by hand so I only use enough water to wet the grass and surrounding areas fairly good and quit. Also most of the time I'll water in the evening so there isn't too much evaporation.



PK - Regarding the size, I make my pavement surfaces 3.25" wide. That way all of my scale vehicles, including heavy mack trucks, will fit between the double yellow lines and the white shoulder stripe. I snapped a few pix using my cellphone, so the quality isn't the greatest...

Here are the raw materials I used for the asphalt roads: Evergreen black sheet styrene .040"; Krylon Dark Gray Primer for the base coat; Krylon Ultra-Flat Khaki to make it look "dirty"; and Wal-Mart brand light gray primer to create a faded appearance. I wanted a mix of colors since a single color would look too toylike [IMHO]:

A section of asphalt road painted in the three colors shown in the previous photo, before adding lines:

Some Walthers "Street System" Concrete street sections painted in Krylon Ultra-Flat Khaki, I'm using these in my "downtown" scene:

Here is a road section I did ~3 weeks ago. The photo makes the surface look darker than it actually is...

Tomorrow I plan to work on the stripes. I'll try to include a few step-by-step photos.

It's getting late and 5:00am comes up awfully fast. G'night, see you all tomorrow.

I think your road section look very nice for a new road.

Trussrod - we are already up to 91, but thankfully up here our humidity is low, but the heat still isn't comfortable. Think I may pick an air conditioner on the way home this afternoon. I can always go down to the basement where it's cool even on the hottest days, but our bedroom faces west and is a bit uncomfortable in the evening when it's hot out.

I feel bad for those that live in areas with high humidity. Sure didn't hurt my feelings when I finally got out of Florida.

It's

David ... Regarding water damage to my friends trains. Boxes were ruined by the water, but the trains should be okay. His daughter removed the trains from the wet boxes and put them on towels on a table to dry. Trains should be fixable, but I have not heard if that is so.

We don't need a sump pump here because we are on a hillside, but work has been done to make sure water flows around the house in a downpour.

Glad to hear that Sister removed the cars from the boxes, sounds like it was bad enough though.

It's also good that you had your property graded so you have run-off on both side of your place. That's the way my place is fixed up too.

Good morning ..

I finally had time to work on the layout a while yesterday. There is much work remaining.

Regarding roads, I often force the perspective making them wider in the foreground and narrower in the background.

In this scene, the bridge trusses are closer together on the other side of the tracks than in the front of the scene. The road behind continues to narrow as it goes off into the distance. ... Of course, it reaches a point where it is too narrow for vehicles. Some of my background roads have N scale vehicles, but not in this scene.

Your scenes really look good and using forced perspective really a lot to it.



Take care and hope everyone has a great day!

 

[BigE]

No cloud, just a standard VM on a VMHost machine that wouldn't power on. The physical machine has 5 virtuals on it. I had a VM locked down and couldn't get it to power on. Production server, fortunately we were closed at the time, but it sure doesn't help when they leave you in a lurch and you're dealing with people in another country who really don't seem to be in a big hurry to do anything about your issue. Typical of large scale computer help centers. (Except for my last job in a support center. the pressure was there to get them handled as quickly as possible, and we never had people wait more that 15 minutes for the next engineer. Although I could probably find some of their customer that had a similar experience to mine.

No you have me curious who you are dealing with. Don't mention that here. Send me a PM.
I started dealing with VM hosts about 15 years ago. I had great experience with them but I could just call the owner at his house if I had an emergency and he would get an engineer to call me right away.
Come to think of it, I haven't talked with him in years. Think I'll drop him an email just to say Hi.
E.

 

[GarryCBQ]

I meant to tell Eric I'm really impressed with how nicely your layout is coming together.

Also, I meant to say to Ken, I like your grade crossing. Nice !

David .. Thanks for commenting about my forced perspective.

 

[PRR Modeler]

Afternoon All,

We have a visitor to the house for a week. A fellow skunk owner in the area is going on a family vacation so the skunk is boarding with us. Today I got the rest of the trees in and put down some details. Of course I used to have the complete sets of dear and bears from WS but I can only find a couple of each one...figures. Tomorrow I have to go downtown and I don't know how long I will have to be there.

Ken- Excellent road work. That is something I have not been very good at.

Garry- Excellent work on the back drop.

I hope everyone has a good night.

 

[PRR Modeler]

Of course I forgot the darn picture...again

 

[PRR Modeler]

Ken- Here is the adult Doe...missing the fawn

 

[BigE]

We have a visitor to the house for a week. A fellow skunk owner in the area is going on a family vacation so the skunk is boarding with us. Today I got the rest of the trees in and put down some details. Of course I used to have the complete sets of dear and bears from WS but I can only find a couple of each one...figures. Tomorrow I have to go downtown and I don't know how long I will have to be there.

How cool!!! I hear they make great pets and quite playful. A flying squirrel I had for a while was super awesome. So was the ferret, "Little Bit", I had until the wolf dog got too close. She died in my arms that night.
Nowadays, there is a feral cat that's been hanging around for a couple years. Over the last few months he has decided it's time to "come on in" like they say in CIA field operator parlance. In the last week he has come in to explore - just a little. He let's me pet him now without fear. Just today he came all the way into the living where I was sitting here typing. That is MAJOR progress. 3
years ago when that cat saw anyone at all he bolted straight off.
Guess I'm just an animal whisperer.

 

[montanan]

Curt - Looking real nice. Really like your update pictures.

BigE - now all you need is Moose and squirrel.

Garry - Great picture.

 

[BigE]

BigE - now all you need is Moose and squirrel.

Funny you say that. My last cat was named "Moose" but he got hit last Thanksgiving day. So I was told. I went looking for the body to bury him properly but never found anything. I searched and called for him for a couple weeks before giving up.
This feral cat I call "Big Smokey" and I swear him and Moose must be some sort of kin. They have almost the same hair and eye color. Moose was a big talker. Smoke doesn't make a sound although he did talk to me yesterday - twice!

As to the moose and flying squirrel: you mean Bulwinkle and Rockie (always wearing those old open pit cockpit pilot goggles).
I'm told I can do an awesome imitation of Bulwinkle.
E

 

[BigE]

Ken, your road work is getting me thinking I need to bring in some roads.
Of course without people or vehicles I might could let it go. Nah. Can't do that.
Gotta something to improve - always!

In hindsight, I am kind of thinking I should have built this thing in my living room where I have MUCH more space (about twice).
I live alone so that doesn't matter. I often joke about how I suffer from "chronic hermitosis".

Wow. Only 84° here right now. Guess I'll do a beer run.
E

 

[bnsf971]

As to the moose and flying squirrel: you mean Bulwinkle and Rockie (always wearing those old open pit cockpit pilot goggles).
I'm told I can do an awesome imitation of Bulwinkle.
E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWwkBL0VMXE&spfreload=10

 

[BigE]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWwkBL0VMXE&spfreload=10

Thems the ones. I prefer Bulwinkle's "poetry".
That's what I imitate.

My personal favorite was from some comedian I saw once.

... and now a little poem....

"Spider spider on thee wall,
haven't you got any brains at all,
can't you tell the wall's been plastered,
silly spider you little ba... spider".
(insert word bassturd for those that didn't see that coming)

Unless I've had a few beers I can not do that at all.
Even so, I stick my thumbs in my ears and splay out my fingers so as to give the "antler look". By then everyone is already laughing and I hadn't said a word yet.
Wish I could ad-lib that.
I can only ad-lib some stuff and some people.

 

[IronBeltKen]

Good evening. 74*F and calm in central MD. That violent T-storm apparently is running late, now TWC says it will hit us at 4:00am. Probably sleep thru it, long as there aren't any tornadoes in it.

Thanks everybody for the kind comments about the crossing. But where is Prairie Knight? I'm a bit dissappointed that he hasn't been in here, since I posted those photos at his request...

{E}ric - I used to be able to do the "Rabbit-Outta-My-Hat" routine in Terry's link perfectly with both voices (Bullwinkle and Rocky). Haven't tried it recently though.

Curt, your lake scene is coming along quite nicely. Wanna know what would make that doe look even more believable? Have her raiding somebody's vegetable garden!

Time for me to go, need to restore the seratonin level in my bloodstream so I'll be ready for tomorrow. G'night!

 

[bnsf971]

Good morning. It's mostly clear and 67.
My new laptop is supposed to be here tomorrow, so I can stop using my tablet to post.
Note to anyone: laptops don't respond to having a cup of hot coffee poured on their keyboard very well...

 

[montanan]

Good morning. Starting off at 64 degrees, with highs near 90 again today. I did get to use th enew air conditioner last night. Did enjoy it. I have lived in this house for over 38 years and we have been able to get along without A/C for a long time.

I'll probably be taking the day off and working on the bathroom we gutted. Final work on moving some plumbing and getting the room ready for sheetrock which should be delivered today. The should keep my son and son-in-law busy this weekend. I'll let them hang it and I'll do the taping and mud work. It sure is nice to have the family pitch in.

 

[logandsawman]

Good morning, we have 60 degrees and heading for 68. The temps cooled off last night and it is going to be like this for a few days.

Big E--I wondered when you were going to start talking about a bigger layout...

 

[GarryCBQ]

Good morning .... Happy Canada Day in case Canadians are on board.

Eric .... "chronic hermitosis"..... That's a good one.

Terry .... Caffein and laptops don't get along? ... Oh.

Anybody have any plans for July? .... I hope to get more work done on the layout.