Good Morning All. Clear and 34° here. Wide variance in local temperatures this morning, the Weather Underground station a mile away is showing 39°; about 4 miles west there's one that shows 37°. However those in a 10 mile radius south and east are all showing 31°-33°. The warmer areas are all open countryside while the cooler ones are all close to a small town of 10K people. Warming up with maybe 70° today, mid-70's tomorrow and over 80° for the next 8 of the 10 day forecast. This is a typical La Niña weather pattern for us, warmer and drier than normal Winter & Spring. I'll let the fire go out in the wood-burning stove today, maybe until November.
Another slow and roll with it day yesterday here on the SFW estate. Everything prior to noon revolved around Mass and then it was weekly laundry time for the bed linens. I
finally got around to removing the beer from the car after Thursday's grocery trek. No puddles left on the trip out to the beer fridge in the train shed.
Had to listen to my wife who wanted me to get out of the stock market
except for the three specific stocks that she hand-picked. Those are actually losing at a greater % than the ETF's that I have more $$$ invested in. I'm listening to Warren Buffett and want to buy and hold. So far I am down about $25K this year, but I am $27K ahead of the start of 2024. It will however, take weeks if not months to recover whenever that starts. Just waiting for the right foreign government to drop their tariffs to get the ball rolling. Meanwhile American businesses will milk this for price hikes immediately even though there are months worth of goods already in the pipeline here.
Unfortunately I didn't get much time in the train shed yesterday, so what little time there was I spent running a couple of unit trains from staging to the opposite end staging. I had some uncoupling issues that I quickly fixed. I found a pair of Scaletrains Dash9-44CW's that I failed to convert the couplers to Kadee ones. I usually do that as soon as I take them out of the box, but somehow missed these two. Their scale couplers like all other scale couplers don't act well with my fleet of KD #5's and #148's. Plus, they are plastic.
Terry - Your comment regarding "Buy high, sell low and make it up in volume", reminds me of a staff meeting at work many years ago. The VP of Sales commented after the VP of Finance told everyone that we were losing $1 on every patio door that we sold to a certain high $$$, high volume mobile home customer. He said "But look at the volume that they bring"!!! He actually meant that their high volume reduced the costs of making and selling the doors to all other customers. He was pressured into raising their price factor soon afterward.
Troy - I missed the Little Fingers joke since I don't watch TV. Don't bother explaining it though. I'm familiar with that variety, but I still feel that filling that container with soil nearly to the top would produce better results. They'll be a bitch to peel! Meanwhile the Radish and Lettuce look really good. How's the covert crop doing? Gardening to some is really serious business. I have angst over it some times, but the stress level has almost gone away after I started working closer with Mother Nature than trying to stretch her limits. It's like this season, I bought but haven't set out the Tomato plants and last night's temperature drop has proved me right this time.
Many of those healthy recipes make food that tastes like cardboard. Many others are great though.
Tom O -
I don’t understand complaints about Ruth Chris or Fleming Steakhouses. You should know before you get there you’ll be paying way too much.
Very true.
Open Table works well for us also, the very few times that we have had to use it. Mainly on out of town places and on trips. No restaurants in the local area accept reservations unless you are planning a party of 8 or more though. Or maybe I just don't go to the more exclusive places.
Mike - Yep! We noticed the same thing about Red Lobster too. Shrimp skewers that used to have 6 shrimp now have five for an increased price. Many other items have also shrunk.
It must be nice that you only have to mow 7 months a year. I do it 10 and even sometimes 12 months some years. August is one of my off months! But I never have to shovel sunshine!
Marlin - Copycat recipes exist on the Internet for almost anything that can be gotten at chain restaurants, and I use some of them myself. But we still like to go out once a week just for the service and ambiance.
Of course today is National Beer Day, commemorating the end of Prohibition.
Everyone have a great day. It appears that the Stock Market has made a temporary U-turn after being down for the first 30 minutes.
but i have to order more wood, because my initial plan was to build 2 modules for ntrak, but its to thin, so i used it for my normal nscale layout. here a picture of my work. but will add more pictures in my layout thread.
Then I came in and made bierocks for supper and was ready when the wife got home. I saw leaves starting to curl about 7:00p.
