Running Bear's May 2025 Coffee Shop

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Good afternoon all,

Beautiful sunny and mild day today, following several soakers of late.

I tried out the mineral spirits for track cleaning and it seems to work fine, somewhat better than the 70 pct isopropyl.

Lumber came for the new Grantsburg NP depot, will be working on that bldg next.

My locomotives are behaving so running trains is winning out over construction.

Have a pleasant evening!

Dave LASM
 
Years ago I had my tires balanced at one of those big car parts stores in Virginia. I asked them not to use the pneumatic gun on the lug nuts and to tighten by hand because I'd never be able to take them off. Well, on my drive to Maryland, I heard a big bang from under the car as I was on the beltway. Made it to my cousin's place and found that I was missing 3 lug nuts and a couple were bent. Seems they didn't tighten the lug nuts at all and I could have lost a wheel, crashed and burned and killed a million people (oops, sorry practicing to write for MSM! haha)

Since then, I do the work myself. I bought a 1/4 and 3/8 inch torque wrench and use them on everything - lug nuts, oil drain plug, oil filter guard (not sure why they have this since it isn't the lowest part in the immediate area, but it's there).
 


Good for cleaning the wheels as well. Just let it dry before running - pretty quick but not as quick as IPA.
I've had really good luck with it too since I stopped using IPA.

I haven't tried the graphite treatment after cleaning that "some are singing its praises".
Don't know that I really need to though since this works well. If it aint broke don't fix
it, right!
 
We're home.

First grocery run for breakfast foods and milk has been made. Old routine begins tomorrow.

Right now, it's Whiskey O'Clock
(with sweet vermouth and Aperol)
whiskeyoclock.jpg
 
I've been watching Model Railroading with Larry Puckett the DCC guy. Last video he said in North America, we pronounce it sodder, get used to it. Haha that was funny and awesome. No bending the knee for anyone like all the other utubers I watch. No 70 degrees fahrenheit or whatever celsius going on here.
 


Arrived after about 22-23 hours take off to landing flights. (That’s start to finish of 3 flights and 2 layovers). Plus a couple hours before and then clearing immigration and customs and getting a bus to Kobe and taking the subway to near where my sister in law and her husband live. From waking up to going back to bed was probably 28-29 hours. I did get a few 1/2-3/4 hour cat naps on the plane and got 4 movies in. I started a 5th movie on the flight from Incheon/Seoul to Osaka Kansai airport but I was too tired.

I did sleep well. Hi to bed probably around 2am local time and only woke once to use the rest room and it was like 10:30am when I woke up. Still tired but usually jet lag gets me up early so glad to make it through.

I had ordered a new air mattress on Amazon JP for sleeping here. Have had one but it would slowly lose air and I wanted to try one of the better 18” thick ones. It turned out instead of replacing the one we already had here we augmented it. I slept on it and the wife slept on the old one. It was nice as they are only 5’ wide and not wide enough for two people though it’s worked.

Anyway we took a subway.

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And the ads are different in the forum now.

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We headed out to Branson, MO today for a weekend with family. Hit 78 and sunny, a perfect day. Stopped for lunch at a Neighbor's Mill and Bakery in Harrison, AR and it was delicious. Got to Branson and got checked into the timeshare without having to kill anyone. Our nephew and his crew got in a couple hours later, so we got together and Uncle Kevin got tons of hugs and loving from the g'nieces. Supposed to rain much of the rest of the weekend, but we are gonna really spoil another g'niece coming in tomorrow as she made National Honor Society.
 
Ohayoogozaimasu! Nice looking medamayaki!
SIsIL knows I’m not into runny yolks so at least cooked it soft and not runny.

Women folk want to go shopping. I’ll tag along.

We’re still tired and to a certain extent jet lagged so day 1 is kind of low key.

I seem to have updated the SSH keys on a server I run when I got my new Mac mini 2 months ago and not update the keys on my laptop and not left the old key on teh server so I seem to be locked out of the server. :(. Hopefully Murphy doesn’t strike.
 
Dang, that sucks. Is that like SSL? For a long time now, I can't establish an https connection with my nas. i always have to go unsecured.

I don’t know exactly what it’s an acronym for but SSH is a secure seasion thing. By itself it is used to get a terminal or command line or shell session on the remote server. It encrypts all the traffic so you can securely connect to remote servers and administer them. You can also use it as a transport for other data services. Like scp, which is secure copy, sftp, which is secure ftp (file transport— a different form of copy files) and there are other things you can use it for to encrypt your traffic. You can set up the remote server to allow username and password or you can also set it up to only use secure keys. So you set up a private key and use the public key associated with that key on the remote server so when you connect it uses the public and private key to make sure you are who you say you are — no password needed.

The problem seems to be that when I got my new Mac mini in March I set up a new private key/ public key pair on the mini, and stuck it on the server. And I seem to have maybe changed the server to not have my older one which I have on the laptop. I don’t normally use the laptop. It’s my son’s before he left and the wife normally uses it though I have an admin account int it and have used it to log into the server before. But I seem to have removed the key on the server so it doesn’t work.

And the server is set up to not allow username and password.
 
I survived the shopping. We went to a local shopping mall and looked at clothes and stuff. I brought my old ratty running/walking shoes but in Japan you’re always taking shoes off and being old and fat it’s hard so I was looking at slip ons. They had Vans on sale for cheap but I didn’t buy any. I need to find an arch support and gel insert fort or I’ll die walking around in them. (That was at ABC mart). We also went to Daiso, which is the king of dollar stores. Unlike dollar stores in America, which are crap and no longer a dollar, the 100 yen store (currently around 70 cents) has all sorts of good stuff. Not everything is 100 yen but they’re marked with the price of not. My daughter but a new glass screensaver for her phone since hers was cracked. 100 yen. We now have a Daiso in Utah. It opened up a week or two ago. We’ve not been to see how America has ruined Daiso.

We also went to a Mega Donki store (Mega Don Quijote). It’s a discount everything store and a Nega one is extra big. They have a section for everything including bro Rey, snacks, cosmetics, electronics, toys, tools, suitcases, and everything else. Some stores have departments that others don’t. And they have smaller Super Donki and plain Donki stores which have less stuff. (Donki is not just what foreigners call it. Also the nickname in Japan). The store is very popular with tourists. I don’t really care that much about it but if you need something and it’s there why not. I got my lunch of champions there (which I’m now enjoying back at my SisIL house).

The chips are like crunchy Cheetos but the flavor is some sort of beef bbq eh where the word bbq is not American style. More Japan style grilled. They’re not bad. I try whatever new things I can find in Japan I saw these and decided I needed to try them. The Dr Pepper seems to be plain old Dr Pepper. I tried it because the label was different than the normal one and they had normal labeled bottles next to these ones.

IMG_8052.jpeg
 


I survived the shopping. We went to a local shopping mall and looked at clothes and stuff. I brought my old ratty running/walking shoes but in Japan you’re always taking shoes off and being old and fat it’s hard so I was looking at slip ons. They had Vans on sale for cheap but I didn’t buy any. I need to find an arch support and gel insert fort or I’ll die walking around in them. (That was at ABC mart). We also went to Daiso, which is the king of dollar stores. Unlike dollar stores in America, which are crap and no longer a dollar, the 100 yen store (currently around 70 cents) has all sorts of good stuff. Not everything is 100 yen but they’re marked with the price of not. My daughter but a new glass screensaver for her phone since hers was cracked. 100 yen. We now have a Daiso in Utah. It opened up a week or two ago. We’ve not been to see how America has ruined Daiso.

We also went to a Mega Donki store (Mega Don Quijote). It’s a discount everything store and a Nega one is extra big. They have a section for everything including bro Rey, snacks, cosmetics, electronics, toys, tools, suitcases, and everything else. Some stores have departments that others don’t. And they have smaller Super Donki and plain Donki stores which have less stuff. (Donki is not just what foreigners call it. Also the nickname in Japan). The store is very popular with tourists. I don’t really care that much about it but if you need something and it’s there why not. I got my lunch of champions there (which I’m now enjoying back at my SisIL house).

The chips are like crunchy Cheetos but the flavor is some sort of beef bbq eh where the word bbq is not American style. More Japan style grilled. They’re not bad. I try whatever new things I can find in Japan I saw these and decided I needed to try them. The Dr Pepper seems to be plain old Dr Pepper. I tried it because the label was different than the normal one and they had normal labeled bottles next to these ones.

View attachment 220026
Tie your laces so they're loose at the top. Double knot the bunny ears.

Slip ons with a bit of effort. I occasionally have to raise a foot to get the heel/ankle to wrap correctly. But I've been doing that for ages.
 
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