Good Morning All. Clear and 49°, good to see the sun after two days of clouds/fog. No wind to speak of today, that will change briefly tomorrow around noon when moderate SE winds bring enough moisture from the Gulf to give us a 60% chance of rain in the early afternoon. We shall see.
Busy day yesterday starting with the delayed morning grocery trek. I dislike shopping on Fridays because it is more crowded, made worse since several night shift re-stockers were no-shows at Kroger; and there were pallets and buggies blocking most aisles. Then to add to the issues, several employees from the local beer/wine distributor were assembling a display rack and using a normally busy aisle in the meat department to do it in. On the bright side, they weren't out of anything, although I had to request the rutabagas which a produce employee went to get from the back. There were two manned checkout lanes open, both with baggers so there was minimal wait. Noted that gasoline price had jumped from $2.69/gal earlier in the week to $2.85/gal yesterday, a significant jump.
I got home and had to park 125' away from the door and carry all of the groceries (3 trips), since the roofer was there and his truck (and the other car) was blocking the way. Then I had to walk the same distance to load my wife's vacation luggage into the car, none of which was ready to allow me to combine trips back for groceries!
Then eat lunch, pay off the roofer, take a nap, and then empty the dishwasher from the load Thursday night. Unfortunately the roofer is a chatty person and that took much longer than it needed to take. His helper yesterday was his 10 year old son. He also worked at a much slower pace than his crews did. His kids are home-schooled so I had to listen to that as well. BTW, I agree that home-schooling is a good thing for some, especially in his school district. When will America wake up???
My #2 daughter's family went to South Padre Island early to watch the ultimately partially failed launch of the SpaceX rocket this morning. My grandson supposedly got some drone camera footage.
Out in the train shed yesterday, I worked on a project that I started earlier in the week. I received as a Christmas present a few years ago, 120 painted figures made in China from one of my grandkids. I have posted before that I have to rework almost all of them in order to use them. If they were 6' away, there would be no issues, but most of my figures are less than 24" from the viewing point.
Here's examples of nine that I am targeting right now.
As you can see, the paint is very sloppily applied, and the colors are only worn by someone in San Francisco or London; orange, red or green pants for example.
Another problem is the "Oriental bun" on their heads, otherwise known as the sprue attachment point.
There's also more than needed mold flash. You may notice that all of these figures are poor copies or rip-offs of Preiser figures.
The first thing that I do after trimming the sprue attachment and excess flash is give them some blue jeans. I sometimes leave the shirt colors as is, and I change the hair color regularly. Everyone has black hair out of the package.
Here's the first one that I attacked.
Note the excess paint on the neck, the shoes, and the splotch on his hand. Also the flash on the neck and the poorly painted shirt.
After I cleaned up the neck area, I decided to keep the pink shirt, as I have a matching paint, but the pants became blue jeans.
While in the picture, you can see some green shading under the blue, that is not visible under normal layout lighting conditions.
This is the first pass, I need to scrape a little more pink off the arm and define the shirt/pants line a little better; which I can also fix by giving him a belt.
By the way, I decided on which figure to add to the men's bicycle that I posted about a week ago.
Sauerkraut - I have never had bad commercial sauerkraut, but homemade is so much better without the additives.
401k - My company rarely made any matches to our contributions, but the plan allowed for some self-management; which I took advantage of. Eventually around 2005, I hired a financial advisor who I kept until I retired in 2015. In my case it was money wasted. I lost six figures in 2008-2009 because he advised me to stick it out. I did make most of it back (helped by my continuing contributions) in 2011-2012. In the overall scheme of things though, I kept several IRA's out of his hands (he still managed some) which was a smart move on my part, as I moved those investments into safe money market funds. Overall, I recommend 401k plans, but I would advise that one look carefully at the options and manage them themselves. After retirement, I rolled the entire 401k into one of my existing traditional IRA's where I could fully control it.
Tom O - My son also works for the rain forest company in their cloud division. I don't know if he had to sign an NDA or not, never asked. He does discuss that business some with us, mostly his pay/stock options. In his case, it is well worth it for him pay-wise.
Maybe by watching those teams on the TV, you jinxed them!
Tom - Enjoy the train show.
Mike -
Walthers would be a hard company to walk away from. They have such a widespread group of products.
In addition, they are just about the only company that offers real rail-sized industries. While their instructions leave a lot to be desired, once you get used to their products that can be overcome.
Mickey Mouse is 95 years old today. For the gearheads out there, today is Denny Hamlin's 43rd.
Everyone have a super Saturday.
