robert.admin – Page 10 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 13, 2025

ShowLog – Deland – 7/12/2025

ig one-day show for us over in Deland, make quite exciting because I’d be show boss and Old Man Raiford would not be around for set up. Had a new driver, Leonard, who took away any concerns on my part by moving the trailer around like a seasoned switch crew with a boxcar (though that plastic parking post was a little worse for wear after we went through). But anyway, even though the fairgrounds are now locking up their gates overnight, we still manged to worm both mini and maxi (the truck and trailer) on for a 6:30-ish arrival. Since […]

July 13, 2025

Destroyermen 15: Winds of Wrath

nd we’re done! It’s been a long fifteen books about the plucky little destroyer, the USS Walker, chased by the Japanese out of World War Two and into this alternative world where velociraptors and lemors evolved to sentience, where English Indiamen, Spanish conquistadors, a boatload of American artillerymen from the Mexican-American war, a battle group from a fascist Europe and even a Q-ship from World War One came into being. Yes, a long slow slog against baddies so bad they made your teeth hurt. And all through this, I kept waiting to find out that the series had ended prematurely, […]

July 10, 2025

The mutter about clutter (DOG EAR)

t’s a societal/sexual thing – we all really want some Japanese semi-dominatrix like Marie Kondo to force us to get rid of all our stuff. “No, mistress, please! Not my exorcise stuff in the garage!” “All of it! To the curb, worm!” Really, in a way, she is right. We tend to keep too much shit. And if the first use of the internet is porn, the second is consumerism. No longer do we have to walk to the market, buy something impractical, and carry it all the way back to our farm. Now it’s one simple click. Across our culture, […]

July 6, 2025

Monk and Robot (Review)

kay, so this is a two-fer, two novelettes in one. With this, you get… A psalm for the Wild-Built A prayer for the Crown-Shy These are just two stories that combine into a unified whole, so it’s better to get this collection. So anyway, Dex is a young man in a world that, after ecological instability and the robot rebellion (when Robots walked off their factory jobs and wandered into the wilderness), now lives in a utopia. But guess what – you can live in Utopia and still not be happy. So he quits his first job (kinda a part-time […]

July 3, 2025

Dump (DOG EAR)

o you may not have noticed (or cared) that I have not been writing up any DOG EAR pieces for the last few weeks. I’ve been very busy with three distinct crises. One of them was termites; we had evidence that they’d swarmed in our garage and so we had to get barriers (i.e. poisons) injected into all our baseboards. This meant that all furniture along the walls had to be moved. And we have a lot of books. Shelves and stacks of them. For this, we’d ordered a pod placed out on our driveway to put all the books […]

June 29, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 6/28/2025

aybe I’m expecting too much from my hobby of operations? Don’t know. The last few haven’t been so hot. And for this session, it’s not the fault of the Farnhams (no, it falls pretty much on the operators but a bit on the weather, too) but the June run of the Florida East Coast was a tough session. How tough? Got home by 8pm and fell into bed to “read” and crashed for nine hours solid (would have been ten, but the cats demanded their due (i.e. food)). So what went wrong? Well, we knew going in that the Market […]

June 29, 2025

The Roaring Trumpet (Review)

friend of mine, while talking about books at the train club (hobbies within hobbies) to me how she’d liked the Mathematics of Magic series from back in her youth (her youth being a lot more recent than mine). Well, I did a little searching and found a copy of it up in a used bookstore in Jacksonville. Overjoyed, she ordered it, but when she read it, she was underjoyed. Turns out it wasn’t as good as she’d remembered. Yet, strangely, she decided that since she didn’t like it, she’d give it to me for a go. Kinda an anti-recommendation, sort of. […]

June 26, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 6/25/2025

was in a pretty mellow mood when I got to the club Wednesday. It might have been because all morning I’d been moving boxes of books (just like cubes of wood, but with writing, not rings, inside their slices) until noon or so, in the hot Florida sun. I’d had a beer at dinner and settled in the back desk to set up the clocks and computer and run the railroad. I don’t know if that explains my easy-going nature that night, and I have no explanation why the rest of you were all so… tetchy. We have that phrase, […]

June 23, 2025

OpsLog – WAZU – 6/22/2025

o I’m sitting at my favorite table in my favorite coffee spot, watching the vehicular frustration at 17-92 and Lake Highland. Odd start for a blog. As most of you know from my long conversations around the clubhouse, my home has some termite infestations. With the bug men coming on Tuesday, I needed to clear the last of the heavy furniture from the baseboards. For that, I’d need my brother. But of course, he couldn’t come out any other time than Sunday noonish sometime sorta. Which is, as you all know, WAZU-time. When I contacted Doc and told him my […]

June 15, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O (TT&TO) – 6/14/2025

pecial Leigh, Monongahela & Ohio session for the evening of Father’s Day (or, for me, Dead-twig-on-the-tree-of-life day). On occasional Saturday nights, we turn up the difficulty level and run the LM&O in the early fifties, with train orders and the Bethlehem tower in service with its block signals (actually, little joke, they are interlocking signals. If you were there, you’d know what the deal was). Suddenly the crews are forced to think on their literal feet, determining their own movements, ducking into sidings and meeting opposing trains while running on their schedules. And I’m happy to say that we had […]