robert.admin – Page 12 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

December 23, 2024

OpsLog – WAZU – 12/22/2024

o last week I had RSV (now everyone who knows me and was around me is giving me the stink eye). Felt pretty bad at the high water mark (lung water, that is). So now I’m in the recovery mode but the doctor who saw me in the ER said if I don’t get better in a day or so, I gotta come back to avoid it turning into Pneumonia. Well, shit. But I think I developed a sure-fire cure. First, go to a doctors clinic (well, Doc Andy is a veterinarian, but a damn good one). Makes sure […]

December 23, 2024

The General Danced at Dawn (Review)

eorge MacDonald Fraser wrote many great books across his long literary life including the Flashman Series. I’ve been reading him since my teens. And I can’t explain it but I had a recent dream were I remembered (in disjointed parts) the story The General Danced at Dawn. Decided to reread it so I carried it with me to the local botanical gardens and bought a coffee and sat down and read it again. So Fraser’s McAuslan series deals with “the dirtiest soldier in the world”. He is based (along with the narrator) in a fictional Scottish unit in the North […]

December 20, 2024

OpsLog – LM&O – 12/18/2024

really wanted to run trains on this eighteenth of December session. At our Just Run Trains session, I’d run the MT ores over the hill. Having heard so many sad epics of problems, I wanted to see if they were as troublesome of trucks as I’d been told. Also, since Leonard and Zeus were splitting the dispatching, I finally could be out on the road. And since I was recovering from a flu, I would wear a mask. There are too many crews who would be looking for the “Dispatcher in the Roundhouse” and administer a beat down if given […]

December 19, 2024

Better never than late (DOG EAR)

hose who know me know that the 2024 election didn’t go as I’d hoped it would. My thoughts on this are my own, and if you don’t understand, well, you probably can’t handle the truth. But a week before the general election, I got a weird email from the site (nice to know the contact link still works – nobody ever writes). Anyway, from way out in Culver’s Country, Wisconsin, someone wrote me via my site in all caps. It was a complaint, crabbing that I owned this domain and they needed if for another Robert Raymond who was running […]

December 17, 2024

OpsLog – WVN – 12/13/2024

‘m down in a dark low place, a plywood and benchwork cavern under the hills between Darby and Elkview, looking for reefer cars off my Pacific Fruit Express run which was turned into tossed salad by a miss-thrown turnout. Several cars were derailed in the tunnel and one had hit the floor. On my knees in the dusty dark, it was then that I saw it. Tucked in the corner opposite me, under the town of Harris, the dull ivory of ancient bones amid a scattering of Indian war bonnets, rusting tomahawks and flint arrowheads. It was an Indian burial […]

December 15, 2024

On Earth as it is on Television (Review)

n popular culture, aliens are presented as either destructive pricks or bulb-headed benefactors. But what if they were fun-loving little creatures who love our greasy food, our discarded plastic, and above and beyond, our wasteland of television. This novel, written by Emily Jane, is a delightful story of aliens nosing around Earth, placing agents among us, controlling our cats, and generally being goofy and funny. Told from humans (who might be humans, but maybe not) the story starts with a dis-unified collective of characters and slowly works out their bonds and origins, explaining the oddball situations in ways that delight. […]

December 12, 2024

Rickmember (DOG EAR)

or those of you who haven’t watched Rick and Morty, it’s a funny animated TV show over on Hulu. The idea is that it’s a loose lift of Doc Brown and Marty, played by a crusty (and often drunk) super-scientist and and his slow grandson. Sure, it’s nasty and the violence is gratuitous. But on the positive side, the show often makes stunning observations about our culture and especially our tropes. They will back-reference themselves and make occasional fourth-wall rim shots (such as, “You’ll remember back in season two…”) So I’ve watched all seven current seasons. However, all the way […]

December 9, 2024

OpsLog – WB -12/7/2024

nother biannual jaunt down to Port Saint Lucie to run on Al Sohl’s magnificent Western Bay (a DRGW narrow gauge line that will make your eyeballs hurt, the scenery so vast and, well, western). We had a contingent foursome of operators: myself, studious John L, personable Jim M (the padre), and Terry B (a newbie who seems interested in operations, has survived two club beatings and is game to try other lines). Terry and I had ridden east to the Holiday Inn marshaling yard, and I was gratified to learn that he was aware of Time Table & Train Order […]

December 8, 2024

Alexander and the End of the World (Review)

his is an interesting work on Alexander the Great. His adventures, driving across the known world and beyond, are the things that (used to) thrill the imaginations of schoolboys (back when they had imaginations). But the interesting aspect of this work is that it doesn’t do his entire life, not his youth, his father’s assassination (mentioned as an afterthought). And not (as I would have loved) the siege of Tyre. No, this is about his later campaign. It starts with him in Persepolis, with Darius III on the run and his primary objective (stated as revenge against the Persians, but […]

December 5, 2024

Get off my lawn (DOG EAR)

s Poopdeck Pappy said in Popeye, “I come across my hating fair”. And I do. The other day on Facebook, I posted something about kids being little shits. A friend of mine had just quit the teaching profession, having been beaten, assaulted and mauled by her students. She’d had enough. This slots into my own personal thoughts on this subject. I don’t have kids. But I can’t tell you how many movies, dinners and airplane flights have been ruined by screaming children. And how many events, from bike riding to train shows to anything, have been tarnished with shitty teens. […]