robert.admin – Page 78 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

May 20, 2021

Making Room (DOG EAR)

ell, it was time for the quarterly National Model Railroad Association newsletter again (South-East region only, thank God). It’s that time when I curse my late entries and the scramble to get everything into the newsletter, fighting with oversized photos, rambling copy and Microsoft Publisher. I’m always pleased with the result but not the process. This time, I had my own contribution, a rather important piece I wrote, three-quarters of a page, that would talk about the importance of a train club being there for its membership. I have just dropped out of another club for exactly that reason – […]

May 16, 2021

Titan (Review)

ell, blogkids, after spending a couple of weeks reading meh books from the 70s, I finally turned away from the used bookshop piles and pulled something off my favorites shelf. And there it was, one of my old beloveds from my VPI college days, John Varley’s Titan. Okay, so Titan begins with a deep space mission to Saturn with a handful of astronauts. As they near the ringed planet, they discover a body never glimpsed before, a pinwheel-shaped form slowly spinning in its orbit, the radar returns indicating it as hollow, filled with air and life and obviously artificial. It […]

May 6, 2021

An open mind (DOG EAR)

y Grande Loop (for my bicycle) is to ride to the Sunrail station and roll north to Longwood. From there, it’s a bike-mile to the Seminole Trail. I can shoot east to Oviedo, catch the Cady Way Trail which brings me back home at just a shade under 30 miles. It’s possibly my favorite local ride. I don’t ride with music and I certainly don’t answer my phone (making me somewhat of a minority on the trail). Old people riding their trikes with angry talk radio spewing. Joggers with earbuds focused on their motivational podcasts. People chatting on phones or […]

May 2, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 5/1/2021

fter a frightful eyeball malfunction and a kidney stone, I was ecstatic that I could finally host the Tuscarora Branch Line with three of my favorite operators (Greg, Brian and Tyler). Once we ran the wasp blockade (three nests in the porch roof), we were able to kick off the session and have a great time. This time, I took the dispatcher’s post while Greg ran the coal extras. Brian ran the scheduled timetable and his son Tyler, the signal tower. And this was a really fun session – the first time we ran with active signals (rather than just […]

May 2, 2021

Becoming Alien (Review)

omeone once told me that Star Trek: Voyagers was essentially “Star Trek for Women”. I suppose I’d have to agree. Not weighing in on that series (I’ve heard a lot of gripes about it), I’m actually focusing on the novel Becoming Alien, by Rebecca Ore. This is another one of my Used Bookstore finds, another one that came from 1988. So, Tom lives in poverty in a backwoods farm with his brother Warren. Parents dead, the chickens just not making the revenue, the brothers turn to drug manufacturing. And during this time a strange alien vessel crashes in the woods […]

April 29, 2021

Railroad Paperwork (DOG EAR)

ne of the side uses of my site is recording model railroad ops session. To explain, I’m a member of a huge model railroad club. Once a month we run trains like a real railroad. Dispatchers. Orders. Paperwork. Switching. All that fun railroad stuff. And early on in the Blogatorium I started writing my accounts of each session, everything from my small 2×4 foot microlayout to the sprawling La Mesa club in San Diego’s Balboa Park. It’s fun to “yarn” about things that happen, all the goofs, fubars and accidents. What is funny is how much this has become a […]

April 29, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 4/28/2021

always thought that when you accomplished some amazing feat, you’d feel this near-holy glow radiating from you. However, right now it feels like I levered myself into a dryer, sat a bowling ball on my lap and hit spin. I’m in a daze. When I left the property tonight, I got out to lock the gate and then discovered my car’s push-button start wouldn’t work. I pushed it and pushed it in the dark, only to realize that when I’d got out with the gate lock, I put my keys in my back pocket. So the ops session – from […]

April 25, 2021

Hurricane Claude (Review)

ack before writers wrote to fulfill publishing needs, when they just wrote stories and submitted them to publishers and magazines in manila envelopes, writers ended up with all sorts of story-chunks, from a million words to a couple of hundred. And publishers, trying to fill a potential book, had to dip into a writer’s backups to get enough to flush out a paperback. That seems to be the case with the short story Hurricane Claude, which showed up as a 45 rpm flip side in Steam Bird (which I reviewed HERE). This story was actually quite good. Oh, there were […]

April 22, 2021

Rock and a Hard Place (DOG EAR)

doubt it caused concern in the New York Publishing Houses (is that even a thing anymore?). And I don’t think the literary blogs were abuzz over it. But last week, I skipped any entries – Dog Ear and the following Book Review. The thing is, I wasn’t up to it. Before posting up my blog (I’d written it the day before) I’d gone over to the dentist first thing in the morning to get my new tooth implant inserted. Big day, been waiting a year for it. But when I got out of the car, that gentle muscle spasm (sic) […]

April 11, 2021

Hey Nostradamus! (Review)

rom the brilliant cultural writer Douglas Coupland comes this (as always) social commentary of the cheap-landscapes and aimless-times we live in (you might remember him from his breakout work, Generation X, the book which defined that term decades ago). As always, he’s a good writer to produce a book you can curl around when you feel the world is tragic, stupid and pointless. So Hey Nostradamus! is told from the points of view of four primary characters. And they are: Cheryl, in 1988, a young high school girl who is comfortably religious, a member of a group of high school […]