Blog – Page 129 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 22, 2018

Japan – Day Eight – Raked stones and backwards panels

oday was our free day in Kyoto – our final full day. So we each picked something we wanted to do. JB went for the Ryoanji Temple with its internationally famous racked gardens. So, while JB was getting ready, I hit the streets on an errand – I needed to pick up a little spending-yen, about $50 would carry us for the day, I figured. The thing was, on the ATM machine in the nearby 7-11, I got the number of zeroes mixed up and pulled $500 (i.e. 50,000 yen) by accident. No way I needed this amount of money. […]

October 23, 2018

Japan – Day Nine – This can’t be good

ike I said, I’d only post if something bad happened. And here we go. Final day in Kyoto – shuttle pickup at 1pm, so we had a morning to wander around the city and enjoy it for a little longer. Went into a bookstore (I sound like a broken record). Look, we were travelling with small backpacks and mine was stuffed full of old clothing but hey, in the bookstore they had a copy of The Art of Porco Rosso (a movie I just adore) so I had to pick it up. JB said, sure, go ahead – if we […]

October 24, 2018

OpsLog – LM&O – 10/24/2018

hings keep evolving at the club. Shelfton industrial has been re-tracked. Hellertown is now Lehigh. And the paper warrants are in to their second session. I was dispatching so I wasn’t outside to shepherd the paperwork. Overall, it went… okay. One problem – crews would mix their pickups and drop-offs and would end up holding paper for both. I hadn’t anticipated that and now it looks like some cars went to their local deliveries and were immediately picked up and brought back as outbounds. One of these actually was delivered, returned to the yard, then placed back on the local […]

October 28, 2018

The Last Days of Magic (Review)

o imagine that all you stuff you wish, think, or dream was true – fairies, elves, giants and, of course, magic – really was. And that you (as a modern twenty-first century human) know it is only myth because books tell you the real history of the world. But maybe that is only a false narrative. What if there really had been magic, all the way through until the late fourteen hundreds, that various civilizations slowly spread, conquering the magic on their frontiers. The Vatican, of course, with its own league of magic-using exorcists, continues to fight actual witches, not […]

October 31, 2018

Blogging (DOG EAR)

loved Japan. If you read my trip report, you can see how much I loved it, day by day. Great fun, good food, friendly people. Outside of the “purse incident”, it was the perfect trip. Now I’ve been blogging DOG EARs since 2012 and recording trips since 2011, which is a lot of words under the bridge. And it does take some effort. Usually I’ll take my tinytop with me so I can write as I experience it. This time, we were traveling light – a backpack apiece (and a purse, sometimes, it seemed). But this time it was adding […]

November 5, 2018

OpsLog – Tehachapi – 11/3/2018

oday was a much better start for the day. The crew caller handed me a soup ticket for 56-2, an eastbound passenger that sounded more romantic then it actually was (two clapped out steam engines and a string of mismatched baggage and express cars, real City of New Orleans stuff). And who should I see in the next train over (56-1) then my traveling buddy John. Yeah, he’d be proceeding me up the hill. And another nice guy, he’d be the final section of the parade. So, three friends out for a stroll. And at train time, off we went. […]

November 5, 2018

OpsLog – Tehachapi – 11/2/2018

hey say railroads, like any other slumbering beast, arise slowly. The SP/SF Joint Line across the summit at Tehachapi came awake like a mean drunk, cursing and swinging and then puking into a bucket. My job should have been easy – I picked up Extra 167, four Santa Fe F’s idling at the famous loop at Walong, a caboose coupled on for no reason I could discern. Anyway, I was looking at two facing trains, both sections of 802, one nailed down at Cliff, the other at Bena (I had rights over both across the line). Should have been an […]

November 8, 2018

Storytelling (DOG EAR)

hen my wife tells the purse story, she always does it wrong. She starts with, “I left my purse in a Tokyo bathroom but someone brought it back.” I mean, what can you do with a story after this? All the suspense, the tension, the comedy and the trans-pacific dread, shot. When we meet mutual friends who haven’t heard this tale, I jump in an start with the Kyoto exchange leading into the chaos of the Narita Airport, the police, the sweaty brows, all that. I thought about that a lot, the way my wife tells the tale. I thought […]

November 11, 2018

ShowLog – Makers Faire – 11/10-11/2018

hen the scenery guy put small sections of clear plastic over some of the more delicate scenery, I thought it was excessive. After Makers Faire (a showcase for all sorts of builders, dreamers and geeks) I think six-foot sheets of bullet proof glass would have been more appropriate. We’ve never faced a more difficult show. First off, Friday night, we had three people building the layout (out of the half-dozen or more who’d agreed to it). Finally two more people came in and we were able to finish up, but that was a lot of work for the reduced squad. […]

November 11, 2018

The Massacre of Mankind (Review)

I always wanted to write my own version of a sequel to my favorite novel of novel, War of the Worlds. Read it at least twenty times and thought about it often. But now that Steven Baxter wrote this version (with the full backing of the Wells estate), I can move on to some other Great Novel. Here’s the first thing – if you are going to read this work, make sure you go back and breeze through the original. It’s far better to know the story, the details and the characters than to hit them cold. And pretty much […]