Blog – Page 140 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 22, 2019

Time for Crime (DOG EAR)

s mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I’ve retired (or “ReTyred“, shameless plug). And as others have warned me, I am now busier than I’ve ever been. I’ve got a garage to clean, a storage room to sort and shut down. I’ve got a newsletter to edit (more on that in a later blog). Three times a week bike rides. Meeting with the accountant. Gardening. Astronomy. Model railroading. And, of course, writing. But here’s the rub. Back when I was a workaday-Joe, I had a good couple of hours a week to write – this was called “lunchtime”. I’d just find […]

August 25, 2019

OpsLog – FEC – 8/24/2019

ince the dispatcher’s seat was filled with a trainee (Doug, who did a damn good job out of the chute) and the yard was filled with the Lady’s Quilting and Trim/Classification Club, I was out on the road again. And there’s no time like waiting at a red board to wax philosophic on the meanings or life and model railroading. To wit – the puzzle of industrial switching on the standard out-n-back turn. When you run one of these jobs, switching your way through a set of towns along the mainline, it begins to feel like an intelligence test. So […]

August 25, 2019

No Other Gods (Review)

till crushing my way through a major book. And given what’s going on in my life (details in Thursday’s Dog Ear) I’ve got a lot of short story collections floating around. So this one comes from Catastrophes, a collection of short end-of-the-world scifies edited by Asimov, Greenberg and Waugh. It looks at disasters that end life, from the galactic to the localized. I’ve just puttered through two stories and picked this one to pass along. So it turns out Yvonne and Quinton, doctors of science and seemingly out in a spaceship, in and out of hyperspace, come back to find […]

August 29, 2019

The Saddest Little Bookstore (DOG EAR)

f course, you’d think I’d love finding a bookstore that offered old favorites I loved to read, just hundreds of them, at the low low price of nothing. Sure. Except that in this case, I’m cleaning out the dozens of boxes of old paperbacks and comics I’ve accumulated over the years. Mission One of retirement is to clean out the garage and make room for Mission Two, cleaning out the storage unit. And that means pulling down all those boxes I’ve dragged from place to place with the expectation that someday I’d have a full spare room with dozens of […]

August 29, 2019

OpsLog – LM&O – 8/28/2019

should have known this was going to be one of those nights. I needed to clear the boosters. I needed to swap out a dicky phone. One of the clocks was fussing with the master and took a couple of tries to reset. Two people came after me (literally) with blood in their eyes about their waybills. And for some reason the overhead speaker wasn’t active (and when I did activate it, nobody thought I was asking them, specifically, to confirm a radio check). It was a relief to go clock hot. It was one of the busiest nights I […]

September 1, 2019

Stars, Won’t You Hide Me (Review)

nother short story (from the Catastrophies collection), this time from 1966 by Ben Bova (back from when most of your weren’t even sperms nor eggs, and I (kiddies) was a potential-loaded kid of eight). It’s a great short piece that really catches the scifi theme of distance and time. We start with Holman, a fellow wired up to a damaged star ship, racing away from the debacle of a battle where Humanity just lost to the Others. All we know about the Others is that they skirmished with humans once, put us back into the stone age, capped us with […]

September 5, 2019

Retyrement – finally! (DOG EAR)

retired nearly three weeks ago. It’s been very busy, all sorts of doctors’ appointments and linking up with a riding group. And then there was the first project (going through boxes of books and picking the ones I liked (more on that next week)). And then there was the hurricane which was going to sweep us off to Hell before it turned into a Sunday afternoon shower. But for that, all our loose lawn items had to come into the (newly cleaned) garage. So busy busy busy. Today was the first Thursday that wasn’t howling-busy, and for today, I wanted […]

September 8, 2019

The Custodian (Review)

nother short story (sorry about this) while I lubber through Infinite Jest. Again, a short story about the end of the world, this time from the sun going nova. So, in The Custodian, we learn through backstory that humanity has learned that the sun would be going nova in a century and that two beliefs were formed – Custodians, who thought we should preserve what we could and try to get those who wished to leave left. And the Affirmers, who believe that everyone goes, nobody stays, and that to make this happen, everything (and I mean everything) must be […]

September 12, 2019

Book Burning (DOG EAR)

estroying books – it makes us think of jackbooted fascists pouring gasoline over priceless tomes (or school boards caving to the pressures of the few). It goes against everything I treasure. But as mentioned, my retirement made me question what we were keeping (and paying to keep). I have boxes and boxes of old books, things I read and enjoyed (or tossed aside with a meh). All of these went into boxes with the idea that someday I’d have a library where I could put all my books and say lookit me! Well, when I pulled the first box down, […]

September 15, 2019

Pennsylvania Railroad Facilities – Volume 10 (Review)

nlike our model railroad club sectional layout, which was designed and evolved along the stretch between Jacksonville, Florida to Folkston, Georgia, our sprawling permanent layout was little-planned (with an overall concept design or two and a clay mockup). Originally it was transcontinental (which is pretty damn foolish, looking back from twenty years later). About a decade ago, we decided to shorten this to a realistic concept and modeled Bound Brook, New Jersey to Cincinnati, Ohio (still rather big, but better). In the middle (closest to the entry) we have Pittsburgh. Because that’s what it was, not because we’d actually lain […]