Blog – Page 46 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 23, 2013

Opslog – Longwood & Sweetwater – 6/23/2013

Working a double shift – two sessions in two days. Doing the Altamonte Local, pushing cars into a tight corner, trying to get everything sorted in a minimum number of moves. While working a food distributor, I found a reefer that I had to shift over to the icing deck. With a throttle in one hand, cards in the other, and my mind three moves ahead, it suddenly struck me that I was pushing cars into my late father’s industry. This structure from his old layout was now on Jim T’s pike. On his old New River Gorge route, he’d […]

June 26, 2013

OpsLog – LM&O – 6/26/2013

“Red over red means more bread.” This is a contemporary railroad saying. It refers to twin-targeted signals (one light over another) and how the absolute stop position is a red light over another one. This phrase is very sage advice in that it translates to “Don’t fret and worry that you have a fully restrictive signal. So you wait. You get paid by the hour.” So I’m grinding my way up the eastern ascent to Harris Glen. I’ve had traffic in Calypso Yard and met a well-overdue coal train in Hellertown. Now I’m easing onto the main at Harris, meeting […]

June 27, 2013

Really? (DOG EAR)

“Really?” Got a coffee-buddy at work, a God-fearing, pool-shooting, sharp-tongued lady with whom I chat over lowest-bidder coffee every morning. She’s a fireball and I like her. The thing is, she has this phrase – “Really?” (used with a dash of incredibility). When she describes someone doing something stupid, her shift from straw-man-protagonist to her own level-headed take is to toss in this word. It’s sorta the story clutch-press, the shift from dumb action to witty observation. And it’s fine – it works. And it’s the word I want to use, fellow writers, when I describe what I feel when […]

June 30, 2013

Dick Trevanion (Review)

Readers talk about “junk novels”, novels they read for low effort and high pleasure. My brain surgeon sister reads bodice-rippers. Everyone below the age of thirty reads Harry Potter. And me? I read old adventure stories. That’s why Project Gutenberg is such a find. You can get anything there. I touched on that in my recent Dog Ear piece about a test download that caught my interest. The only thing I regret about my choice is that I couldn’t recommend it to my late father. He’d have loved this one. You see, Dick Trevanion lives on the Cornish coast in […]

July 4, 2013

Dark (DOG EAR)

It’s a Western character type, the dark and world-worn hero. He’s got back-story, haunted eyes and a half-growth of beard. His cynicism is cool and his standoffishness endearing. It doesn’t really translate well to real life. I’m finding out how grief and depression really work since my father passed a few weeks ago. The event itself moved me (in a quiet way). I reflected on him, I wrote his obit, and experienced a few moments where his memory came back to me. I talked about him a bit more than I expected, finding myself relating stories about him. But now […]

July 7, 2013

15 Views of Orlando (Review)

Carl Hiaasen sneers at Orlando, making it the butt of his Florida-bashing jokes. My model train club (based on Orlando) models Jacksonville (since it’s railroad-sexier). Orlando is a sprawling, simmering, distracted city. To those who use it for nothing more than the home-work drive, it’s little more than a blur beyond the I-4 guardrail. But I’ve lived here for thirty years, bicycled its streets, explored it from end to end. And when I heard about this collection of short stories punch-pinned across the city’s map, I had to check it out. In this collection, fifteen local authors have a go […]

July 14, 2013

Cannibal Reign (Review)

I can’t tell for certain if author Thomas Koloniar was influenced by the story The Road. There, something happens, something that causes earthquakes, clouds the sky, and slowly kills off all plants and animals. As for the humans, well, they are forced to snack on the “other white meat”. Here, we know it’s a meteor. We see it coming as we establish our characters and then it hits – boom, and that’s pretty much it. One group is in a well-stocked missile complex, one set is in Hawaii (with the US Fleet and controlled borders) and a smaller group is […]

July 14, 2013

ShowLog – Deland – 7/14/2013

My little confession that most people know – I am a theoretical socialist. I don’t know how socialism would ever be, or come about. I’ve talked to the Hyde Park radicals and gotten an earful of gibberish. I’ve read Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and found nothing but slogans there. I have no idea what socialism would look like, or how people would work as one, for the greater good. Well, until this Deland Show. We had a lot of club members waiting at the ramp when Bob backed the truck in. The module racks came down the ramp, each […]

July 18, 2013

Ya ya (DOG EAR)

Instead of writing over Friday lunch as is my norm, this time I got a lesson in writing. Cassandra and Darlene invited me to a “cultural lunch” – Jamaican food down in one of the strips along the west side of town. Bryon, a guy from Darlene’s team, came with us. I’ve make this joke before, since I was the only caucasian in this group, I felt like the gay white guy in a black comedy film. Anyway, lunch was great – barbeque chicken and rice and dumplings – yum! But the interesting thing was the conversation we had, and […]

July 21, 2013

Stories of the Sea (Review)

I‘m really slanted on this book. See, it led to the resolution of a wonderful life-moment for me, just before it was too late. I picked this up at Slightly Foxed. Published by “Everyman’s Pocket Collection”, it is truly a pocket collection, dozens of great sea stories packed into a small hardcover – pocket-sized – book. I’ve read collections before – rather like them. A good collection will give you a wide range of selections; perfect for airplane rides – you get one you don’t like, skip to the next. And this, let me tell you, is one of the […]