Blog – Page 51 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 5, 2013

ShowLog – Deland – 10/5/2013

Elsewhere on my blogs (namely here) you can read about our recent disastrous trip to the Rhine, where my wife broke her arm and we were stuck for two days in the hotel room in Amsterdam. As you might expect, with all the caregiving and work catchup and stuff, I wasn’t too excited that our club had a Deland Show the first weekend we got back. But still, yes, I’d have rather stayed in bed, but if I had to do a train show, I can’t imagine a better way to do it. The modular layout went together like a […]

October 6, 2013

Rhine – Day Eleven – Lemonade

You gotta be kidding me. The phone did not ring. TRAVEL INSURED INTL denied the claim and the special flight out. Why? How could they leave a woman in a foreign country with a broken arm? It turns out their non-English-speaking doctor did not fill out the O2 entry in the documentation he was supposed to provide (he only had a simple satchel with him, with no means of measuring it anyway). And I even had included (with the eight pages of documentation the insurance company wanted) his own form with the FIT TO FLY box checked, AND the hospital’s […]

October 6, 2013

Trapped (Review)

My sister – doctor, professional speaker, businesswoman – reads bodice-rippers. She says it’s her guilty pleasure, these lurid tales of bare-chested men and women running (in nightdresses) from towers. She was so into one once that she read right through the boarding of her flight, looking up at chapter’s end to find her gate empty and plane gone. Myself, I always feel an obligation to read books that challenge my beliefs and views. I’ve read Mao’s Little Red Book. I’ve read a book on Intelligent Design. I’ve read the Gita. I’ve even gone against every progressive viewpoint I carry when […]

October 7, 2013

Rhine – Day Twelve – Homeward Bound and Travel Thoughts

I think it was the dread of traveling again via air that kept me awake most the night. After all, I’m dealing with all the crap, along with a wife with a broken wing. In preparation, we repacked everything down and condensed it into our two checkins and one carry bag. One very heavy carry bag. And I’m the bag who carries it. The driver was on time – thank goodness – but dropped us at the wrong terminal. Yes, we were flying UNITED AIRLINES but it was actually Lufthansa. This mean a good hike to our checkin gate. I […]

October 10, 2013

Good Relations (DOG EAR)

A year or so back, my site got hacked. I first found out when GoDaddy (my provider) told me they were getting activity off my site that denoted it had been compromised. Yes, I was being used to launch denial of service attacks. My site had become a zombie. I went to the same site I’d gotten my great book cover, Elance, and put out a job for website security (and backup – what the hell had I been thinking that I didn’t need backups). Looked at the various bids and picked a guy out of Greece, Stergios Kolios, to […]

October 13, 2013

OpsLog – TY&E – 10/13/2013

The first real session on the Tipton, Youngstown & Erie. I’d prototyped a timetable for JW to use – all he had to do was move the times a bit and add a couple of cornfields and he had it. But in this, one of my favorite runs in the design was a LEM to Sandmine, picking up sand and log cars, then a turn and a long run to Staffordtown. Exchange the cars on those sidings, then back to respot for the next day. When the jobs […]

October 13, 2013

The Diary of a Young Girl (Review)

For those who don’t know the story of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl trapped in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, it’s a grim testimate to what people will do to cling to life. When Anne’s sister is summoned for deportation to a labor camp, her father envoked plans he’d been slowly assembling. He and others in his workplace had reconfigured the top floor (and attic) of his office building to a refuge, its entry masked by a fake bookshelf. Into this urban lifeboat go Anne, her sister, her parents, as well as a aquantaince of her fathers (and his […]

October 17, 2013

Facing the Obvious (DOG EAR)

I‘m reading Pillars of the Earth and, while it’s a good book, the writer is playing a cheap trick on me. His villains are ugly. His heroes are handsome (or at least not blemished). That’s a basic trick. I mentioned seeing it in Trapped, but that’s not the only place I’ve seen it lately. It’s a lazy way win points for your hero with the audience, and make your villains more villainous. Really, come on – you have 400 pages, all sorts of room for development. Why rush to establish characters? There are countless examples where this isn’t true – […]

October 20, 2013

The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF (Review)

The mark of a really good science fiction collect isn’t that I read it and enjoy it. It’s that my wife reads a number of its stories. Without a gun to her head. Not that I have a gun. Still. Mike Ashley (with whom I’ve had a long review relationship over his Verne and Invasion novels) (I chuckled to myself when I saw it was my old friend again) assembles a goodly number of time travel yarns, dozens of short stories. And what pleasantly surprised me in this collection was the fact that they were all (with the exception of […]

October 21, 2013

OpsLog – Longwood and Sweetwater – 10/21/2013

So I’m sitting in my little yard goat, chugging up the passing siding with four cars in front. All I gotta do to finish this job oh-so-slick is to take the four cars and the engine out the other end, run down the length of my train, shove everything back together, and home-we-go. So I’m pushing into the tail track off the end of the passing track, pushing in, watching the space between the front car’s coupler and that bumper drain away. And now it’s close, close, and the brakeman in the front swings his hands out – cut! No […]