Don – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 9, 2019

Don Quixote (Book 1) (Review)

was actually stunned, a few weeks ago, when I mentioned to someone I was reading Don Quixote and the person had no idea of the reference. Really? Good heavens but I didn’t think a 500 old book, one of the building blocks in what is now the modern novel, would be so forgotten. Well, for those who don’t know, Don Quixote is a tale of an old gentleman, a threadbare noble, living in a small hacienda in the Spanish countryside. To pass his idle time, he reads books of chivalry, of knights, the tales of adventure and nobility (wildly popular […]

July 21, 2019

Don Quixote (Book 2) (Review)

don’t know how this all came to be. Miguel de Cervantes had his first smash hit (the original Don Quixote). Then, fifteen or so years afterwards, he came out with his second one. But this was two years after someone poached in his preserve and wrote their own sequel. Given that he bitches and mocks this trespasser all the way through his effort, I’ve got to figure that this sequel was a direct response to the incursion. But I found it interesting to see how much Cervantes’ powers of a writer had grown in that time. Book 1 was just […]

August 20, 2023

RIPLog – TBL – 8/19/2023

t’s getting so the “Old Sweats” in the club are outnumbered. At one point, we were the club and when one of us passed on, there would be a full mob at the service. Now we are increasingly irrelevant. With Don Ziesig’s passage, only four of his oldest friends were there. Anyway, so Don did pass and the club received an invite to the service. We were also asked if we could bring a model train thing since it was such a part of Don’s life. We could have brought a sectional layout piece but (a) we couldn’t fit it […]

September 11, 2026

OpsLog – P&WRR – 9/10/2026

ot an invite through a friend to come down to Sebastian, Florida for a session. The soup ticket was to Don Irace’s Providence & Worchester Railroad, which I knew nothing about. Bungled the entire trip over, overestimating travel times which put me sitting in the world’s nastiest donut shop for just over an hour, waiting for hot-time. Anyway, once Chip showed up and showed me where the railroad was, I met Don (who is a very nice guy, and who is the host of the segment Talking Ops with Don Irace on the Around the Layout podcast). The layout is packed (thoughtfully) […]