This looks like it should be on a campground somewhere, back in the woods maybe.
No, it’s Hillandale park in Harrisonburg, VA. It’s signposted off of VA-42, a little north of Walmart and Food Lion at the south end, and south of Downtown. They have a good walking track, and even some fixed exercise equipment that can be used on the way around.
In May, the C&O Historical Society organized a Heritage Day in Clifton Forge, VA.
While I was rushing around finishing up what I was doing (while my wife was sick and had gone to the car) I happened upon these two old men sitting on an old wheelset. I probably shouldn’t have stopped to take the photo, but I’m glad I did!
One of my favorite things to do as a photographer is take photos of people taking photos. It’s really weird.
My wife also enjoys taking photos, and so often I will find I’ve taken photos of her taking photos, just because it’s what I like to do!
In this case, we were on a train leaving New York (headed to Boston). This was on our emergency trip to Boston to pick up a friend and a car. It was a good time, and I’d love to do it again with a different time schedule and under much better circumstances.
This is my photo from a similar angle, but this is what she was taking photos of:
I go out just about every Friday and take photos of trains, because I’m a nerd like that.
Occasionally I get distracted by things, like this flower beside the tracks.
It reminds me that sometimes, even when I’m in the midst of what can be a fast paced activity, there is other beauty to be found in the area that is worth my attention.
Do you hear about one-day projects? 24 hour turnarounds? Things to do in a weekend?
Have you ever looked at the instructions, and the expenses and decided that it is way too expensive, or that there is no way you could ever finish the job in the time suggested?
I know I have, on many occasions. So many things I could have accomplished if I had twice the time allotted. Or twice the money suggested.
This project is slightly misleading, because the most expensive part was actually the cheapest. On Saturday we took two trips to Harrisonburg, firstly for a wedding and the second for dinner. On the way out the second time, I noticed sitting in a driveway a large piece of furniture with a sign saying “Free You Haul!” This was to be the cornerstone of our Sunday activities.
We’ve been meaning to clean up “the green room” for a while, it is where a lot of our stuff is stored, it is also where my desktop is, and was a work room before we realized there was nowhere near enough space. We’ve also been looking for more storage options, because while bookshelves are good, they aren’t the be-all and end-all of our problem. This item, which turned out to be a buffet, seemed ideal.
And so that is how my Sunday morning started. We got in the truck and drove the mile or so to the place, were excited to find it still in situ, and loaded it. We drove home, unloaded, and assessed.
The two end doors were off, and needed to be reattached (we pulled them right back off again after we started actually planning..). There was putty or something along the top and the sides, which appears to be filling in a design, but it would have been too time consuming to take it all off and so we elected to sand it smooth and just paint it, like the rest.
This is what we started with. Two drawers, and three doors to a long combined shelf. According to the stencil on the back it is made of Walnut. It was light enough (until we painted it) and in relatively good condition. We presume it to be fairly old, as the center and right-hand doors don’t seem to fit quite right. We may never know!
Anyway, this is what we started with. We began by eating lunch. An excellent way to start, in my opinion! We then headed to Harrisonburg where we visited Walmart (Crash needed food) and then Home Depot where we purchased unto ourselves a quart of red paint ($14), a spray can of chalkboard paint ($5) and a roll of masking tape ($3). Total cost was approx. $24, including tax.
The first job was to sand down. There was a layer of varnish, easily taken care of. We also pushed back the layer of…whatever it was…to about where the fascia was showing through in most places.
Next Kelly painted the doors while I started painting the top surface. Crash hung out and supervised.
With one layer of paint on, we moved inside to start working on cleaning the room.
Two hours go by…
We came out to check how it was going. It was supposed to take around two hours to dry, and parts of it needed a second coat. While Kelly was working on that, I masked off the doors and broke out the chalkboard paint. Kelly wanted blackboard surfaces to write on so she could write lists of what was in the drawers and such, and be able to rub things off and such without having to completely relabel things, or be crossing things off on paper and being messy. She has suggested the same thing for a future kitchen, but the idea of chalk dust and food in the same vicinity makes me a little uneasy. This will, however, give me a chance to see how it works in practice (without the food!) and be able to make a more educated choice.
Now, the chalkboard paint is a spray on. It dries to a point of touch-up after 20 minutes (which we utilized), and after 24 hours is safe to draw on. Something to keep in mind if you are planning it for a child’s room, or similar. Don’t give them the chalk until the next day! For us, we didn’t have any chalk and so Kelly was planning to pick some up while at work, which meant it would be around 22 hours anyway.
Around this time we organized food. Two medium pizza’s from Dominos, please! Good times. I finished mine on Monday.
We touched up the doors and finished clearing a path in the green room to where we wanted to put the thing. The plan was to put it under the window (where we had storage boxes and such).
Crash approved.
Once the chalkboard paint was finished (another 20 minutes later), we reattached the handles and then reattached the doors.
We gave the other paint a few more minutes to dry while we checked clearance for moving it inside.
Now in place in it’s new home, it actually looks pretty good. The plan, for now, is to use it as an art/storage cabinet where it won’t be seen by a lot of people. If it moves to a more public location after we move then we may need to consider at least touching up in places that we rushed.
Looking at the photo time stamps, we took about 3.5 hours from arriving home with the supplies (we picked the thing up at about 11 in the morning, arrived home with paint and such at 2:45. We moved it into the house around 8:10-8:15).
Not bad, really..
The last two Fridays have been train-watching days, one relatively more successful, though how you determine which is up to you.
March 25th saw me arrive fairly late in Staunton, and I was greeted almost immediately after arrival by the BBRR local arriving “home” for the day, coming in from the West.
It consisted of BB12 leading BB6 and 3 cars. It backed down towards the flats and shut down around 12:30.
The Eastbound Cardinal (AMTK 50) was well late, arriving at around 2:25pm led by Unit 92:
The Westbound Cardinal (AMTK 51) was only a few minutes late, coming in at 3:05 led by Unit 123:
And that was about the level of action I saw for the day.
April 1st made me the fool, and would have been a whole lot easier had I been in possession of a radio scanner – I would have done a lot less running around, that’s for sure!
I arrived in Staunton at about 10:45 to find three BB units about to drop a cut of cars at the Shenandoah Valley Railroad.
I pulled in to the small road off behind the SVRR offices and took several photos – I suspect it was while this was happening that the FRA car went through without my realizing it, either that or between while I was at the SV and driving down to sit at Brand, a crossing loop just outside Staunton to the East, for a while.
4
I came back from Brand with nothing, and decided to sit at the station for a while. I happened to turn around and saw three bright lights and a solid snake creeping around and jumped out of the car:
Literally 5 minutes later the last car went by…
Growing a little bored and knowing that #50 was running almost an hour late I decided to adventure eastward towards Fishersville and Waynesboro, and I had just turned the corner giving visibility to the NS bridge in W’boro and I saw an unknown train (now known to be 38Q, thanks Yahoo Groups) passing over it. A snap decision was made to follow it North, eventually getting ahead of it. Too far, in fact. I stopped and turned around (BAD idea), and caught it again. What was I saying before about needing a scanner? When such an acquisition is made I’ll also need to carry timetables in my car too.
Anyway, I finally got far enough ahead of him to stop and get photos at “Rocky Bar” and at “Island Ford” before heading straight through to Shenandoah and then heading home to Harrisonburg.
Other photos are up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kellyzdude/
Here are the photos I took at the Winter Jam concert on Friday night. Below are brief descriptions and military times from my phone of when they were taken. I apologize for the quality of the photos, I used the camera in my phone having (intentionally) left my digital in Harrisonburg.
From what I am told, the crowds started arriving at 3pm, doors opened at 6pm and the show started at 7.
16:51 – Eating Pizza at Lil’ Cucci’s Pizzeria in Daleville, VA. Good pizza, but a bad decision.
18:17 – A sign at the Roanoke Civic Center. This wasn’t for our event, looked like a trade show or something inside.
18:19 – We see the crowds outside. At this point the venue was declared full, and the doors were blocked with no more allowed in.
18:48 – Show starts in ~ 12 minutes, and the line has shrunk. From what I heard, they opened the area behind the stage and allowed another 300 people in, but that wasn’t enough to get us through the doors.
18:56 – They haven’t played inside yet, but the Sidewalk prophets came and gave an acoustic performance for those of us stuck outside. Great guys, great music. They all signed the copy of their CD I bought, and the singer recognized me after the show when I went to get his, having missed it earlier.
18:57 – I took a few photos before my phone battery started saying it was low.
20:31 – This is the first photo I took after getting inside, so we got in at about 8:30pm, an hour and a half late.
20:32 – David Crowder Band is finishing up their set.
20:33 – A slightly better shot, David Crowder Band
20:39 – Crowd blinders came up, this is my view for the first few minutes from behind the stage.
20:48 – This was our seated view behind the stage before moving, this guy was talking about orphans and the sponsoring thereof, I believe.
21:16 – KJ-52 performing while the final details are put on the Kutless set.
21:29 – Kutless!
21:57 – Newsboys entrance. Closest is the guitarist, farther away is the keyboardist, both on platforms above the crowd on the floor.
21:58 – My last photo of the night before I ran out of room on my phone, the Newsboys stage.
It’s been a while since I posted an update on where my model is at, mostly because it’s been a while since I did anything really observable.
Recently, however, I brought the two sections inside from the garage and did a lot of work on wiring them properly. I’ve also bought some cheap parts to finish the job, and I should be set to finish putting wires underneath some time next week. Then it will be on to building a control panel to tie it all together.
The left section is fully wired for track circuits underneath, and this is where the main connection with the control panel will be. The two sections will be electrically connected using 20-pin ATX cables – one side will have a male connector and the other will have a female, and a small extension cable will connect the two together. Connecting to the control panel is another story – a 24-pin ATX connection is being used to begin with, but it won’t be enough on it’s own. This is still to be decided..
The right section is primarily wired for track circuits – I’m awaiting some terminal blocks to arrive so I can wire them all the way to the end. Also, once terminal blocks arrive I can really get moving on wiring turnouts – at present I have one pair of turnouts (a crossover on the left section) wired to a terminal block, but then I ran out of terminals, and so it stalled.
I’m shortly expecting a set of couplers to arrive, ordered for my 4 IHC passenger cars to bring them ‘up to standard’ (IE, have knuckle couplers..). They should be here tomorrow! I also have a bunch of LEDs and resistors for an upcoming project to change the way my locomotive lights work. Hopefully it will also be easily transferred to DCC when the time comes.
I was surprised to find a train set at Gift and Thrift in Harrisonburg a week or so ago, and I bought some parts of it. A Great Northern box car which will end up as scenery, a Chessie System caboose which will also be scenery, and three small Bachmann hoppers (two N&Ws and a Southern). These are on my list to replace with knuckle couplers too, however I need knuckles with a mounting hole smaller than that of a #5 Kadee, but larger than that of a typical Tyco model. I suspect further research is required!
So, hopefully by the end of this coming week I may be able to run trains again! We’ll see.. Here are some photos. I apologize for the lack of quality, I used my cell phone camera!
This is the underside view of the wiring for the first pair of turnouts to a terminal block. This will eventually be wired to the main terminal block (to the left in photo).
And this is the top view.
This is the left hand module, to the left is the main terminal block which has all 8 blocks of track circuits wired for both sections plus common. To the top is the connection to the right hand section, which is yet to receive the remaining turnout wiring.
This is an overall underside view of both sections.
And an overall top-side view of both sections.
And why won’t you go away and let me sleep?
Well, at least it has been a while since I had trouble sleeping. I just hope it isn’t related to the new firmness of the bed.
Good news and potentially bad news! The good news is, I replaced the severely damaged boxspring that was under our bed and built a new one. The still good news is that it cost around $80 and took 3 days (not working 8 or 9 hours a day either, probably could have finished it in 2 had I worked my butt off). The bad news is that now our mattress has a much more solid support and in turn has become more solid. I’m not sure if that is related to my inability to sleep or if I’m just not nearly tired enough, but it’s entirely plausible.
The design of the new frame thing is simple: I bought 6 pieces of 2″x6″(x8′) and 12 pieces of 1″x4″(x8′) and cut to suit. It’s a queen-sized bed, so the dimensions were supposed to be 60″(W)x80″(L). Turns out the mattress is something like 78″ long, but I’m not going to complain endlessly about it.
With some help from Randy and the use of his circular saw, electric drill and sander, I constructed a basic design. It has a 2×6 frame with two paired 2×6’s down the middle for extra support. There are then 12 slats screwed down on top. To compare this to the old boxspring design, it looked like there were 10 1×2 pieces for slats, something smaller than a 2×6 but bigger than a 1×4 (no, it wasn’t a 2×4 or a 1×6) down the middle, and a not-very-rigid frame around the edges. I’d patched several of the slats on one occasion, and two of these had broken again.
Anyway, here are photos:
This was the break at the foot of the bed. I’d repaired it before, but it’s one of the common landing points when Crash jumps up.
This one is looking from the foot towards the head. You can see a couple of the patches I’d made, as well as the big break in the piece down the middle. Again, all the pieces broken resemble the points where Crash typically lands on the bed.
I kept thinking through the process that I should be taking step-by-step photos, but a) they aren’t really necessary for such a simple thing, and b) by the time I actually got around to doing anything about it it was too late to bother, so I waited until it was done (and then nearly forgot).
This is the frame as it was, completed, sitting in the garage waiting to be brought inside and placed on the metal frame that holds it above the floor (came with the bed, I’m not responsible for that part). You can see the 2×6 around the edges and the double 2×6 down the middle.
Carefully note that at this point the ends of both the mattress and the base are pushed against the wall of our room. This is the difference between the 80″ long base and the “80″“ long mattress (ha ha..).
I’d take a wider angle view of the complete bed, but the rest of the room is….camera shy, at this point in time ;-).
In other news, I have some more train photos going up on my Flickr account, and I’ll try to get some new scenery photos up too. I’m hoping to write some kind of ‘newsletter’ or just slightly generalized (with a touch of personal) letters home to New Zealand to family and friends. I’d really like to go home to visit some time, but that (as always) depends on money and our ability to save enough of it. It’s hard to prioritize so often, when there are things we desperately need that cost money, along with things we really want, in conjunction with little things that are really nice (but mount up quickly..). IT WILL HAPPEN. I SHALL HAVE MY SUMMER CHRISTMAS ONCE MORE!
We started out expecting a fairly average day in the capital of the nation. That was not to be. Who knew that when you hold a rally with 215,000 people (as estimated by aerial photographers [Citation: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20021284-503544.html]) most of whom were traveling into the city from outside of it, it puts a strain on the transportation systems?
The roads were fairly empty once we got past mile 62 on I-66. According to WMATA, they set a Saturday record of 825,437 trips. That’s compared to 350,000 on an average Saturday. [Citation: http://www.wmata.com/about_metro/news/PressReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=4717]
We left Broadway just after 7:30am. Kelly and I and our friend KBru took our car and headed North, making a brief stop at McDonalds in Newmarket for breakfast before getting on I-81. We were right on schedule for the Vienna/Fairfax Metro exit at about 9:15am when we reached the queue. It stretched back about 2 miles, and after sitting in it for 20 minutes we decided to try our luck at one of the next exits. This turned out to be one of the three best decisions we made that day. It proves that prior basic knowledge of the system works in favor of those trying to use it in ways they never have before.
We got to the West Falls Church exit at about 9:45 (literally just a couple of miles down the road). We found a parking space in record time, and proceeded to the station. It was at this point that we went back to waiting, and shortly afterward I started taking photos on my ‘new’ cell phone, received the day before. (It’s a certified pre-owned, and it replaces the Nokia that I washed a few months ago. It also has a camera!)
10:12am: West Falls Church bridge over I-66 East. The bridge is crowded by the line to the ticket machines. The road underneath is practically empty. The view back two miles on the same road is VERY crowded.
10:13am: We got bored and did what we usually do – take photos of ourselves.
10:25am: We’re getting close to the ticket machines. This lady we saw a couple of times, she looked like a white lady, and was wearing a big sombrero that said something like “I-legal, fear me!” on it.
10:29am: This is the set of lines for the ticket machines. KBru has started knitting in line. Kelly is off to the side as per the request of WMATA. She rejoined us not long after this.
10:45am: We made it on to the platform.
It was shortly after this point we made the second of our best three decisions of the day. Every train coming into the station (the third on the line) was crowded. One or two people were getting on. After about three trains we decided to try doing the non-obvious. We got on a train going the other way. This spawned our catchphrase for the day – “Backwards is the new forwards.” Someone on one of the trains had yelled out the door that they had boarded a train headed away from the city and stayed on it. After all, once they reach Vienna they just go straight back in to DC, and the trains were pretty empty going that way. When we got to Vienna we found (as we expected) that the trains were full leaving there.
The journey into the city was fairly uneventful. Almost every stop had someone with a hilarious costume or sign (a couple of Waldo characters, at least one person wearing a grape costume, I even saw a TARDIS cutout. The one sign I remember said something along the lines of “Three words that will solve the economy: Gay Bridal Registry”).
12:27pm: The museum of American History (if I’m reading it correctly). Those of you who know the Smithsonian will know that at this point we are practically there. This guy also has a really cool improvised drum kit, and he plays really well. Unfortunately I didn’t get a video at all.
Here is just a stream of photos I took while on the mall. I don’t remember enough details to caption each one. There are a few doubles of things, mostly cool signs I saw. We took a photo of KBru outside the Canadian Embassy, and there are photos of the several thousand people who just walked up one of the streets (I forget which, it was headed towards Chinatown).
I run out of photos about now because my camera battery died, but we walked through Chinatown looking for a place to eat, but they were all really busy. We walked up to Union Station – not a bad idea but not great. We ended up eating standing up, having been sitting on the floor in an alcove and being asked to stand as we were considered a safety hazard. Being reasonable and understanding people, we complied – there was nothing we could do to change the minds of the people enforcing the rules, they appeared to think the rule in particular was stupid anyway. We took the metro from Union Station back to Metro Center, where we made the third and final “best decision” of the day, taking the Metro towards Maryland a few stops and then heading back through the crowded city.
The trip from there was uneventful – I remember a little girl who was obviously tired who I talked to briefly about “coming out from the ground” – she had said it and then thought it was a silly thing to say, I told her it wasn’t. We disagreed politely.
A brief stop was made outside of DC (I always forget what it’s called, but there’s a Sheetz and a McDonalds right beside each other, and we almost always stop there on the way out of DC either for food or gas or both..). We were all in need of a bathroom break and some snacks for the ride home, which brought as back to Broadway at around 9pm. An enjoyably sane day in the city of Washington DC.
