A few drops of oil

You've probably noticed trains much on my mind these days. Now that I've got some locos that run I'm having fun getting them to run their best.

You've ever noticed while waiting at the light for a train to go by that they often have 2, 3 or more locos hitched together to pull long trains? They call this consisting. Model trains can do this to, it's just a bit of work to get them to all run at the same speed so they pull together. It helps if the locos the same model and brand. So with this in mind I've picked up 3 SD40-2's by Kato, one of the better brands. The SD40-2 one of the most popular locos ever made, they sold over 4000 of them, so from a prototypical point of view it makes sense to focus on this model. I like the looks of it to.

My two CP Rail SD40-2 little jack rabbits, while my Burlington Northern drags behind noticeably. I spent a fair amount of time slowing the CP Rail's down to match and then it occurred to me perhaps the BN just needs a little oil. I got out my precision oiler and lubed all the critical spots. Sure enough it much faster, not as fast, but fast enough to make the whole tweaking process much less tedious. All three of them now can run a lap around the layout and stay within a couple inches of each other, more than close enough to allow them to consist well together.

What's up?

How kind of you to ask, well let's see ...

The battle over the couch continues. I remembered one of the cat sites I read mentioned a change of material can make a piece of furniture more or less inviting. I've noticed Mindy liked the feel of the sheet I had put over the couch, often running her paws over it. I took the sheet off and the peeing seems to have stopped. I say seems, since the couch still stinks, so it hard to tell. Even after a couple hits with the cat enzyme spray. Becoming more concerned about this I did the sensible thing and lifted up the cushions. Oh boy!! She had found the gap between the cushions and peed in there. Now I've got the cushions leaning up against the wall so I can give them the enzyme treatment top and bottom and have also thoroughly sprayed the innards of the couch. We'll see how it goes. This enzyme stuff getting expensive.

I've gotten decoders installed inside all my loco's now. The latest addition to the fleet, the Kato's, are like a watch. Just like everyone said, very smooth runners. I've taken a break from building stuff around the club and have focused on getting my loco's tuned up and helping rewire our main yard. It's coming along nicely and I'm looking forward to Thursday nights again. I've also taken time to read up on the details of how our club's DCC system works. Fascinating stuff. Now when people have questions I can help them out. I'm aiming to make up some posters to put up on the wall to answer the most common questions about how the particulars of the system work. My chance to get familiar with PowerPoint.

I mentioned in my last post about my yearly battle with the change of season. I'm happy to report I'm starting to feel better and am waking up a bit sooner again. We've had a bit more sun lately which has helped as well.

Things at work a bit strange the past few weeks. Usually we look at a piece of equipment, get some parts, fix it up and move on. Lately this process really dragged out so we've got lots of half finished projects hanging. We've also had more electronic problems. I can do some board level repairs, but am not a pro. One -80 deg. C freezer had a little control board go bad, company wants $660 for it! We decided to take the brute force approach and replace every IC chip on the board. All 10 of them. Total cost, about $8. With everything going on, I kept putting off placing the order for the chips. The professor getting impatient so I finally sat down and spent 1/2 hour typing in all the part numbers. Two days later the parts came. Hurray. What's this, they sent the wrong ones. Oh. Replacements coming this Monday. I've installed sockets for all the chips on the board, once they come, we'll plug'em in and see what happens. Hopefully we will have saved the professor $652. This project got me jumpstarted to finish up some other projects that had fallen off the radar screen. Will feel good to have them out of the way.

A couple at my church puts on a meal every Wed. night. Everyone welcome to come eat and stay as long or as little as they like. We usually have anywhere from 20 - 40 people in their modest sized house. It's a fun time. A couple weeks ago Dannie went to turn off the ceiling fan and wound up with the chain dangling in her hand. Jim went and got a new switch, but it didn't fit, so he asked if I'd take a look. What seemed like a simple thing, well ... not so simple. The switches look alike on the outside, but work totally different on the inside. It turns out easily 10 different styles available. Found a wonderful place on the web that sells just ceiling fan switches. Now Jim and Dannie's fan whole again.

Now for the story within a story. One of guys who's a regular on Wed. night lives near me. The switch didn't come on Tuesday like I had hoped, so all day Wed. at work I debated whether to drive home and see if it had arrived. Meaning I'd have to drive all the way across town twice, with no guarantee the switch had even come. I finally decided to make the drive and on the way over it occurred to me to give Derek a call and see if he'd want to ride over together. The sound of death answered the phone, Derek feeling really sick. He hadn't planned to come, since he rides a motorcycle normally, but thought he'd make it in the van OK. Cool, Derek's a great guy, everyone misses him when he can't make it. Turned out the switch did come, so I got to help Jim, Dannie and Derek out with one simple decision. You think maybe the Holy Spirit talking to me at work that day?

Honesty

I've had a few situations come up over the past week that have gotten me to thinking about the whole topic of honesty.

I personally value friends who are straight up with me in a constructive sort of way vs. a backhanded hurtful kind of way. I struggle with how to achieve this balance within my sphere of friends and how to interact with folks who don't see things this way.

Last week I became part of a discussion about a fellow's dating habits. Every time he gets a girlfriend he spends every waking moment with her, in turn dumping his friends and other interests. Eventually, the relationship collapses under this weight and he's without a girlfriend for a while. Everyone has done this at some point in their life and most have learned the lesson to take things at a more measured pace when it comes to dating and friendship. Unfortunately, it seems he's not getting it and keeps making the same mistake over and over again.

I asked if anyone had actually talked with him about this and attempted to offer some friendly advice. They all shuddered at the thought and said, "Never! It's his life and his business. It's not for us to intrude into his life. Besides, even if we did, he wouldn't listen anyway". I wasn't suggesting that they try to run his life, just a tactful heart to heart on basic relationship skills. It seems to me, especially in parts of the New Testament, that scripture calls us to do this sort of thing with fellow believers. Yet, I think our cultural norms work against this, to the point that when we read the pertinent scriptures on this topic we just glance right over them.

Ever met someone who has a glaring social deficit, say poor hygiene? Everyone talks about them and usually avoids them. Does anyone ever stop and tenderly suggest to them that if they took a shower more often it would open up a new world to them? Are we really loving them by "giving them their space" or saying "I wouldn't want to hurt their feelings". I would venture no.

Once in college I had become depressed during the summer and fallen into the bad habit of not showering for 2 or 3 days at a stretch. Our campus group met in an apartment that summer and often hung out together afterwards. One evening found Sammy and myself sitting on a picnic bench looking at the sky. With a bit of apprehension he asked if he could ask me a personal question. I said, "Sure", and he proceeded to tell me that I stunk and others in the group didn't like to hang around me because of it. He asked a bit about my family as well, perceptive on his part, as my living situation at the time not so good. Did I feel hurt? Sure. It hurts to hear this kind of thing, and yes I avoided Sammy for a couple weeks after our conversation. Did I make sure I took a shower everyday the rest of the summer? You bet, and after a couple weeks I came to appreciate the risk Sammy took in reaching out to me and thanked him for making me aware. I had always liked Sammy anyways and my respect for him grew after getting over the initial emotional reaction to the bad news.

I try to reach out to others, when appropriate, just like Sammy did to me that day. I see it as part of my responsibility to fellow believers and my fellow man. It helped that I had gotten to know Sammy some over the summer, making it easier for me to accept his advice. I try to keep a couple things in mind when I'm thinking about approaching another person. Do I know them well enough to have earned their respect in the area I'm thinking of confronting them about? Have I spent enough time around them to understand the context surrounding the area I thinking of talking to them about? Having achieved these relationship thresholds before confronting a particular person will dramatically increase the chances of the advice falling on receptive ears. No one likes a know it all or someone falsely accusing them/making snap judgments without the benefit of the full picture. The better we know a person the less likely we are to fall into these pitfalls when dispensing unsolicited advice.

This and That

The days are starting to get shorter and I'm going through my annual adjustment period. Something about this time year messes with my sleeping schedule, I wind up sleeping more in order to feel rested. I know I need the rest, but I feel guilty about it. Whenever sleeping comes up in a conversation people look at me like I'm some kind of slug or something, this time of year I usually sleep about 9 - 10 hours a night. During the summer more around 8 - 9 hours. I've tried a couple times to run on 7 or so, after a week I feel sick.

This weekend felt very strange to me. I did a fair amount of stuff, yet I don't feel like I accomplished anything worthwhile.

I went to the monthly meeting of our local National Model Railroad Association, Division 5, and had a very enjoyable afternoon. I picked up some parts I needed from a guy at the meeting and spent the rest of the day installing them. Today I applied all the detail parts to my Kato locos. This pretty much wraps up the train stuff I needed to do. I actually started something and saw it to completion within a week. You'd think I'd feel excited. Instead I feel tired and wonder where the weekend went.

After working on the train stuff I went outside and mowed the lawn/bagged up leaves. Since I had the flu last weekend I didn't get the lawn done, figured my neighbors about ready to kill me if I let it go any longer.

I've also debated over what to do about my cat problem. Mindy still peeing on the couch I cleared off a couple weeks ago. I need to do something about this, but after crying over the thought of handing her over the Humane Society I realize I have become more attached to her than I first thought. Still, I can't have her peeing on the couch everyday. I keep dousing it with the cat enzyme spray, but this only a stop gap measure, and getting expensive to. I've tried rearranging litter boxes and even put one of them on the couch for a couple days. She just peed on a different part of the couch instead. Sigh ...

I typed up some nice long e-mails to a couple of my friends, they moved recently to Texas and are going through some big adjustments right now. One of them made this statement in his blog "Isn't it amazing that we are surrounded by tools which are supposed to enhance communication and yet we actually share so little?". This hit me as so true and so ironic. We live in an age with virtually unlimited communication options and yet for the most part are lonelier than ever. Even with my own blog I know some of my friends check in regularly, yet I struggle to post often enough to keep it interesting for them. Not for lack of things to type, just usually by the end of the day I'm pooped and not much for typing. Still as my friend also pointed out, busyness really comes down to priorities. Where am I placing mine?

I'm in the digital camera market and have a couple models I've got my eye on. I don't have any kind of photographic background, pretty much a point and shoot kind of guy. I do know from borrowing various cameras over the years that I want something with a wide-angle lens. Say 28mm or so vs. the typical 35mm.How many times have you said to yourself, man I wish I could back up a little more? With a wide angle lens this less of a problem. Canon, Panasonic and Ricoh all have some nice, super compact models they just came out with. Giving it some time to see what kind of reception they get and where the prices settle out.

I'm also intrigued by some new laptops on the market, esp. a couple models made by Sager. Sager you say, who's that? They specialize in high performance at a reasonable price, actually their models virtually identical to other higher price brands, all made by the same Asian company, Clevo. Just Sager more low key. I'm so tempted to upgrade to a newer machine, but I keep telling myself my trusty Toshiba Satellite 5105-S607 holding up very nicely and doing everything I need. Still the new models s o o o cool and I love trying out the new stuff. When I got my Toshiba, S/PDIF outputs pretty cutting edge, I had great fun learning how to get it to work and to this day still use my laptop as my DVD player. I just plug an optical cable from the S/PDIF output into the optical input on my home stereo system and vola I've got Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound. My Toshiba has a 1600 x 1200 display, I think I would enjoy the 17" 1920 x 1200 display a lot. We'll see as the months roll by. The new models not coming out till the middle of this month anyway and the prices will stay high for a couple months there after while the gamers snap up the latest gear.

Now that the train stuff out of the way I plan to get back to finishing the big project from work. I'm very close to having all the numbers I need to see if the project viable and am very keen to enter the last few rooms into my big spreadsheet. I've had a couple projects at work on the back burner for a l o n g time now and am going to order a bunch of parts this week to try to get them done and out of the way. Electronic spring cleaning if you will.

My eyes getting real tired, putting on all those small parts has taken it's toll. So I'll bid you good night. See ya soon in cyberspace.

A Hobby Rediscovered

I'm part of a model train club which has a large HO scale layout about 5 minutes away from my house. I joined it last year after going to a local train show and meeting a bunch of the guys in the club.

Truth be told, N scale my favorite, I love the size and how much you can do with so little space. The local N scale club also had a big display at the train show. I checked out both clubs and finally decided to go with the one closest to my house, the N scale club about 30 minutes away. I also liked the fact the HO club had a permanent, fixed layout, where the N scale club a modular club meeting at a fair ground.

Over the past few months I've slowly come to realize I had become down on my club. It seemed we spent more time messing around with building repairs and mowing the lawn that we did running trains or making improvements to the layout. I eventually saw this as partly my own doing. I like building type stuff and had all too willingly taken on a bunch of projects. It also hit me that I originally joined the club as an opportunity to hang out with folks and have fun, not to add more projects to my life. With this in mind the past few weeks I've focused on finishing, or at least winding down the projects I started and not adding any more for now. A couple weekends ago we had our semi-annual open house. For the first time we made it a two day event on Sat. and Sun. I dreaded it, as it meant a whole weekend away from getting stuff done around the house, which as my faithful readers know, something I'm very keen on putting behind me.

The Thursday before the big weekend I noted our Vice-President becoming frustrated since no one giving him solid commitments. It hit me that as a member I should step up to the plate and I reminded myself the open house only twice a year. I said I'd come for sure on Sat. and left Sun. open if he needed me.

Sat. rolled around and I had a blast. Ran lots of trains, met a bunch of people, couldn't believe the time went by so quick. That night, full of energy, I got busy getting two of the locomotives I had bought a few months before into running shape so I could pull a train of my own instead of having to borrow someone else's. Sun. I showed up early with both engines in tow and quickly discovered both had problems. I spent a couple hours troubleshooting, making repairs, and come up with one good loco. Just in time to, as we needed to get more trains running for people to see.

The open house reinvigorated my excitement for the hobby and our club. Since the open house I've gotten my other two loco's in running shape, thanks to the guys next door at work showing me how to run the mill so I could shave the weights down a bit. Thanks Pete and Adam!! This past weekend I put together the boxcar kits I had bought. Took forever! About 2 hours per boxcar. Not sure if I want to go the kit route again, seeing how it's only $5 - $7 more to by the car fully assembled and ready to roll. We'll see. Today I stopped at the local hobby shop and invested in a special pair of cutters which should reduce the assembly time by 30 - 45 minutes, should I decide to give another one a try.

In hind site, I wonder if the N scale club actually has the advantage by meeting at the fair grounds and taking the modular route. This way they have no maintenance issues to deal with and each member can focus on his individual modules which doesn't seem as daunting as a big stationary layout. During the summer they get together for big meets and put 10's even 100's of these modules together and run trains all day. Due to the small size of N scale this equates to literally miles of track. Trains with 100 cars not uncommon. Sounds like a blast.


Having said that, I'm content with the club I joined. I'm getting back into the hobby, I've gotten to know a great group of guys who are a pleasure to hang out with; and despite having burned myself out at first, I feel good about helping make some long term improvements to the building which will benefit the club for a long time to come. The N scale guys have graciously kept me on their e-mail list and I've considered picking up a couple N scale loco's down the road so I can do things with them from time to time. For now I need to watch how much I spend and stay focused on the house before taking up any additional pursuits.