May 29, 2021
#577 dozes at the Winona depot sometime in 1972
—orc Sat May 29 18:27:37 2021
My maternal grandfather was a service engineer for Allis-Chalmers from approximately WW2 until the early 1970s, and this involved flying to various customer sites to debug A-C machinery.
Various customer sites everywhere except maybe the poles, and this included at least one trip to Peru, where he got a rug that we assumed was made of pieced together furs. I don’t know exactly when he make the peruvian trip, but I remember this rug sitting in the basement den of their West Allis house from as early as I can remember things.
Well, eventually my grandparents all died, and this rug ended up in my mother’s hands, where it hung on the wall for many years until it got (what we thought was) a little moth-eaten and was taken down for repairs, only to be forgotten until today when I cleaned out the closet it was stored in.
When I saw it, it was covered with dust, so I picked up and gave it a vigorous shake only to discover that it was NOT pieced together furs, but hides that had appropriately dyed fur glued to it. Glued to it over 50 years ago, so it wasn’t so much glue anymore as powder, so the shake resulted in an explosion of fur all over the room it was in.
I can’t fix this (well, I could fix this in a perfect world where I wasn’t constantly fighting depression or wasn’t 60+ years old, but this ain’t that world) so I’m afraid we’re going to have to toss it in the bin.
This is as annoying to find out as it was to discover that 578 was scrapped after the enthusiast who bought it from the Brillion & Forest Junction lost interest.
Damnit.
—orc Sat May 29 00:01:39 2021
May 28, 2021
When I was a child, my brothers & I were given a set of Disney Seven Dwarfs figurines which we loved to death and played with until they were lost or worn down into shapeless ivory plastic blobs.
Or so we thought.
I’m cleaning out my parent’s old apartment after they moved into an assisted living place (and then my father inconsiderately died to get out of doing any work!) and look what I found. Happy, still with most of its paint and smiling out at the world at least 50 years after the last of the others joined the choir invisible.
I guess I’m going to have to make a curio cabinet to hold the relics of my childhood I’ve found in this last week or so.
—orc Fri May 28 23:55:48 2021
An oil I painted in my last year of high school (1978, in case you’re wondering) of Texas Transportation Company #1 (a 60 ton Baldwin-Westinghouse steeplecab) switching the Pearl Brewery in San Antonio, Texas. At the time this was one of a very small handful of electric railroads in the USA, but alas in 2001 Pearl’s corporate masters shut down the brewery and abandoned the railroad. This locomotive still exists (dumped in a storage facility somewhere in San Antonio, but not cut up, thank goodness) but everything else in this painting is long gone.
—orc Fri May 28 00:26:33 2021
May 24, 2021
(Of course this dose ended up hitting me like a bag of hammers – oh well, better the hammers than the woodchipper of a severe covid-19 infection!)
—orc Mon May 24 21:10:07 2021
May 21, 2021
May 20, 2021
Joe Nemeth photo
#594 putters around at what I think is the east end of the North La Crosse yard on a warm July day in 1974. It’s likely that I’m somewhere around (probably down by the river lurking around the roundhouse; if I was up here I’d be on the service road those two dogs are walking down) unless I was on summer holiday in New Hampshire at the time.
(#594 is now – renumbered to #988 and in an uglier paint scheme at the Mid-Continent RR Museum – the sole survivor of the huge pile of RSC2s that the Milwaukee Road operated in the midwest.)
—orc Thu May 20 12:04:47 2021
May 16, 2021
Thor guards the box of receipts
—orc Sun May 16 20:46:41 2021
May 14, 2021
Polishing the family silver
—orc Fri May 14 21:27:52 2021
May 13, 2021
Out to Henry Higgins for another dozen(ish) bagels
—orc Thu May 13 20:47:55 2021
Part of my parents’s silver; these two teapots were both hideously tarnished from long storage, so I went over one with silver polish for comparison purposes. (I’m going to have to do the other one when I pry the serving tray out from under the bags of good china, but didn’t have the time today.)
—orc Thu May 13 20:44:32 2021
May 12, 2021
The feral rose in the front yard is blooming.
—orc Wed May 12 22:25:19 2021
May 07, 2021
May 02, 2021
It had been a while since the last time we went to Trader Joe’s, so the shopping list got a little bit out of control. 80 pounds of groceries in the trailer, 12 pounds of oranges in the rando bag, and as a special bonus it turns out that both flat magnets have slow leaks and me + the groceries sagged them to the point where the front wheel was squishing side to side and the rear wheel bottomed out on any bump or whenever I stood to pedal.
Thankfully I had co2 in my toolroll, because trying to push air into a tire with a minipump when the front bag & trailer are trying to flip the bicycle over is an adventure (one that I don’t really want to do more than once in my life, thank you very much!)
—orc Sun May 2 21:48:44 2021
May 01, 2021
I will never get tired of taking pictures at the virtual house on Leif Erikson Drive.
—orc Sat May 1 17:27:47 2021
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