Running Bear's February 2019 Coffee Shop


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JOE"S Inability to sleep has worn off on me -- I went to bed last evening about 9:30 pm and woke up wide-eyed at 2:30 am. Already need a nap!
I routinely will either wake up at 0230 or so and go back to bed at 0600 or 0700, or will stay up until 0230. In any case, I'll sleep until noon or 1400. Since the colonoscopy, I've been going to bed at 2100 or 2200, sleeping all night and getting up somewhere between 0800 or 1000. I don't dare take a nap, now, or it'll start all over, again.

Willie Years ago, when the kids were little, we moved from Alaska, where all heating was petroleum based and dirt cheap, to a house in Vermont that had electrical heat. Also, for some reason I still don't understand, the electrical rates doubled in winter. The first winter bill was a killer! Luckily, the house had a woodstove, and a friend at work sold us six cords that got us through that first winter. After that, we heated exclusively with wood (except for the bathrooms) for the six or seven years we were in that house. We liked the wood heat, but it was really dirty and we were always dusting (how much of that is to blame for my present COPD?). I was glad to be rid of it when we moved into houses that were LPG and/or gas heat.

Louis In one of my own other lives I used to work at IBM in the Essex Junction, Vermont, factory, first on the production line, then briefly in R&D. My first desktop was purchased through the employee discount program: 1 MB hard drive (and I wondered how I would ever fill it up!), 3 expansion ports and a 512kb vga monitor. $3k!!! This wasn't long after IBM tried its abortive break into the home pc market; the 3" rigid "floppies" were brand new on the market. I think the reason IBM failed in the home market was their attitude that they should educate the public about what they needed, rather than give them what they wanted.
 
Howdy everyone!
Willie: Great work & photos of the butcher shop & the beef!
Greg: Really like the mine photos!
Mike: I might have missed it, but how's the quit smoking going? My wife is struggling to kick the habit.

Big Four WV

the Erie-Lackawana / Lackwaxen PA

 
Mike:

After I quite smoking it was due to being in and out of hospitals for five weeks. I kept a pack in my personal locker and only once thought of having a cigarette. It wasn't easy, but I'm glad I stopped for health and $$$ reasons.

I was a pack and a half or more cigarettes and my wife a close second so at today's prices say $6.00 a pack, that's $18.00 a day or $126.00 a week or $6,552 a year!!!

Want an incentive to quit....in model railroading perspective, that's could be 22 HO sound locomotives added to your collection.

I never looked back...Mike, right now at 41 days, you're over the hill.

Greg
 
That's good to hear your doing well.
My wife is taking Chantix and it's not really helping.

My DR asked me if I wanted to try it, and I decided to use the patch, and gum first. It seemed to do the trick for me. I only used the patch for about 10 days. The gum never did anything for me except irritate my gums. My wife has had a much rougher time. She graduated from the 21MG patch to the 14MG, and then the 7MG. She cant kick the 7MG patch, so I don't know what the next step is. I guess I was lucky, it came very easy for me. I feel for the ones that have a rough time with.
 
I started smoking at 14...smoked about 30 cigarettes a day,more if out drinking. I tried absolutely everything to quit....acupuncture,laser,nicotine gum,chantix,hypnosis, and eveything else under the sun....only thing that worked for me was cold-turkey while spending 4 nights in hospital recovering from a widowmaker. Been 10 years free....best thing ever.
 
Greg: Great to hear you kicked it! I tried the money incentive with the wife ($5,400/yr). But that doesn't work, either.
Mike: Nice that stuff worked for you.
Gene: It will probably take something drastic for my wife to quit, as she's tried everything also.

My employer called - time to go to work.
Everyone have a nice day!
 
Mike:

After I quite smoking it was due to being in and out of hospitals for five weeks. I kept a pack in my personal locker and only once thought of having a cigarette. It wasn't easy, but I'm glad I stopped for health and $$$ reasons.

I was a pack and a half or more cigarettes and my wife a close second so at today's prices say $6.00 a pack, that's $18.00 a day or $126.00 a week or $6,552 a year!!!

Want an incentive to quit....in model railroading perspective, that's could be 22 HO sound locomotives added to your collection.

I never looked back...Mike, right now at 41 days, you're over the hill.

Greg

That about the amount we had it figured up to. Between my wife, and I, we went through a carton every 4-5 days, At $75 a carton, depending on the amount consumed, we bought close to 7 a month. Its hard to believe we just kept plopping that kind of money down without even thinking much about it. The cost just kept gradually going up, and we didn't seem to notice.

Funny thing was, I didn't start till I was 35years old, and started dating my wife. I only did it for 13 years, so maybe that's why it seemed easy for me to quit. She has done it much longer, and is kind of struggling.
 
Mike - Congratulations on 41 days and keep it up. Hope anyone else and their spouses are able to follow Mike's footsteps and have his success. I was very fortunate to quit when I did 49 years ago, but had an easier time because I had only been smoking three or four years at the time. Cold turkey as there wasn't any widely available over the counter help back then. My reason for quitting; the price of a pack went from 30¢ a pack to 33¢ a pack and I decided that as a self-supporting college student that I couldn't afford that extra quarter or so a week! I'm reading $75/carton now and thinking "Wow what inflation!" Wish that I owned some tobacco company stock all that time!
 
I doubt the scammers out number the needy, I'd be interested to see some data on that.
Google "Welfare fraud" and read some of the many articles and studies that put the figure at around 80%. Section 8 abuse, under-reporting income, sharing kids (as Garry pointed out), SNAP abuse, are just a start. It's not needy, but in most cases greedy and laziness. It's a whole subculture that is routinely "swept under the carpet". At the present time, anyone that needs or wants a full-time job can have one. When I drive down streets both rural and urban, every business has help wanted signs. And don't give me any child care BS (like Senator Warren), because that's available as well. Most needy people are that way out of choice that has been made easier by political decisions.
I'll stop here as any more could be construed as political.
 
Afternoon All,

Today after some chores I finished building the platform with the exception of a small set of stairs on the right end. The upper door by the Purina sign will have a set of stairs down to the platform. The first computer I ever owned was a Apple 2E Pro that had no internal memory so everything was on floppy discs. That is the only apple product I have ever owned. I started smoking at 17 when I joined the Navy and smoked for about 12 years. My young children guilted me into quitting by telling me they didn't want me to die (I'm sure at MOH's prompting). I quit cold turkey.

Max- Nice photos.

Willie- They are quite the pullers.

Garry- Nice E unit shot.

Greg- I really like the signals on your mine.

Sherrel- Nice shot of the Frisco E8's.

Louis- I say that all the time when I hear someone died stupidly. Of course you want to run that consist because it's Pennsy:cool:.

Joe- What I do is spray the frames with light grey rattle can and then brush on the color I desire, usually either thinned Tamiya or craft paint.

Migalyto- It's always exciting to start a layout or do a modification to a existing one.

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I hope everyone has a good night.
 
I started smoking at 14...smoked about 30 cigarettes a day,more if out drinking. I tried absolutely everything to quit....acupuncture,laser,nicotine gum,chantix,hypnosis, and eveything else under the sun....only thing that worked for me was cold-turkey while spending 4 nights in hospital recovering from a widowmaker. Been 10 years free....best thing ever.

Mike & Max. I started at 16, briefly quit after the 1st son was born, started again 7 months later when the Ex told me she was pregnant again. kept smoking til 51 and I lay in the hospital with a stroke that took my whole right side. It was a struggle recovering from that, and since then the smell of a cigarette smells like a burning dog turd to me.
Once the side effects hit you, you learn. Get away before it happens to you or a loved on!

On a lighter note, Look what was left on my porch yesterday!!
mels+model+sm.jpg

I'll find a place for it , and surround it with appropriate cars & trucks, figures and LED lighting. Anyone have any ideas on how to do 1:87 neon??
 
JOE"S Inability to sleep has worn off on me -- I went to bed last evening about 9:30 pm and woke up wide-eyed at 2:30 am. Already need a nap!

Sherrel: Sorry about that, Captain Weems. It only gets worse. In bed 2315 up before 0500. There was a time when they were normal hours, and I was running around sleep deprived. Now, there is no reason for sleep deprivation, but I still can't sleep right.
 
I did it! Kind of. Almost.

The basement is cleared out, at least to where I can set up my layout. The only hold-up now is that I need to clear off the table at the bottom of the photo. Then, a sheet of 5/8" plywood will get bolted to each of the two tables, and away I go. The shelves at the right are all my train supplies; they're pretty jammed full, and I'll probly need an extra set against the far wall.
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I remember being excited about 3.5" floppies, and how much more data I could put on them, with less floppies, too.

Terry: Absolutely. Then the CD was the next big step.

I started cutting punch cards for PRR's Frieden system, The cards were about 5½ x 11 so waybills could be wrapped around the card. Everything was transmitted by a ticker tape and teletype to the mainframe. Each function required a separate function tape. It was actually quite time consuming. After the merger Frieden was replaced with IBMs system, transmitted through phone lines. Both were COBAL based systems.

Boris
 
Good morning Everybody!

I spilled a 24oz cup of coffee on the desk in the family room. I thought I cleaned it all up, but I had missed some that dripped onto the power strip. Next thing I know my monitor is going goofy alternating between normal display, blank screen, green screen, red screen and blue screen. Looks like a I have a repair order in the que!

I'm using my computer in my train room/office/play pen.

Mark, I'm glad to hear you got your furnace working. Mine gave out on new years eve :) seems mishaps never happen a t a good time.

Terry, that is great to hear about Dell doing the right thing. Back in the days when I built and sold my own brand of computers I had a motherboard that would work for a month or two then give up. I never repaired customer computers, it was simpler to replace it right off the bat. Saving their data was a PITA, but I had happy customers. I would bench test and repair systems that failed and sell them as remanufactured. Every time I benched tested that system it was good! Finally I used it and after five or six failures over months I finally found an intermittent bad connection on the motherboard. Maybe when the stars aligned, room temperature, humidity was just right and the barometric pressure was at a specific level it would fail. :) I don't know, but sometimes problems can hard to find.

Turned out the problem with my furnace was intermittent bad connections on the circuit board, I replaced the board and it has worked perfectly ever since. Thank God because my hands were not looking forward to making wiring harnesses.

Louis:. It could well be nothing more than coffee on the circuit board in the power strip.
Try using a blow dryer on low heat to see if that resolve the issue. Of course if you spilled coffee on your keyboard or worse on your note book computer that could be the problem too. If you need to get another power strip I would suggest one put out by APC - American Power Conversion located in Cranston, RI if my memory serves me right ? They have the best surge protection of any of the brands. Personal experience, No damage to desk top computer, modem, connect phone or APC power strip, from direct lightning strike !! No BS, just the best !
 
Joe- What I do is spray the frames with light grey rattle can and then brush on the color I desire, usually either thinned Tamiya or craft paint.

Curt: That's the best way. right now, I'm avoiding any spraying, rattle can or air brush. Don't need to irritate the lungs any more than they already are.
First group of windows has been painted, and mostly installed. So far, so good.

Speaking of good, your feed mill project is really moving along nicely. The loading dock is a nice touch.

Boris
 
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