Running Bear’s August 2019 Coffee Shop

[posse]

Good evening folks! I'm an old time member returning after a 7 year absence. I look forward to joining all of you in your conversations. I see a lot of new faces here.

Good night!

 

[Bruette]

Good Morning All. 77°, clear and no breeze. High of only 99° yesterday. Cool front is still in the forecast for a week from tomorrow. ?!?!? Update on my wife's knee replacement surgery after three weeks. Monday she stopped taking the prescription pain medications, Vicodin and something else. She was tired of being a zombie. Yesterday she climbed the eight steps up to the pool deck and got into the pool for 45 minutes or so. It's been killing her not to be able to do that and it's a sure step to both physical and mental recovery. Without the meds, she got over the anxiety of trying to do this.
Bacon and blueberry pancakes for me this morning Flo, with lots of maple syrup.



Louis - Avocado, guacamole or tomatoes are all just suggested sides for Huevos rancheros. Most around here, myself included, prefer spicy hot salsa (Pace Hot Salsa) slathered on like BBQ sauce. I personally do not like avocado or guacamole. Sounds like the Spanish guys were eating tamales. Very good when made right. By the way, Nachos are not really Mexican food, but a Tex-Mex dish, despite the fact that they did originate just across the border. Despite it's heavy use in Mexican restaurants, real Mexican food does not include a lot of cheese except in breakfast dishes.

Willie, I'm so glad to hear of your wife's progress, thanks for sharing.

My other friend, Willy, loves his eggs with ketchup! I like eggs so much that I only use salt. When I make eggs, I make them sunny side up usually and only cook them long enough to be hot, the liquid yoke is my favorite part. My wife makes scrambled eggs with onions and I love that too! Another favorite of mine is what I call "a poor man's steak and eggs" I fry a steak-umm or two, then put a few sunny side up eggs on top, it's cheap, but tastes so very good! Thank God I have low cholesterol!

The first time I had nachos was 1980 when I was working at Memorial Stadium. We had a new GM who came from San Diego and he opened 3 stands selling only nachos and draft beer. I thought "this is stupid, it's never going to sell", I was wrong! The lines at the nacho stands were so long we soon had nachos at almost every stand.

I love nacho cheese, I eat it on my hotdog with jalapenos and onions. I don't care much for corn chips, but the nacho cheese even makes them good! When I make nachos I buy chips made from wheat flour, it must be the Yankee in me

Speaking of jalapenos, 1980 was also the first time I tried them. They are fantastic and the only hot pepper I really like. I use fresh jalapenos in my chili and my wife uses them in her goulash and other recipes.

I do like pickled crushed hot cherry peppers, but no so much. They are ok on a sandwich if I don't have high quality lunch meat. For me most hot peppers just drown out the taste of other things.

I was wondering about nacho cheese. it seems like it is made with cheddar cheese (my favorite cheese) and I did not think that was Mexican. I did not know where it comes from but, I love it! I wish I knew how to make nacho cheese. I don't buy it much because the brand I like only comes in a #10 can. That's a great size for a party, but it's way to much for just me.

 

[Bruette]

Beady, it's good to know I am not an old fart, I just drive a bit slow, but I do stay to the right and keep pace with traffic.

My daughter was surprised when she rode with me and I was driving upwards of 80mph. I'll drive faster if the traffic is light, visibility is good and the weather permits. I won't go over 80 in my van because it has light truck tires and they are not made for high-speeds.

 

[Bruette]

THANKS for the advice with the computer. I also called the service rep and googled the problem and find that it happens to all types of computers. I allready tried everything suggested. I can go in and change some settings but WINDOWS will not boot.

Service rep says I had a "memory leak". It is a 5 year old computer which he says is old. Maybe in the computer world, but the d*** thing should have lasted longer.

WELL off to shop for a new computer.

LASM, I suspect your problem is your SSD or hard drive. Both have limited life spans. SSD drives have supposedly improved in recent years. In the computer world 5 years is about average, anything over 5 years is a bonus. Operating any computer in high temperatures (80+) will diminish it's life span.

I'm sorry to hear about your troubles, but a new computer is the wise choice in my opinion. Check places you don't expect for computers. The system I am using now is a gaming system I bought for the family room and Target was the best value I could find at the time. Even the wholesalers I deal with could not match it!

Refurbished computers are often a good buy, if you don't need the latest and greatest. Other than the power supply the most fragile part of any computer is the hard drive/SSD drive. Replacing the hard drive/SSD drive makes the process of refurbishing a computer quick and easy, it's often standard procedure. Like anything, always check the details. I have a refurbished system in my office I have been using since 2012. I do have a cloud backup, just in case.

One more thing, buy the most powerful system you can find for your budget. At least a little higher system requirements than you need. In the computer world, tomorrow is today.

I wish you well my friend.

 

[Bruette]

Good afternoon.

Willie .... I like your gas station ..... Thanks for commenting on the rock strata. (I almost said 'Thanks for commenting on my rocks', but changed it. Beady would have razzed me if I said that. LOL )

Louis .... I think others answered your quest as to what is NWSL. ... I have a couple of their tools for cutting material when building models. Also, I purchased from them a kit to re-power my Bachmann doodlebug which works extremely well. ... They sell high quality gears, wheels, etc. for model trains.
..
I just got out boat back from teh mechanic. He replaced a bad alternator. Hopefully, we still have a few weeks remaining for boating.
....

Everybody ....... Have a nice evening.

Garry, thanks for brining it up, I learned a lot about something I knew nothing about!

 

[Bruette]

Don't worry: Winter Is Coming. A couple of our trees are already dumping leaves.

I think I just spotted a fellow "Game of Thrones" fan!

 

[Bruette]

Good evening folks! I'm an old time member returning after a 7 year absence. I look forward to joining all of you in your conversations. I see a lot of new faces here.

Good night!

Fantastic, it's great to have you back!

 

[Bruette]

Mexican food... I don't know my …, from a hole in the ground about Mexican food. I like what I like and I don't like, refried beans, whatever that is, or any beans other than baked beans with hotdogs or pork and kidney beans in chili, but even my chili has double the meat of beans.

Corn flour, I don't need it, don't care for it, not even corn bread! I prefer wheat flour and for that matter, I don't eat much bread. Bread is only good for putting mayonnaise on and holding the meat together with the tomatoes or for sopping up gravy or egg yolk, even then I prefer potatoes! I do like barbeque Fritos, but dumb … Frito Lay stopped making those!

My youngest daughter was dating a Spanish guy. She brings home left overs from an expensive Spanish restaurant. Popusa or some... "Dad you have to try this, it's great", oh yeah. it's great, even the dogs turned up their nose. I would not have given it to the dogs anyway, God knows what is in it!

Taco Trucks, no, I'm not eating from any truck and where do they get off parking near other real restaurants. The city is no place for food trucks. There is a food joint on nearly every block and they pay property tax. Run those …ing food trucks out!

I know beans are a good alternative to meat for the environment, but give me a break. I recycle, I don't have a vehicle with an engine over 2 liters and I pick up trash I see on the street. I like meat, my cholesterol is low and they tell me my heart is in great condition. I'm sure there are more than enough vegans to offset my meat eating. Leave me be to eat meat, I'm fat and happy

While I'm on the subject:
Chinese food; other than Egg Foo Young, I got no use for Chinese food! Not to mention Vietnamese, Japanese or any other Asian food, forget about it!
Italian food; How do they screw up sausage? It's the only kind of sausage I ever tasted that I don't like!
Peruvian chicken, what's up with that? No thank you, I'll stick to Maryland fried chicken.
Ethiopian Food; I did not know they had food.
Indian foods; I could never get past the smell!

Before anybody takes offense, this post was not directed at anyone. It's a general rant about my personal food preferences, no offense intended to anyone. God Bless Us Everyone and respect to us all, but I'm not going to ever be a fan of those foods! If somebody I know makes some of those food home made, I'll be happy to try. There is no way I am going to pay to try any of those foods!

I'm not in any way, shape or form against immigrants or legal immigration. In fact I am all for it, but don't expect me to run out and try their foods. To each his own.

I need a hotdog now. Yep, that's right, hotdogs for breakfast. I can almost smell the mustard and onions, I'll be back.

 

[Bruette]

Age very well could be. I’m just now coming up on that half-century mark this fall, & I stopped driving 4 years ago.

Mike I missed this post, forgive me. Why did you stop driving?

 

[Bruette]

I love the smell of hotdogs boiling in the morning!

I love Oscar Mayer, the one pound packs come in two separately sealed packages, a half pound in each. That's perfect, two for me and one for each beagle!

 

[bnsf971]

Good morning. It's 69 and cloudy-ish.
Louis, refurbished desktops can be a good value, but refurbished laptops can be something of a crap shoot. After several issues with refurb laptops, I finally bit the bullet, and got a new one. The initial price hurt (a lot!), but I did some extremely intense comparison shopping, and finally ended up with a new Macbook for $750. Reg. price was $1299. I don't have to worry about what somebody else did to it, and how that will affect its lifespan.

 

[Raincoat2]

Good morning everyone. 69 and raining out there. I'll have a cup of coffee, eggs over medium, sausage, and a short stack, please, Flo. Say, how about just leaving the coffee pot here on the table?!?!

Kyle "Posse" - Welcome back. Where ya been for 7 years, or is that a secret?
Willie - good to hear of your wife's recovery progress. Prayers for her.
Louis, Garry, Wheeler, Flip, Dave, Truckdad, Sherrel, Patrick, and anyone I may have missed - thanks for your likes on my workshop post.

Nothing to report from the train room. Did some landscape cleanup from the violent winds that came through the night before, and did some work out in the woodworking shop. Got a couple of photos of some hikers in the hills around the layout. One didn't turn out very clear, so I'll just post the other one. Not really satisfied with the look of either scene, so I'll continue to work on them.

Have a good day everyone.

 

[santafewillie]

Good Morning All. Clear and 77° to start our morning. At least there's a little breeze today. Today's grocery/beer Thursday, so that's on the agenda this morning. Wife's three day a week physical therapy sessions are getting a little harder as she progresses. Her regular therapist was back yesterday after a week off, when Brutus took her place. I have been using my new chipper/shredder for about 45 minutes a day lately, but the pile isn't diminishing much since I am also dragging other brush over to add. It still beats the bonfire that I used to endure along with the anxiety of setting the county on fire.
Just pancakes and sausage for me this morning Francine. Is Flo over there getting cooking lessons from Louis?

Thanks for the likes and comments regarding yesterday's Tire Shack pictures; Patrick, Sherrel, Chad, Dave, Johnny, Jerome, Garry, Justin, Tom, Louis.

OK, on to the train shed. Another short session out there yesterday. I managed to spread a bit of ground cover and I am working on a string of pennants for the Tire Shack, not easy! I painted a few more detail parts, unfinished still, and ran a switching run. I don't really have any progress pictures from yesterday, so I will post some (not so good) pictures from a scene on the layout. Part of this scene showed up in one of the locomotive power pictures that I posted a few months ago, and someone, I think it was Dave, asked about it.

It's a little hard to discern, but the girl on the right is washing a dog in a tub.
Here's Dad staying out of the way with a few cold brews.

Front of the trailer.

Why haven't I finished the scene? Well I lost er, misplaced the two sets of stairs! I have a bunch of scrap styrene that I will eventually use to make new ones. Someday!

Johnny - While we've hit 99° on 20 of the last 22 days, it still hasn't quite broken the triple digit barrier here yet this year. Dallas saw 100° on Friday, but otherwise it's been a cool summer, for us. Remember a year ago in June, we were at 110°+ for about ten days. Note that our average is 18 days a year, our greatest year was 2011 when it reached 100° 71 times, and in 1980, it was 100°+ every day in July! Historically we have had triple digits in every month from March through October, but August is usually the greatest number of occurrences. This is from my gardening records.
I redo scenes that I am not happy with sometimes. I usually add more vegetation or figures. It comes about after looking at them for a few months and realizing that something is missing.
Dave - Good luck with the computer. Makes me nervous since I am using this ten-year old desktop right now.
Beady - Trees here are dumping leaves because of lack of rain, not because of the approaching seasonal change in another three months.
Sherrel -

I always thought of a tamale as being "rolled" whereas a burrito is "wrapped"?

So much fast food Mexican food is the same stuff, a filling, folded, wrapped or rolled in a tortilla and cooked in various fashions. LOL
Glad that the trip home was successful.
Kyle - Welcome back, don't be such a stranger. Lot's of the same folks still, just a bit more eccentric.
Louis - Doesn't sound like you get real Mexican or Tex-Mex food in your area. It's all great except the menudo that Sherrel alluded to yesterday! I make it all the time. You would most likely love Carnitas, which is (the way I make it), slow cooked cubed pork shoulder with oregano, garlic, jalepenos and toasted cumin seed. Serve it on a large flour tortilla with homemade verde salsa (green tomato, onion, garlic, chile peppers, cilantro) and Monterrey Jack cheese. Another favorite is fajitas. That's marinated grilled steak or chicken (or goat), served on flour tortillas with grilled onions and bell peppers, cheddar or Monterrey Jack cheese, pico de gallo (diced jalepenos, tomatoes, onions and cilantro) and sour cream.
Note that Taco Bell or Taco Bueno are not Mexican food restaurants. LOL

Today is National Take Your Cat to the Vet Day. Good luck with that!
Everybody have a great day.

 

[Bruette]

Good morning. It's 69 and cloudy-ish.
Louis, refurbished desktops can be a good value, but refurbished laptops can be something of a crap shoot. After several issues with refurb laptops, I finally bit the bullet, and got a new one. The initial price hurt (a lot!), but I did some extremely intense comparison shopping, and finally ended up with a new Macbook for $750. Reg. price was $1299. I don't have to worry about what somebody else did to it, and how that will affect its lifespan.

Terry, that is very true! If you don't have the details of what has actually been replaced and what it was replaced with, it's not worth it. When it comes to laptops replacing anything is not as simple and less likely to have new parts. As always, "the devil is in the details".

 

[chadbag]

72F at 7:30am. Been 72F all night too. Did not get below 70F in the night (yesterday was down to mid 60s). Another hot and clear day ahead.

Last night I ran some more trains on the test track loops. I ran the Brawa diesel some more and got it going so it would go round and round. I had it pushing a couple older tank cars. Pushing since there are some track issues where wire passes underneath and we get small sharp peaks in one or two places, which causes the cars to come uncoupled (Rapido -- the standard on most Euro wagons).

I also tried both the same Piko diesel and another Piko diesel. Got a little movement out of them but in the end gave up. I'll need to work on them and see what is up. I then ran an Arnold (Hornby) BR152 in Porsche livery alone, and pushing a bunch of epoch IV 2-axle container flat cars (approx 1968--late 80s). I let them go round and round for a while until we had some cars derail in some extensive crossover points region of track (KATO N-scale #4 based ones sometimes have issues). Which led to a small pile up

ETA: I am sure some of the issue is the track needs to be cleaned, dusted, etc. I'll run the Tomix cleaning car vacuum around a bunch and then get out the wet roller car (somewhere on my desk).



I may try another ham/cheese/egg soft taco for breakfast again, with overcooked cheese and habanero sauce. In no way authentic but it tastes great. Won't eat breakfast though until after 9am.

 

[Bruette]

Willie, what you make sounds good, really good!

I'm sure with almost 10 million people in the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area there are many real Mexican food places, I'm just not interested.

Baltimore has always been a place of ethnic neighborhoods. Polish, Greeks, Italians, Germans and others. In my youth I sampled food from many of them and I was not very impressed with most of them. I live near what was/is known as "Greek Town', it was one of my favorite place to go to eat.

Greek Town was the first place I took my Angel to eat on our first real date. I took her to the Greek Islands Restaurant. The owner was formally the head chef at a famous hotel restaurant near the white house or capital hill (I can't remember exactly where or the name) he served President Richard Nixon among others. Baltimore/Washington has many great places. My problem is I prefer home cooked food. I like simple comfort foods.

Now Greek Town should be called Latin Town. It now has more Spanish restaurants and shops than Greek. My kids tell me there are many good ones, but I really am not interested. I tell them "take your Mother, she might like it. I'll pickup a cheese steak from Captain Harvey's for me and one with no cheese or onions for the dogs." Top that off with a cold pilsner beer after and life can't be any better! I never drink beer with food, but after is good!

Taco Bell... a good place to eat If you are constipated.

My grandson wanted to try Burger King's new taco. I had my reservations, but they were only a $1. I should have saved my money and Burger King needs to stick to hamburgers.

I'm even difficult about pizza. If it's not New York style and has anything, but peperoni on it, forget about it!

I forgot to mention French food; I don't want anything that slithers or hops in the garden, no thank you!

Come to think of it after posting all this; I use to think "I'm not picky", I'll have to rethink that!

 

[Sirfoldalot]

Willie -- You have made me hungry this morning! I'm off to Burger King - they have a flour tortilla with egg, sausage, cheese, onion, green chilly, and other fixings that is very good and it does not require a delay in other errands. A couple of them will fix me right up.
Louis -- I'll let you have your hot dogs - just about my least favorite meat, but for breakfast?

Calling for 98* from one weather station and 91* from another; that's a YOUGGE difference ... I'm going to place my wager on 95*
It was HOT coming across the desert yesterday. I stopped a couple of times trying to get a little "rail" action. Twice I missed a solid unit oil train which I thought was pretty neat looking. It appears to come along every day at about the same time with 4 "big guys" on the point and 2 more pushing on the climb westbound out of Needles.

OK - off on some errands for now.

 

[Bruette]

Jamie Adams - ‎Baltimore & Ohio Fans Worldwide
A lot of B&O in this photo. Taken in June of 1972. - Location unknown and no photographer listed on slide mount. Original Kodachrome collection of J.L. Adams
*UPDATE* Many people who have commented here say this is Brunswick, MD. - Indeed, Thank You all for letting myself and everyone else know that!

A special thank you to Milwaukee Road 113 for posting this on his facebook page!

 

[Bruette]

I just placed my first order with Menards

I know I said I was not buying anything until I get organized, but I could not pass up this deal!
I ordered this 9-Piece Plug & Play Accessory Kit for $19.99 to get the truck for free!

The entire order was $29.61 with processing, tax and shipping.

I also forgot to mention my 2019 LCCA Christmas Boxcar arrived yesterday!

 

[GarryCBQ]

Good morning ....

Today is the first day since we got the boat back from the mechanic. .... It's raining. Looks like an all day rain. ... ... And the boat trailer brakes locked up as I returned it to the house after putting the boat in the water. I have it parked next to the road across from our house. I think I know how to fix the problem, but I'll wait for rain to go away for that.

Johnny .... That's a nice layout photo. .... I'll have to look up the scenic railroad you mentioned. ....

Louis .... That is a nice photo of B&O locomotives. It also shows grimy and dirty track which would be fun to model.

Willie ..... I like your scene with trailer and junk autos.