Good evening Shop Dwellers! 77*F, calm and dark in my central MD neighborhood. I figured I should probably make an appearance so you guys would know I'm alive & kickin'.
Johnny - I really like the trees and "hominids" on your layout, they really bring it to life.
Willie - welcome home from your Gulf shore vacation. Enjoyed seeing all the museum photos. I, too, have a fondness for Accurail freight car models...I have small fleets of their 89ft piggyback flatcars and open auto racks, their reasonable pricing put them within my reach. A friend of mine refers to Accurail as the "Blue Box of the 21st Century."
Louis - I always gives a thumbs-up to a news link that says it's ok to eat [or drink] what I love, especially when it gets the Ivy League elites pist off!
Chet, looks like the [typical] early Montana winter is forcing you to spend more time running on your home layout - which is fine by me, since I've always enjoys your Logan Valley photos more than the ones of your club [even though they're ALL good!].
Sherrell, sorry to hear about your forced encounters with repairmen, hopefully they won't [or didn't?] gouge you too badly. Excellent photo of the Frisco SW1, though it still could use a bit of weathering...
Mikey - I'm glad to see you posting here regularly again! I still remember the summer when I came down to B'ham with my wife to visit her sister, and you served as my 'tour guide' for much of the week - including that op session at the Wrecking Crew layout. Looks like your recent 'invention' will make it alot easier to get the right sized carbon pipe models.
Greg - glad you survived the hospital ordeal, hopefully soon you'll be mobile enough to negotiate stairways again. Your story about being snowed-in at your cabin reads like a page from one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's
Little House books that I read aloud to my daughters at bedtime when they were young'uns...
Karl - glad to see that recent life events haven't extinguished the mrr 'flame.' I forget where you said you're moving to, is it near Hagerstown? One of my longtime mrr friends [from the mid-1990's] lives in that region and has op sessions every couple months, I've gotten to know several modelers who live up that way.
* * *
On
my end...
I got back the lab results from my most recent checkup with my primary doc, and the three numbers I was most concerned about were all in the 'ok' range: PSA=0.03 [big surprise
there LOL!]; A1C down to 3.54 [not exactly
great - but at least no longer considered at risk for diabetes], and creatinine at 1.52 [it was up to 1.79 before my prostate surgery]. So the cancer is gone, I can continue to eat bread and pasta, and my kidneys still have some useful life left in them.
This photo editing activity I've been involved in is like an
addiction! Several evenings I had planned to post here, but first I just had to finish up this "one last little change" on a photo and, next thing I knew, it was way past my bedtime.
One thing that consumes a
huge amount of time is when I try to paint-out unwanted "scene-buster" objects, such as in this set of before-and-after clips from a larger photo [which I'll post later], those have to be done pixel-by-pixel:
...but the end result is always worth the extra bit of drudgery. At least now, I have 9 useable wide-angle photos of my steel mill peninsula.
See you all next week, or maybe sooner...[?]