The Monday Morning Epistle

Now she's done it: my lovely bride has deliberately, lovingly, and irrevocably unleashed the model railway beast from its lair. After more than a year of buying model train magazines and debating between scales and time periods, I finally broached the idea of a small railway layout in our basement. Garion will no doubt be thrilled with any kind of trains, but I'm curious to see if I can lure Alex or Jacob into railway modeling as well. To my great delight, Mary agreed to give up one end of the laundry room, on the condition that the household debris cluttering the area was cleaned out and properly re-organized first. Depending on how much I can creatively store in the garage, I should end up with a space about 8 feet wide by 6 feet deep, which is just enough for a small N Scale layout. More importantly, the menagerie is not allowed in the laundry room, so I won't have to worry about being invaded by Catzilla.

My goal is for this layout to be something of a litmus test: elaborate enough to resurrect my modeling skills (both real and imagined) but small enough to avoid a huge investment of time or money. One very real danger of re-entering a beloved childhood hobby is that my discretionary income is several orders of magnitude larger now, and it is so tempting to rush out and buy the dreams that I couldn't afford thirty years ago. With conscious self-restraint, I opted for a tabletop layout kit called Scenic Ridge that includes all of the necessary parts and supplies to build a modest figure-eight track plan. It may only be 3 x 6 feet in size, but it will have tunnels and bridges to amuse Monkey-Boy and enough opportunities for scenery to amuse Daddy. I'm also casually trolling eBay for bargains, and picked up a ‘nearly new’ DCC controller for less than half of its normal price; this device has a USB interface, so with some customized open source Java software, I can control the entire layout from my laptop. Like I said, Mary has unleashed the beast!

Over the weekend, the Gruesome Twosome looked at a calendar and realized that they only have about three weeks of school left, and celebrated accordingly. Alex's jubilation was somewhat subdued, as there is still serious doubt as to whether or not he'll survive High School. The District 11 administration may consider a ‘D’ average sufficient to pass, but we do not: Alex has already been warned that if he can't muster at least a ‘C’ average, he'll be repeating 10th grade again this fall. This may make us mean, cruel, and hateful parents, but we firmly believe that ‘social passing’ is one of the practices that has weakened the American public school system. Either way, it is actually better for Alex to screw up his sophomore year, as opposed to two years from now: we've seen too many students (and their parents) do the “will graduate / won't graduate” tango with college admissions or military service on the line.

KidBit: Fresh corn was nearly impossible to find in Stuttgart, so when it recently started appearing at our local grocery store, I returned home with half a dozen ears for dinner. As the entire family contentedly munched our way through this butter-laden treat, Mary commented that local corn should get much cheaper when in season. Since melons are another common crop in this region, I replied “I know.I can't wait for cantaloupe season!” Jacob looked up from his dinner and asked “Why? Are we going hunting?”

PotW: More trains: Garion at the model train exhibition in February, caught flipping switches on his favorite layout.

Until next week…Tschüß!

,,,^..^,,,

2007.05.12-06:50