Model Trains Notes

I began the morning by looking at some of the posts on The Gauge Forum. I noticed one user who had a very attractive track plan in his post. A scroll through a series of his posts finally indicated that he was using a software package called XTrkCad.

I then used that term in a google search and located a web site that produced this software. It also indicated a Yahoo Group on this software, which I joined. Then I downloaded it from the Files submenu for the Group. Once again, the software was not available for Macintosh. I downloaded the file and then stored it on a memory stick. I then used Parallels to switch to Windows xp, copied the file to the desktop and installed the software.

I went through one of the introductory demos and it seems to work just fine. Given the price, I will stay with this for awhile and see if it meets my needs.

SUMMARY of the session: I now have a free software package for track planning that is worth trying for a few days.

7:10 am

9:40 PM By mid-afternoon I had changed my mind and decided to upgrade my version of 3rdPlanIt (from version 3.0 to version 7). I downloaded 6 program files as well as the user's manual. Since these were all Windows xp files, I then had to move them to Windows where Parallels could be used to load Windows and then install them. This took just over an hour to complete.

The manual was a different problem. I first had to download the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader (for Windows) and then open the pdf file. Once this was finished I had to transfer the file to another Dell computer that was connected to a laser printer. The final result was a printed version of the manual. Another hour. I am now ready to begin the tutorial (tomorrow).

SUMMARY of the session: I now plan to make a commitment to Learning to use 3rd PlanIt to prepare a complete set of files for my layout. I seem to be going about this in reverse: first I create the layout and then I create the plan. But the final result should be the same: a complete plan and a complete layout.

9:50 PM

Literature Notes

link to back cover

• The Waves (1928)
  • "For most reviewers, it was 'more like a poem than a novel', something very like a poem', a 'prose poem', 'a kind of symphonic poem' and even 'imagist poetry of the first order'. [p. 265]

This rang true to me as soon as I read it [Briggs]. But I hadn't explicitly recognized it until seeing Briggs comment. This made my reading of the last half of the novel much more lyrical. The sentences had a definite rhythm and the novel began to flow from that moment on.

• Here are some quotes from the actual novel.

• "Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing> But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it." [p. 657]
  
  
• " 'I have torn off the whole of May and June,' said Susan, 'and twenty days of July. I have torn them off and screwed them up so that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly. There are only eight days left. In eight days' time I shall get out of the train and stand on the platform as six twenty-five. Then my freedom will unfurl, and all these restrictions that wrinkle and shrivel - hours and order and discipline, and being here and there exactly at the right moment - will crack asunder." [p. 662]

This is very close to the feeling I had when I walked out of the university after handing in my notice of retirement.

• "But you understand, you, my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would make midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs - they have given up calling for a self who does not come ..." [p. 673]
  
  
• "You are all engaged, involved, drawn in, and absolutely energized to the top of your bent - all save Neville, whose mind is far too complex to be roused by any single activity." [p. 673]

This approximates this web site with its many threads....

• "I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am." [p. 676]
  
  
• "I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come." [p. 677]
  
  
• " 'You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages tht seem to approve of your own character." [p. 678]

How did she know???

• "There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over treetops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities." [p. 693]
  
  
• "What is my story? What is Rhodas? What is Nevilles? There are facts, as, for example: 'The handsome young man in the grey suit, whose reserve contrasted so strangely with the loquacity of the others, now brushed the crumbs from his waistccoat and, with a characteristic gesture at once commanding and benign, made a sign to the waiter, who came instantly adn returned a moment later with the bill discreetly folded upon a plate.' That is the truth; that is the fact, but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture." [p. 705]
  
  
• "Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great coulds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then." [p. 751]
  
  
• "But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always below it, even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite formalities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights - elm trees, willow trees, gardners sweeping, women writing - that rise and sink even as we hand a lady down to dinner." [p. 759]
  
  
• " 'The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst. Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and aizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers." [p. 759]
  
• "So we shared our Pecks, our Shakespeares; compared each other's versions; allowed each other's insight to set our own Peck or Shakespeare in a better light; and then sank into one of those silences which are now and again broken by a few words, as if a fin rose in the wastes of silence; and then the fin, the thought, sinks back into the depths, spreading round it a little ripple of satisfaction, content." [p. 767]

 

• I also played with they actual format of the novel. I found a web site that contained the full text of the novel.
  
  http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91w/
  
  The idea was to change the color of the font for each of the 6 characters in the novel. This was easy as each paragraph in the novel is identified as belonging to the thoughts of one of the 6. The use of colors helped highlight the identity of each person and made it much easier to see when each person had previously 'spoken' and what they thought. Here is a sample:

  ‘I was running,’ said Jinny, ‘after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in a hole in the hedge. I thought “That is a bird on its nest.” I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. “Is he dead?” I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you.’

  ‘Through the chink in the hedge,’ said Susan, ‘I saw her kiss him. I raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.’

  ‘Susan has passed us,’ said Bernard. ‘She has passed the tool- house door with her handkerchief screwed into a ball. She was not crying, but her eyes, which are so beautiful, were narrow as cats’ eyes before they spring. I shall follow her, Neville. I shall go gently behind her, to be at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her when she bursts out in a rage and thinks, “I am alone.”

  ‘Now she walks across the field with a swing, nonchalantly, to deceive us. Then she comes to the dip; she thinks she is unseen; she begins to run with her fists clenched in front of her. Her nails meet in the ball of her pocket-handkerchief. She is making for the beech woods out of the light. She spreads her arms as she comes to them and takes to the shade like a swimmer. But she is blind after the light and trips and flings herself down on the roots under the trees, where the light seems to pant in and out, in and out. The branches heave up and down. There is agitation and trouble here. There is gloom. The light is fitful. There is anguish here. The roots make a skeleton on the ground, with dead leaves heaped in the angles. Susan has spread her anguish out. Her pocket-handkerchief is laid on the roots of the beech trees and she sobs, sitting crumpled where she has fallen.’

  ‘I saw her kiss him,’ said Susan. ‘I looked between the leaves and saw her. She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted.’

  ‘I saw you go,’ said Bernard. ‘As you passed the door of the tool- house I heard you cry “I am unhappy.” I put down my knife. I was making boats out of firewood with Neville. And my hair is untidy, because when Mrs Constable told me to brush it there was a fly in a web, and I asked, “Shall I free the fly?

  
  This gives rise to new options for authors as an electronic medium becomes more common. In addition to simple changes like font color, size and type it is also easy to insert images, graphics and photographs. Umberto Eco, well-known for his writing on semiotics, has experimented with this in his recent novel "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana".

It also makes it possible for Learners to play with their form of note-taking, as I have just illustrated.

SUMMARY of the session: Making these notes - retyping out selected passages - is as satisfying as reading it originally. And finding a web site with the text of the novel opened up, for me, a new approach to understanding the novel. Neat. 10:50 am