Wednesday, January 25
6:30 am
It is +4 °C, with a high forecast of 0 °C.
From the Environment Canada website:
Wind Warning.
Today Increasing cloudiness. Wind west 70 km/h gusting to 100 diminishing to 50 gusting to 80 this afternoon. Temperature falling to zero this afternoon.
Tonight Clearing this evening. Wind west 50 km/h gusting to 80 diminishing to 30 gusting to 50 this evening. Low minus 3.
7:00 am Musings
With my first cuppa in hand, this is a good time to reflect for a few moments about priorities.
The top ongoing item is Model Trains. I am in the midst of adding ballast to my mainline track. This is the first real effort at adding scenery to my table-top layout. I now have the general process under control but am noticing that I need to be careful about the ballast interfering with some of the switches. The first time I added the ballast on a switch it continued to work fine, but I am now noticing problems with some of the other switches. This may take some time to resolve.
In addition to the ballasting, I am now thinking seriously about adding a simple backdrop behind the outer mainline track. I have a sheet of masonite in the garage that could be cut into two 24" strips, each 8' long. Then I could glue sheets of Instant Horizons scenes onto this and lean the result against the wall.
There are also the viaduct kits to continue assembling. But first the ballasting.
Literature is number two on my list at the moment. I am presently enjoying Stephenson's "REAMDE" novel about computer gaming and hacking and its relationship to the "real" world. I also have two Rumi books that are beside me, but which are not receiving the attention they deserve. And then there is Shakespeare, and Garber's book on Literature.
3:00 PM Model Trains
My immediate goal is to completely ballast the inner mainline track. Then I will have a close look at the ballast that I have applied to a section of the outer mainline. There are three switches on this section and they no longer seem to be working smoothly.
I spent a couple of hours this morning carefully removing loose ballast from five switches along the inner mainline. This turned out to be a very tedious activity as even a few granules of the ballast can seriously interfere with the switch's operation. I continue to learn.
More learning. While in the hobby shop yesterday I was sharing my stories about the importance of wetting down the ballast before applying the cement. There was another hobbyist in the store at the time and he described his process which was more precise than the one I was using. Instead of spraying the area of the layout with a fine mist of water, he used an eye dropper and much more carefully just added the water to the section of ballast he was working on. This also makes it easy to avoid getting the granules of ballast in the switch machine. The really important step was to add a small amount of detergent to the water before using the eyedropper. This reduces the surface tension of the water and prevents it from forming globules when it first comes in contact with the ballast.
Earlier this morning I viewed a YouTube video on model trains that described a few simple hints for the hobbyist. One of these was about banking the curves, called superelevating the track, so the outside of the curve is slightly higher than the inside of the curve. The hint involved using a piece of heavy string used for parcels and simply laying it along the surface of the table where the outside track bed will be placed.
I didn't have any string, but the diameter looked to be very similar to some medium gauge wire that I have. Perfect. Unfortunately I had already place the ballast on the section of the curve that I wanted to try this on. The good news is that I had not yet applied the cement. I brushed the ballast off the layout, removed the track along the curve, placed a 3' section of wire along the outside edge of the route, replaced the track bed on top of the wire, and then nailed the track onto the bed, holding everything in place.
Unfortunately, again, I then noticed that the vibration from nailing the track down caused much of the ballast that I had added to the straight section of track before the curve to move from where it had been placed. This has now been rebrushed into place but it took another hour to get back to where I was before I began changing the curve.
7:00 PM Literature
My early morning musings reminded me about my readings of Rumi. I reread the introductory sections from "Rumi: The Masnavi. Book One". Rumi lived about 600 years after Mohammed, and was a recognized scholar and leader of a branch of Islam known as Sufism.
"Towards the end of his life he presented the fruit of his experience of Sufism in the form of the Masnavi. which has been judged by many commentators, both within the Sufi tradition and outside it, to be the greatest mystical poem ever written." [p. xiii]
"The Masnavi leaves the impression that he [Rumi] was brimming with ideas and symbolic images which would overflow when prompted by the subtlest of associations. In this way, free from the constraints of a frame narrative or a strict principle of order, Rumi has been able to produce a work that is far richer in content than any other example of the mystical masnavi genre." [p. xxiii]
Many of the sections in the Masnavi are similar to the parables in the Bible, or to Aesop's fables.
10:00 PM Technology
I am trying to make better use of my iPad2.
I accessed the Zinio app that is designed to provide access to magazines. I clicked on a button to buy a 1-year subscription to The Walrus, and immediately received a message saying it was now on my iPad. I assume that I will be billed by iTunes shortly.
The iPad version is very good. I think it is essentially a pdf file of the magazine with the addition of a good index and a bookmark capability.