Yes, today is the day. You, my lucky friend, are looking at Article Number 50 on the Paris to Peking Railway project. The Board of Directors is very proud, cigars and brandy all around.
“Capital,” says the CEO, “simply capital!”
“Outstanding achievement!” roars the PR Guy. “It’s a record!”
“It’s a bleedin’ miracle,” mumbles the Chief Engineer who may have had a few too many of those free brandies.
My brother created both the Paris to Peking Railway Logo and their new slogan: Paris to Peking Railway, from P to Shining P!
So, what have we accomplished in our fifty articles? We’ve chronicled the design of the garden railway, the clearing and repair of the tracks in the China Section, the opening of the Main Line, the Wyatt Exposition Day extravaganza, and a host of other things. If you haven’t looked before, I encourage you to take a moment and click on some of the articles we’ve published on the railway.
What’s next? For starters, I can promise you you’ll see at least another fifty articles! There’s a lot of work to be done before we can call this railway operational (particularly as it isn’t!). And once we’ve got it running there is so much detail work to be done I doubt we’ll be out of articles at 500! Thank you for following along, and keep visiting: great things are happening soon!
One of the great things that happened this weekend was I figured out how to put a roof on my decrepit farmhouse! I thought this was particularly brilliant: I created shingles out of the ends of craft sticks. Please, hold your applause until the end.
Cutting the ends off of the craft sticks turned out to be the most difficult part of the project. I needed about 180 shingles, which equates to…let’s see, carry the one, no, wait, borrow the one, oops, where’s the pencil, uh huh, no, 3’s not right, let’s see…90 craft sticks if I used both ends of each stick. I decided to use craft sticks instead of coffee stir sticks or popsicle sticks for just one reason: I’m lazy. I would have had to place double the number of popsicle sticks, and triple the number of coffee stir sticks! Skip that noise! Instead I masking-taped together a huge stack of 90 craft sticks, binding it firmly against squirming. The masking tape also marked the cut line I was going to use to remove the ends.
I started cutting with my homemade hacksaw, but that was too darned slow. I tried the keyhole saw. That was too sloppy. I tried the steel cutting blade in my knock-off Dremel tool. Now you’re talking! It was slow, smoky and noisy, but it worked!
I cut a 6x11 piece of ½ inch plywood for the roof itself. The Amazing Plumber’s Goop did an excellent job of holding the 180 shingles onto the plywood. I started at the left side of the roof and worked it up and down. Then I completed the bottom row, so as to give myself guidelines for sticking on the rest of the shingles. At first I was applying the glue to the back of each shingle and sticking it down. But I’ve removed the cover from my patio, and the glue renders a smell too heady for those inside the house, and, well it’s August, and even though this is Ventura, which I swear is so foggy that Londoners actually complain about our fog, but today it was hot and sunny and I spent all day yesterday hiking in the mountains where the hot August sun is really hot, and I was hot, and everything was hot, and I was sitting in the sun because I’d removed our patio cover, and, well, I just wanted to get the job done. So I smeared the adhesive, which is both waterproof and quick-setting, onto the tops of the in-place shingles and the roof surface above them en masse, so as to speed up the shingling process. Although it worked, I wasn’t as happy with the stick-down of those shingles as I was with the individually applied ones.
Lesson learned? Don’t rush, don’t take shortcuts, and go buy an umbrella!
When I had finished it, I liked the effect, but something was wrong…it doesn’t look quite right. As I was working on it I kept thinking that rain would fall between the columns of shingles and soak right in. It wasn’t until I finished that I realized that in the real world each row of shingles is staggered from the one below it. I made my rows straight. Rats!
There. Now you know my dirty little secret. When you shingle your roof, in any scale, 1/1 or smaller, stagger the rows!
The cigars are all smoked down to stubs, and the Board Members are getting restless. The Chief Engineer spills his brandy on the CEO’s shoes, and things are getting rather tense.
“On to Paris!” I yell, and everyone sloppily raises their brandy snifters.
“From P to Shining P!” they roar in response.
The meeting is adjourned, and the room quickly clears. All that’s left now is the cigar smoke and empty glasses. I glance in the big mirror that hangs on one end of the room.
“Fifty articles,” I say to myself. “That IS a milestone!”
