Sunday, February 23, 2014

A Visit to See Mike

Yesterday five of the Tuesday Nighters met at Geoff’s place, where Darren was going to drive all of us along with his trailer to visit Mike.  Darren had a trailer full of Mike’s model railway equipment that I think he has been having withdrawal symptoms about.  Mike has recently relocated to Toowoomba to be closer to his daughter’s place.  So after a 90 minute or so drive we arrived at Mike’s very nice retirement village unit.  Soon after we got there, Mike’s Son-in-law arrived and then we were met with fellow past-Tuesday Nighter, Tess, who relocated to Toowoomba about 4-5 years earlier.  What a great time we had.  We unpacking the trailer, carrying everything into the garage and setting up his two shunting layouts, soring out the stuff, putting some of it away, moving thing here, relocating them to there so we made the most efficient use of his single car garage, which also had his workbench already installed as well as a very nicely laid out set of storage shelves.  Once everything was in its place, we even got one of Mike's layouts running by installing his NCE Power Cab and installed a toggle switch so the layout can be switched to DC operation for Mike’s older locos.  I think Mike was quite happy by us all turning up and also doing the work that we did.
 
Mike decided that he did not need his coloured sands and dirts and was generous enough to donate this to a very deserving cause – me.  I had previously used quite a lot of Mike’s sands and dirts scenicing the various locations on Cassino and I was certainly getting down in a number of the colours.  Well now I have an six ice-cream buckets full.  Brilliant!  I think that might see me through for the rest of the areas that I need to install the base colour over.
 
Following the approximate four hours of work (well we did have a cuppa and cake before we started)we adjourned to the local Golf Club for a very late lunch.  Boy was that a very nice establishment. 
 
Today I decided to spend some time on my side fence which was starting to fall over.  I started clearing the earth around one post and sure enough, it had rotted away just below ground level - it was just suspended in mid air.  So I spent the morning digging out the concrete around the base of what previous was joined to the post, so I have hole to put the new post into.  I think next weekend I will remove the existing magic floating fence post that is currently sitting in mid air, and put in my new fence post (luckily I have three in the garage) and throw a bag of postcrete into the hole and then attach the fence rails to the new post.  I then will have two more posts to investigate over the coming weekends but I believe the same has happened to them.  The fence is about 21 years old.  It is in good condition, just three posts look like they have rotted below ground.  I won't work too fast on this project as it will take time away from my shed.
 
After my morning labouring efforts, I was not in a mood to go to the shed until well after four this arvo.  So I caught up on some recorded TV from during the week.  When I did get to the shed, I did mix up two small batches of plaster and plastered around the concrete path on the north-eastern side of the Bruxner Highway.  I also spread some plaster near my gutter.  I will have to spread another two plaster mixes for that north-east corner, before I work on the other three sides of the road/rail interchange.
 
See ya next week.

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