Since weather seems to be a motivating force, I’ll set the scene by saying it’s colder than a well digger’s dupa here in our So Cal beach town, where I have a bug up my nether region, wanting to convert from track power to battery, the first step to moving my trains outdoors. My Bug Mauler tender, which has Phoenix Sound with the Big Boost option, has been chuffing away and driving my wife nuts, as I try to charge up the on-board mini-battery that keeps sounds like the air pump running while the loco is sitting still. With a dead battery, running the loco makes the sound system do crazy things, like cycle through all of the sounds for no good reason as the loco sounds like a Heisler, because the chuffs all run together. Anyway, I wanta try it to see what it used to sound like. In the meantime I have been eyeballing the tender’s wiring setup (viewable on Ray Dunakin’s battery conversion post, which I hijacked), trying to envision how it’s all gonna work and where to put all the new components.
Meanwhile, on the dining room table (workbench number 1) sits my two story house, which I teased you guys with in cardboard mockup form a few months ago. The walls are waiting to be painted and assembled, ditto the roof, which has to be skinned with Precision Plastic shingle sheet. And I need to work on the front porch, which will have cross-grating under the deck to keep imaginary critters out. These are the kinda details that derail all of my projects–
Like my hotel, which is 90-percent complete except for two chimneys.
Or my old-time gas station with styrene siding distressed and painted to look like aged wood. I obsessed over the interior and the tin roof, which needs painting and drives DW crazy in unpainted white.
There’s my Rider’s Crossing store, modeled after a historic building near Albany, NY. It started out as a superb project, one of my best, but got bogged down in the construction of the front store windows and recessed double entry doors. And of course, the interior.
Apologies to Kevin Strong, who long ago asked me to do something for the Friends of East Broadtop newsletter or something like that, regarding my Orbisonia firehouse, which stalled out because I couldn’t decide how to make 42, curly-ended roof korbels. I even bought a 1930s firetruck to go with the building, which is about 80% complete.
Let’s see, 10 wheeler to Connie conversion and upscaling to 1:20.3? Dead in the water.
Pacific Coast Railway side door caboose (based on an AMS flat)? Stalled in the planning stages.
NT: Downloading and Photoshopping over 1,000 images from our vacation: a work in progress.
On the immediate horizon: my wife’s home-made chicken picatta, accompanied by a nice bottle of Montepulciano. I’m a gonna finish that project! 
