Howdy!
The beginning of the summer finds me once again on the treadmill at work. We're getting busy again, and if all the birds come home to roost (i.e., if all the quotes out for approval come back approved) we'll be booked until close to the end of the year. Truly, in this economy, it is a good problem to have, given the vilification of corporate jets across the board because of the truly stupid actions of a few corporations at the height of the crisis a few years ago...
In the meantime, I've been able to steal a few minutes and work on some projects. The Cool Snow Hog '82 A-10A is nearing completion. I got the repaint done fairly painlessly, although I still have some learning to do with the new airbrush. It is a good job, no doubt, but it isn't the same quality I used to get with the older airbrushes I've used. Once I master the Patriot, I think I'll be right back where I was. All I need is time and practice.
I've also started tinkering with the Monogram 1/48 scale F-106A more and more. It wasn't as bad as I feared it would be, and it is actually further along with the re-scribing than I remember, too. That's a lesson for you, kids--don't give up on a project because it frustrates you, or isn't progressing as you had hoped. Put it aside, a build something else. Eventually, you'll come back to the project and realize that all is not lost. And remember, too, that in order to build better models, you have to finish models. They all won't progress smoothly, but the goal is to get them finished.
On other fronts, I must praise the Newberry County Public Works department. Our house, as I've told you, is out in the country on a gravel road. A sloped gravel road. There are drainage ditches on either side of the road, and the County does periodically re-grade the road. This re-grading started the problems for me a few years ago--when the road got re-graded a few years ago, it lost a lot of the gravel and was largely down to the clay and sand base. Since we live in the woods, the leaves and pine straw mixes with the clay/sand to make mud--and it promptly clogged the culvert under my driveway. I'd dig the clog out, and it would reappear with the next heavy rain. After a while, the clog got to the point where the runoff would bypass the culvert and run down the road at the base of the driveway, creating deep cuts in the road--some, it appeared, large enough to swallow a small car.
After months of digging it out, or trying to blast it out with high pressure water, I finally contacted the County. I heard nothing from them. A few days later, they came out and re-graded the road--again. Three days later, we had torrential rain which once again caused havoc in the road. A second e-mail was sent, and the head of Public Works said they were working on a permanent fix, the just regraded to make the road passable. Within a day of the response, they were back out at the house. The removed the old plastic culvert that our lame-ass GC used when the house was built (against my wishes, by the way, much like a lot of things that are causing problems at the homestead) and installed a new concrete pipe. They brought the grade of the road level at the bottom of the driveway, and they re-defined the drainage ditches on either side of the road, from where it begins to where it ends--they even made two or three diversion cut-offs up the road so the water at that end won't travel all the way from one end to the other. Genius. And, finally, they added about 10 truck loads of crush and run gravel to the wettest areas of the road. We had more or less a week of rain last week, and things are just ducky.
Oh, the down side? They accidentally cut the phone line. AT&T came out and fixed that...
So, now I have to put gutters on the house, get rid of a bunch of trees, and re-grade the yard. I'll do that in my spare time. Yeah. Spare time...
I did tell the higher-ups at work, though, that next weekend was mine. Why? This, of course...
Thanks for reading. Be good to one another, and I bid you Peace.
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