Busiest Weekend of the Year.....

. . .  and I'm messing around with the computer.....

This morning, DH and I joined 3 other members of DD's train club to set up our O scale stuff for National Train Day in Toledo, which is tomorrow.  The Heritage Train is here and DD is miserable because we won't take him to see it tonight.  One of the reasons for that is that there's a Train Club business meeting tonight.  Should be pretty short, I hope.

So tomorrow, we get down to the Toledo Terminal Train Station bright and early.  It's a really cool art deco station, by the way.

{{Insert pics here.... oh, Blogspot is having a little hissy and won't load pic for me.....}}

BadAmy and L were married here, and it was a fantastic location for that!

Then DH and DD will stay at the station, and I'll head over to the world class Toledo Museum of Art for the dedication of the Ohio Historical marker, commemorating the 100th anniversary of Girl Scouting.  There will be blah blah blah speeches, a couple of troops will sing songs, then we'll 're-enact' a photo that was taken of Scouts on the Museum steps.  Cool.  I'm pretty sure I'm going to wear my badge sash.....

Then we troop inside and spend the night in the museum!!!  The last I heard there were 1500 girls and several hundred adults signed up, including yours truly.  This is quite literally a once in a lifetime opportunity.  I'm pretty sure we don't get to sleep in the Cloister or with the mummies....

After staying up most of the night, and sleeping on the floor--something I never do any more--I'll come home and pack the trailer.  Oh, and I'll have to put away the train stuff we got out for the display downtown, too.  We've told friends to come over Sunday after 4 for a BYOEverything cookout.

I will hopefully sleep like a log Sunday night, get up Monday morning and send my youngest child off to his last day at the Anthony Wayne High School, go to the ankle doc's at lunch time, pick up said child at school, come home, put suitcase and backpack in the car, and will maybe be able to sleep.....

Tuesday, I put my middle child on the bus at 6:35 a.m.,  and leave sometime after that with youngest for a 4 month sojourn to the west and work.

So I'm sitting around blogging and playing online Scrabble. 

The thing that takes a back seat in the summer is blogging.  I'll be reading yours as often as I can get to a computer, and maybe even once in a while I'll drop you a line.  I'll still be on FB, usually every day, and of course there's the old fashioned method of communication:

Ranger Anna
5 Madison Ranger Station
Yellowstone National Park,  WY  82190

It's been a wonderful ride with you all so far.  Thanks for coming along.

And We Go On

Services for Ranger Margaret Anderson will be tomorrow afternoon.  I've had a weird sense of euni since her murder, partly because I'm so far away there's nothing I can do, partly because I've been re-winding all the times that DH or our family were in some type of real or perceived danger, and partly because life goes on for the whole rest of the world, while it screeched to a halt for the Anderson family.  After my Mom died, I was pissed/annoyed/dismayed that the rest of the world didn't come to a halt.  The whole rest of the world remained the same for those folks.  Seeing people do normal everyday things irritated me.

And yet, here I am, doing the normal, everyday things of our life.  Very unsettling place to be emotionally.

So the normal stuff I've been doing includes a sort of clean out--the Living room is almost back to it's wonderful serene state, and most of the Christmas things are being put away.  I have a bunch of winter stuff that I leave out.... snowmen, cardinals, several sets of lights in funny places.  Okay, not so funny, but still up for us to enjoy until we start enjoying those longer days of spring.

And for many, many folks in our neck of the woods, the total lack of winter so far has left everyone off kilter.  We're all waiting for winter.  We're currently in a stretch of 50, yep 50 degree days.  It should be 25 or something.... yuck. I must say the only time I didn't complain about it--in fact appreciated it, was yesterday, when we took down the train layout at the Toledo Zoo.  My son, DD the Younger, is a rabid rail fanner (even now, he's watching train cams, and plotting which model train engine he should buy ~~read Mom buys~~for him. ("Mom," says he, "it's a limited edition!")

So here are some pics of train layouts and displays from this winter.

The magic starts here, at the WPA built Museum of Science at the Toledo Zoo.  As well as the Great Hall, where we set up the trains, there's a balcony meeting space, and a fantastic auditorium.  It's a marvelous building.

 Entrez vous

Part of my section (on the top) that I call "Silent Night, Holy Night."  The Star-on-a-Stick is new this year. I really like it.

Three of my 6 churches I used this year.

My little Polar Bear family.

Da bears.

These are some of the folks who make up the O gauge division of the Swanton Train Club.  Dan C., Kurt B, Larry W,  the O gauge 'suprintendent', Jerry, and DD the Younger.

A view from the balcony.

Bird's eye view.  We run 6 tracks on this layout.  I think it's 12 by 26 this year.  We'd like to make it 8 feet longer!

Behind the scenes.... time to put stuff away...... it takes 5 people 5 days at 6 or 7 hours a day to set it up.  A day and a half to take down....

You should see all the wires underneath. In addition to the wiring needed to run the trains, nearly each building on the layout has it's own plug.

Heavy duty transformers, called ZW's run the tracks.  We use one for each of the 6 tracks.

The skeleton of the section I help decorate.

Ron M. is the Chief Electrician and Bottle Washer on the crew.

And now, I'm just sitting and enjoying our tree with just the lights on it.  The sun is shining brightly in the windows surrounding it, so it rather glows all by itself.  We'll take it down... soon... and put it on the back deck for the birds to use for cover, as they hoover up the seed we put out for them.

So if I neglected to tell you before, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!