Wednesday Happenings

Got up to another cooler day, had coffee with Donna saw another storm front moving across MO on the Satellite map and sure enough it started to rain and has continued most of the day. Not getting any thing done, at least out side, and the truck will stay parked again. After Donna left for the truck company, I went down and the computer fired up just fine and I started to check blogs and other sites I frequent.

Wanted to clarify my blog of the other day, when I said I had 3000 pictures to catalog, these are not all pictures I have taken, like blogging I have a bunch of websites I go to where I post the train pictures I take and in return download the pictures they have from collections from all over the USA & Canada. When I download them now that you can use long file names I rename them with the date they were taken, location and subject as the file name, then as I said I first put them in a master file called Newpics, and then I go back and sort and route them to the folder I want them to go in, For example I have a Steam Folder for all the steam engines, except for MY favorite Road which I have a separate Dlwsteam folder.

If I wasn't the photographer whoever took the picture usually has an ID copyright printed somewhere on the picture. I won't repost anything that is copyrighted without permission.

How big is my collection in digital form, Thousands, my collection of my favorite home road Erie-Lackawanna now comprises 7702 pictures, The DLW,1090, The Erie.1234, Dlwsteam 547, Eriesteam 1057, as you can see steam pictures are hard to come by since rail fan photography didn't gain any popularity until the post ww2 era, when steam except for Canada was on the decline. You lucky guys had it into the early 60's. The total count of pictures is hard to say since I have 155 folders now and some contain hundreds of pictures.

As a comparison I have 564 pictures in my blog folder that I have taken since January. So you can see the train pics would be in the thousands. I use a 60gig hard drive to store them on and it has 40 gig of free space left. I also back that drive up to DVD's on a monthly basis.

Here are a couple of my favorite Steam pictures.

I included one each from the Canadian National, the green engine known as a Bullet nosed Betty it still see's excursion duty, and the maroon Canadian Pacific Royal Hudson that still see's excursion duty in British Columbia.

The rest are all from the USA, the third from the bottom is a shot I took if the Frisco 1522 passing through Old Monroe MO. It is now in the Train Museum in Kirkwood MO. and  I posted a picture of it there on an earlier blog when I spent the day at the museum. As you can see the color had already shifted on a couple before they were scanned so that is why digitizing collections is so important the dyes used in prints and slides is prone to turning red and shifting color with age especially after about 30 year, look at some of your old family albums when color first started and you will be seeing it.

I will now turn my thoughts to cooking for one tonight as Donna goes to the restaurant, it will be something easy like Baked Cannelloni since that will give me leftover's for a second night later in the week. There is a sort of method to my madness, My sister Wendy says she is looking forward to my cooking since she knows my Mom did her job right and taught the boys how to cook. She always told me it gave her peace of mind in case my wife ever threw me out, she knew i wouldn't starve.

Poor Rigg's lays will his tongue out when all those good smells from the oven fill the kitchen, but there is a strict rule laid down by Mom. No people food for Rigg's so he just wait's till the bitter end and when the dish's are clean and put away he finally goes to his dish and finish's his doggie food. Can't blame him for trying though.

Be safe out there, Sam & Donna.