This Is Drivel

Category: hobby

  • beer

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    The frame is finished, the formica countertop is tightly screwed down, and half the backboard is in place. It’s starting to look as if this is really going to happen. I didn’t do much to the bench tonight, just enough to say I’m still working on it. I added railings between the legs of the… Read.

  • phoenix

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    Two and a half years? It’s been two and a half years since I’ve tried brewing beer? A man with priorities as screwed up as that should not be allowed to consider himself a home brewer. I hang my head in shame, wondering what the hell I’ve been doing with my life, and offer these… Read.

  • casemod

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    What I’ve always wanted is to have a model train layout like the old-timers used to have: A tangled pile of spaghetti in a small corner of the basement with simple block control from a master control panel that has lots and lots of switches with toggles as thick as your thumb and a throttle… Read.

  • dinah

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    To give you an idea what’s been going on along the Lost Continent Railway, here’s an overhead shot of the layout. Compare with April 4, 2011. In my spare time this weekend, between washing clothes and tending to a plumbing emergency, I laid twenty-four feet of track; made templates to build four of the switches… Read.

  • choo-choo

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    I bought a diesel engine choo-choo at the train show last weekend and it’s taken me until tonight to finally put it on the track and run it back and forth. With that lack of commitment I have to ask myself: Do I really deserve this? But after listening to that engine purr and watching… Read.

  • broken

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    I’ve just come home from my annual trip to the Madison model train show, where I was doing a pretty good job of sticking to my promise to myself not to spend a lot of dough in spite of all the tempting toys. In a room as big as two football fields, I found a… Read.

  • ullage

    What do you call that empty space at the top of a beer bottle? There’s already a word for it that goes back centuries, but I don’t think I heard anyone use one word consistently for it until the last five or ten years when I started hanging around beer brewers, who usually call it… Read.

  • subterrainian

    A dull, dreary day is a perfect day stay in the basement, working on the model railroad layout. I spent most of the day running a subroadbed through a tight curve that will end up at one of the three terminals on the line, and at the very highest point as well. The way the… Read.

  • towering

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    There are five books in a teetering tower on top of my bedside book case. I think of these as the books I’m currently reading, even though I’m only really reading one of them right now: Empire of the Summer Moon. Before my birthday came along I was reading a dozen or so pages each… Read.

  • stars

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    Oh I have just passed a most happy hour watching Brian Cox explain how atoms work. No, really. You may think you don’t have an hour to watch a video about a subject that you think you’ve never been interested in about knowledge you think you’ll never use, but just give him at least ten… Read.

photo of the author and the author's best friend