I had been looking forward to last weekend for almost a month because I knew it would be a good opportunity to visit one of my favorite shopping haunts – a hobby shop. Unfortunately, circumstances foiled my scheme.
We have a railroad layout in the basement, not twenty feet from where I sit, dream, plan, write, grade, fume, and for the most part, avoid real work. I suppose I could be over at the table avoiding work instead of sitting here, but the layout has been gathering dust for the at least the past year, perhaps two, who knows, I’ve lost count. I have been lured away from my railroad by other activities – family, sports, scouts, school, and you can just about name it, whatever it was it had a higher number than railroading. Continue reading Old toys





Hellfighters with John Wayne was one of the first movies I remember watching as a kid. I saw it at the Palms Theater in Sugar Land when I was in first grade when we were preparing to move to Venezuela. I saw many movies at the Palms; it was the kind of theater that every small town had with one screen, a concession stand, its walls were painted with a tropical theme lit just right before the movie began to give the feeling of being somewhere besides Sugar Land, Texas. I remember the children’s movies I saw there, but Hellfighters was for adults and there was something about watching movies with real action like oil well fires. It was hardly a great movie, but I remember it well. We even saw it at the theater in Venezuela, it was in Spanish with English subtitles, but they had cut the part at the end about Venezuelan rebels. I have seen it many times since and I even have a copy in iTunes my brother Warren gave me a few years ago.