Hmm. I’ve been pretty lax for the last three months, not posting progress reports on any structure builds, so I’m a bit behind. I started this kit in mid September, and have been making slow progress especially during the month of November as I was preparing to move back home to MN from NC. The particular kit (manufacturered in 1990) is from a company called Fine Scale Miniatures (“FSM”), in … [Read more...]
Unsure what the title of this should be
August 19, 2020 By
A long one, folks. You can read and be bored, or you can skip - doesn’t matter to me. I’m not ranting this time, nothing to rant about; all my ranting was expended last week. With this post, I start on a topic because something I read “just now” (ha, an hour or two ago) stirred some memories from my childhood. It later progresses into misc thoughts of my adult life... ====== I’m reading a … [Read more...]
Election related – summary of electoral college stats
August 11, 2020 By
1932, landslide Roosevelt 462, other guy 59 1936, landslide Roosevelt 523, other guy 8 1940, landslide Roosevelt 449, other guy 82 1944, landslide Roosevelt 432, other guy 99 1948, Truman 303, other guys 189, 38 1952, landslide Eisenhower 442, other guy, 89 1956, landslide Eisenhower 457, other guy 73 1960, Kennedy 303, other guys 219, 15 1964, … [Read more...]
Hertz bankruptcy
May 24, 2020 By
Hertz car rental bankruptcy. How can a company with “only” $9 billion in annual revenue even think it will ever be able to pay off ~$17 billion in debt? Their debt load is almost twice as much as their annual revenue. Either way, even before the virus situation, the expected average annual earnings (profit) of a Fortune 500 company is around 8-10 percent of annual revenue. So, let’s round that … [Read more...]
Thrivent reflections – followup to a post from 2019-05-24
May 24, 2020 By
Huh. How things rapidly changed after I wrote this post a year ago. A month after this, myself and twenty others in the IT dept were given four weeks notice that we were to be laid off at the end of July; the VP mentioned below (Sanjaye) was subsequently arrested for child abuse (teenage daughter/step daughter), leading to his termination; And lastly, within just three weeks of the actual … [Read more...]
Reading, and Wikipedia
May 24, 2020 By
Wikipedia is my downfall. My interest in learning is my downfall. Case in point: I started to read the latest John Sandford murder mystery a few days ago. Usually his stories are based in and around the Twin Cities since that is where he’s from. This book, though, follows his protagonist to Washington, D.C. I get distracted by something the author mentions regarding D.C., and there I go, down the … [Read more...]
quote from randy peprock re pandemic re-opening
May 22, 2020 By
“Reopening everything and pretending like the pandemic is all over is like when you're watching a Friday the 13th movie and you think it's safe for the campers to come out of hiding after Jason is "killed", and then he jumps back out of the lake with a butcher knife. Stay safe. We're not out of the woods yet.” … [Read more...]
Vigilante murder in Georgia
May 14, 2020 By
Vigilante/cold blooded murderer/redneck: (paraphrasing) “well, I thought he had a gun, he reached into his pants”. The young man in question, was out jogging, and had shorts on. Here are my thoughts: When I wear shorts to go to the store, i usually carry my cell phone and my wallet in my short’s pockets, having just those two items tend to weigh down the shorts at times, causing me to have to … [Read more...]
Pandemic – reopening – rude people
May 11, 2020 By
What is the world (i.e., these United States) coming to? A small business owner runs an ice cream parlor, and re-opens his business with social distancing rules for ordering, etc., and within the first day (or evening), people coming into the place are so rude to his staff that he has to then close it up again. It’s just ice cream, folks. You can live without … [Read more...]
Originally posted on FB – some thoughts on my structure kit building
June 14, 2019 By
A shout-out to Doug at FOS Scale Models, and Art and company at Bar Mills: both of these gentlemen (and, Art’s crew) are master designers of structure kits. In the last two yrs, I’ve built ~three dozen kits from these two kit manufacturers (and, one, so far, from Kenny Crump’s KCWorkshop), and I just love the “character” of their designs. It just makes building the kits a lot more fun, and also … [Read more...]
