Morning drive

I like driving to work at this time of year, traffic is rather light and the sun isn’t in my eyes. Somehow all of the places I have worked at here in Las Vegas are east of our house, so I get the sun in my eyes driving in and the setting sun back in my eyes driving home. I usually work early, and for this job try to get out of the house before 6. It’s a 27 mile drive out to Henderson for me, but fortunately there are large freeways all of the way. Unfortunately the drive curves from due east to south and back again, so that no matter where the sun comes up for half the year it is directly ahead on some portion of the road. But for now I can make it in before it shows


I like the open sky, and the shape of the mountains all around. In the southwest US there aren’t any trees on the mountains, just rocks, so there are always interesting shadows.
We also get a lot of high level moisture over the mountains to the south, resulting in clouds that we don’t have in the summertime


Some of you have asked about the trains I play with – they are small ones, in the US it’s called N scale, with engines and cars that fit in the palm of your hand. This is the type of module we create


This one is five feet (1 ½ meters) long, so you can see how small everything is. People in my club build and decorate pieces like this, then we get together and hook them up to make a big layout and run trains. Nobody has a basement or extra room in their house for building a big layout, so we all make small parts that we combine. I like doing the wood work, and build most of the core shells for everyone, then each person puts down the track (according to a standards manual), wires it up and decorates with scenery and buildings. Most people do southwest scenes, with few trees and lots of sharp hills and rocks. Each piece is about the size of a coffee table, there are different size legs so I and set one up in front of the couch and sit watching TV while playing. Everyone needs ways to spend money, right?