January 22, 2006

Finally a sunny day again. I opened up the blinds in the office and Oreo went straight in there to enjoy his warm patch on the floor. He loves laying in the sunlight. Especially now that the house is never over 65F degrees. And much of the time much colder than that.

Since we didn’t go to bed until well after 3:00 this morning we slept in rather later. I was awake by 9:30 but Dominica wasn’t out of bed until a little after noon. Dad was supposed to come over after church to get lunch but he forgot his wallet and had to run home before coming over to get some food.

The roadbed that I layed down last night seems to have taken quite well and I am looking forward to attempting to ballast the track later today. Our plan is to do some shopping up in Henrietta. Dominica and I have some jointly assigned holiday money and we are thinking of purchasing some new furniture. Right now we have a futon in the living room that is not very useful for much except when someone is staying over which isn’t very often. It is not a very comfortable place to sit on normal occassions because of the bed frame underneath. So our plan is to replace it with a normal sofa that will be far more practical and take up less space in the living room and to move the futon down to the basement where we intend to finish off the first room at the bottom of the stairs to turn it into a small guest bedroom. That way when people do stay at our house they are not stuck sleeping in the living room but can have a small “private” room to themselves.

Dad arrived around 1:00 and we went over to the Omega. I lost .5 lb this by this morning over yesterday’s gain which was in addition to two pounds lost during the two weeks of South Beach Phase I that I did directly prior to that. So my total weight loss since starting dieting is 8.5 lbs. Far from my goal but it is a start. After lunch we went to Walmart and did some shopping. Mostly groceries. Dad also delivered my new Con Cor “Chicago, Burlington & Quincy” boxcar set that arrived by post yesterday. They are very nice looking units. Three matching red Burlington boxcars in a set so each one has a different number on it so it doesn’t look like three identical cars on the layout.

We got back home around 4:00 and hung out with Oreo for a little while. Then it was off to Henrietta. We went to Value City Furniture but we very quickly realized that Dominica had gotten an incorrect idea of how much furniture was going to cost so we didn’t shop there for very long. Not that the prices were high but we had been hoping for some seriously low prices. We are not really in need of furniture right at the moment and buying a bunch for no particular reason is kind of a bad use of our current funds, I think.

Since we were in the area we swung into PetCo and got Oreo a doggie seatbelt. We are worried about him travelling in the car without one. We then ran over to Borders and picked up a couple of books about Chicago so that we can plan out mini vacation that we are taking in a month.

We stopped by Andy’s apartment while we were up in the area so that we could borrow Star Trek: The Next Generation Season Three. We have been going through television series really rapidly recently.

Dominica and I came home and watched some of TNG while Dominica knit and I worked on laying the ballast onto the track that I have corked. I have never done this process before so I am learning as I go. I managed to ballast about three quarters of the 2′ x 2′ section that I am working on and should easily be able to finish the rest tomorrow. It is all wet tonight so I won’t have a good idea of how it worked until it has dried which it should by the morning. So far it seems to be going well. I think that it looks pretty good. The nice thing about ballast is that it really holds the track in place. There is a lot of material and glue to keep everything solid.

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