The Miller family slept in a bit this morning. We were quite tired after last night.
We got up this morning and set about cleaning the house. The floors are good and the furniture is all in place but there is plenty left to do, mostly in the kitchen. Dominica got right up and red up the nursery taking down the air mattress which only Ramona really seems to use. The house was looking pretty good by noon.
The Laguna family, Genaro, Dunia and Landen, came up to visit a little while after noon. Oreo was very excited when he learned that they were coming. As they pulled into the parking lot I asked Oreo “are Dunia and Genaro here?” and he got very excited and started running around the house.
After the Lagunas arrived, Oreo was so excited to see them that he had to run down to the basement and play with his rubber ball for a while. He was very excited. Dunia and Genaro run the daycare where Oreo used to attend. He really misses them. They were his other family for two years since even before we moved from North Brunswick, NJ to Newark, NJ. He only stopped going there when we moved up to Peekskill. So it has been a while since he has seen them and I am sure that he wonders where they have been.
You can check out pics that the Lagunas took of Landen, Liesl and Oreo on Landen’s blog.
Landen and Liesl are roughly the same age. Landen is just over four months old. He was born just when we moved up to Peekskill. They have not had a chance to really meet until today. Landen did send Liesl a Valentine’s day card – her first from a boy her own age. Her very first Valentine’s Day card was from her great grandpa Tocco.
Most of the time, Landen and Liesl were not all that interested in each other but at a few points they realized that each other was there and were very interested in each other. We managed to get some good pictures of the two of them together. Hopefully I will get those posted to Flickr tomorrow or the day after.
We all visited until late afternoon. Then, for dinner, we all went out to the New City Diner in Yorktown Heights for some dinner.
After dinner the Laguna family drove back home and we came back home and spent the evening working on the model railroad diorama while watching Murder She Wrote and Waiting for God. The work on the diorama went really well tonight. The diorama was just white plaster at the beginning of the evening and by the end of the night it was all but finished. I can’t believe how quickly the work went.
Tonight’s work included painting the rock faces, tunnel entrance and all of the plaster. It was a bit tough because the scenary kit had been sitting, apparently for years, in the sunny window of the train shop and all of the paint had long since dried and disappeared so I had to work with the dust that remained, but it worked out okay. I would not have used what little I had had this been a real layout but since it was an educational diorama it seemed that getting the work done seemed to be a bit more important.
After the painting came the application of the ground cover. That went pretty well. It took a while to get all of the ground cover down. After that came the creation of the trees. I made Woodland Scenics trees that use plastic trunk forms combined with clump foliage that gets glued to the tree after I bend it to an appropriate shape.
Making the trees is definitely the most difficult portion of the diorama especially as the glue that you are supposed to use to make it work easily was ruined from having been in the store window for so long so I had to make due with a different type of glue.