Last Days

Lots to talk about in this final installment of Virginia City Summer! First we had a killer of a windstorm that played havoc with the place. Quarter size hail damaged every car parked in Nevada City; glad I was parked in Virginia City that day! The wind and hail broke 30 some windows in NC, a repair task that I didn’t have to do than god. The worst part of the wind was this poor bastard who got permanently blinded when a sign was ripped out of the ground. The sign was 8 feet by 12 feet made up of 3 sheets of ¾ plywood. This guy was creeping along the shoulder of the road with his family waiting out the storm. With the wind and the hail visibility was nearly zero. Out of nowhere a 4x8 hunk of this sign came crashing through the front windshield of this truck driving the corner of it right into his face.


This is the sign, the corner drove through the trucks windshield and the rest of it flipped up over the roof and tore off. I picked it up nearly 50yds from the starting point.



On a lighter note my brother asked me about the work truck so I am tossing in this great picture.



It is a 1984 Chevy ½ ton. This bad boy uses the 4.3 V6 and a mushy automatic. Really gets up and sits there when you tromp on it. I don’t want to make it out to be all bad, it is a very environmentally friendly rig too! Most of the time it runs on 4cyl, calling on the 5th cyl when you get on the throttle a little bit. When you really need the power and stand on it that 6th cyl more or less just flops around in there someplace.


The last thing I did before leaving is talk the bosses into allowing me to build a display along the tracks. It seemed like such a waste of space, time and resources not to have some dioramas for people to look at while riding the train.

Before:



After:



I like the damn thing. I was given lots of support on the project from the ‘permanent’ staff. I could only use lumber in the junk/burn pile and it couldn’t interfere with my ‘assigned duties’. Knocked the thing out in 2 days with some polish time here and there in the mornings. The tourists loved it but certain individuals simply grumbled that it should have been built with solid rough-cut 2x6’s. These certain individuals were also the ones responsible for using only junk wood. I don’t think they thought it could be pulled off with scrap. Ha ha! See that big boy, that’s my ass, feel free to kiss it!

On the anal fornication note, good by! Tune back into the out-of-plumb blog to catch up on the latest house happenings.