Reflections on Progress and Principle

It's Christmas Eve, 2024, somehow already.  This has been a year of intensity.  There has been some great progress but some monumental challenge, too.  

Progress on the OCS continues, and brings a great deal of satisfaction in a time when I am feeling flattened by so much.  Recent progress is getting trucks modified for car 12, and it went well, thanks to great resources by Wes Reminder again.  

Walthers makes aftermarket trucks, these being the GSC 41-N-11 models.  They are nicely done, and an even swap for the stock trucks with the Budd Lounge.  But a few changes are needed to more closely match the photos.  

Here's the changes on the left:  I modified the brake cylinders, machined flat the covered bearings and installed new exposed roller bearing caps, removed the exterior brake shoes, and installed a new level surface on the top.  I still need here to remove the vertical strut, before painting the trucks the correct CR Pullman Green color.  

Again, what a satisfying project.  The modified trucks on car 12 are on the left above, with car 27 on the right.  Between the roof changes and now the trucks for 12, it is neat to see the two together.  

A good friend of mine insists that time in your later 40's is a 'lunchpail job' - one where you wake up each day with the alarm, and go to work, then go home and do the family thing, and the drive-the-kids-to-activities thing, and deal with elderly family thing....and then crash at the end of your day only to have to do the whole damned thing again the next day, sometimes out of sheer principle.

It is hard to keep perspective.  So much we have and so much we do is only because of our good fortune, or hard work, or perseverance - or a combination of all three.  The feeling we ought to have is one of gratitude, not grind.  And yet our daily chores seem a grind, despite our best intentions.

Those chores, our volunteer activities and our lunchpail jobs have a lot in common with detail projects like this one.  No one makes you do anything, really, in your 40's.  You're the adult now, and so the motivation has to come from you.  And that is the case with work, fatherhood, husbandry, and modeling.  Sometimes you gotta just get up and get moving out of sheer principle.  It isn't always fun or rewarding, not right away; in any case it doesn't feel like something I have the energy to do.  

And here we are, Christmas Eve 2024...despite all of that.  When it isn't magic for you, that means you are the magic for those around you. 

May peace find each of us in 2025!   Merry Christmas!