Moving Forward

It has been nearly four months since my last Note, but I’ve been very busy.  That home office I mentioned back in January?  As of April 1st, I actually have a functional home office.  The new window blinds went in Thursday and my eldest granddaughter helped me move the side and back sections of the desk into position.  A bookcase arrived Thursday as well, so assembling that will be the next project.   I’m still trying to figure out what pictures and other stuff I’ll put on the walls.

We closed our downtown office as of the end of March. Because both my business partner and I tend to do the bulk of our work with remote access software, there just wasn’t enough foot traffic to justify keeping it open.   We’ll make house calls and office visits for things we can’t do remotely.  Our servers and a work area have been relocated to an office space in Holiday.  Our office phone is now cellular, so it is easier to reach us by phone than it was before.

From a practical standpoint, the change is quite the upgrade in connectivity.  At the old downtown office, I shared a 100 meg cable connection with the servers.  With the move, both our Holiday office and my home office have their own 500 meg fiber connections to the world.  The fact that the faster connections cost less than the old connection is the icing on the cake.

I’ve been organizing the stuff we moved over from the downtown office.  At this point, I can readily put my hands on pretty much anything I need.  There are just a few more boxes to unpack, inventory and organize.

The biggest project during the last four months has been preparing to downsize to a smaller home without any stairs.    We’re not moving far.  The new place is less than 6 miles from the home we’ve lived in for the past 33 years.  We plan to stay involved with church and other activities that we’ve enjoyed over the years.  You will still see us downtown enjoying our favorite places and attending various events.

A few weeks ago, I cleared enough space to set up a temporary train table at our new home.  I’ve been able to start cleaning up and testing some of the trains I’ve picked up recently.  This train was a $5 find at the church rummage sale.  I had to disassemble the locomotive and do some serious cleaning to get it to run.  I put it back together, added some fresh grease and oil and now it runs great.  I’ll be cleaning and lubricating all the old trains as I get ready to start running them again.

Reassembly of the wood framework for the permanent train layout has been pending the installation of the window blinds.  Now that the blinds are installed, I’m going to set things up a bit differently than the way the layout was setup in the attic.  Murphy’s Law as it applies to model trains is that a derailment will always occur at the most difficult to reach place on the layout.  The attic layout had some hard to reach spots that required crawling underneath everything to reach.  If I plan things right, I should be able to eliminate the need to crawl on my hands and knees to get to the far points on the layout.

This is exciting for me as the trains were in the attic at the old house and I had to climb some very steep stairs to get to them.  Their new home will be on the ground floor, literally right outside my home office.

I’m also looking forward to visiting the model train club that meets five minutes from our new home.  I hope to pick up some pointers on how to incorporate better scenery into my new layout.

We still have a few more details to work through, but moving day is fast approaching.

In closing, I’d like to congratulate Bertell Butler, IV on his election to the New Port Richey City Council earlier this month.  Bertell is a very nice young man who will bring new energy and a fresh perspective to the council.  Carolyn and I both wish him the best as he begins his term as a city councilman.

Rob