Wow... I'm tired. This morning started at 3am Pacific to catch a 6:15am flight from Portland to Milwaukee, via Denver.

It's now 9:15pm Pacific... but my body feels the 11:15pm Central it is here.

I made it to Milwaukee at 1:45pm, where our local assistant, George Nefstead, was waiting for me at the airport. We discovered last year that it can be a true wonder to have someone familiar with the local area to assist us with logistical and navigational matters, and  once again this was proven true - since it's "Orange Barrel Season" on the freeway from the airport to downtown, George took us around on ground roads, and it took maybe 15 - 20 minutes between our leaving the airport and pulling up to the Hilton.

I made it down to the convention in time to catch the last bit of Joe's Siskiyou Potpourri....  and then it was into our clinic on Online Resources for Model Railroaders, which explained about mailing lists, forums, blogs, and RSS feeds (don't know what an RSS Feed is? Check Joe's video out HERE.) We also threw in a healthy dose of Internet security... I'm afraid we might have frighted a few people with that. Then again, I'm afraid we might _not_ have frightened a few people with that. Since I clean up after the results as part of my day job, viruses, worms, trojans and scams cannot be overemphasised.

After dinner, I attended a class by Patrick Lana (MMR) on modeling agriculture, with an emphasis on stuff grown in Iowa, where his N Scale CRANDIC (Cedar Rapids and Iowa Central) RR is based. An interesting class from a theory standpoint for an HO scale modeler, with some definite hints about what you should be looking for before designing vegetation, but I'm not sure many of his practical methods will "scale up" to HO without it being very apparent that what you are looking at is very much a stand in for the real thing.

For the 8 o'clock hour (clinics are 1 1/2 hours long, with a 1/2 hour break), I went to the Woodland Scenics clinic on their Subterrain foam system. Fran and Miles Hale presented a good clinic describing all the different pieces to the Subterrain System, describing their strengths, weaknesses, and in some cases better options.   I personally like their incline riser system - it's a nice way to easily incorporate a known angle under your track.

The last clinic of the night was the innocently named "Documenting Your Layout" by William Jameson.

As Joe commented, "Documenting what on your layout?"

The answer: Everything. Mr. Jameson is a proponet of documenting every piece of your layout, from the benchwork design to the track & electrical wiring, DCC wiring, decoders & addresses, locomotives, rolling stock and buildings - in his opinion, if you can think of it, document it. Spreadsheet your models for insurance purposes. Because in 10 years when something breaks in that snarl of wiring (or even in your beautifully laid out wiring), are you really going to remember how it was all put together? Peppered throughout with humorous and instructive anecdotes along the lines of "don't let this happen to you," it's a clinic that I'm glad I'm attended, although I'm not sure how far I'm actually going to get towards meeting it's goals.

Bedtime....