I'm still getting my stuff together.

After a lot of reading online reviews and forums, debating with myself, and online shopping, I have finally acquired a track saw, for better or worse.

I started leaning toward the Kreg, decided I liked the Bosch better, realized the Bosch was just as expensive as a festool, and then finally dialed back to the Makita.

My second road trip necessary to get all my stuff in one place is now history. I have two more road trips to go, unfortunately.

This trip I flew to northern Virginia, where my Mom has recently moved from her independent living apartment into an assisted living room in the same facility. So I inherited half her furniture (prematurely). I rented a Penske truck and loaded up the stuff and drove it to Laredo,  TX, where it's now in storage.

I have a non-railroading question that's sort of carpentry related. I'd like some advice from the various capable people here. 

I have just retrieved the parts to my office desk. It's a monster of a modular thing, fits in a corner and takes up 8 feet along each of two walls. I've had it for years, and it's been moved around a few times, and each time its moved a few more of the pins that hold it together get broken. These pins are meant to allow assembly and disassembly, but they don't survive moving well.

My path to a layout has been one where I had to get over a lot of 'humps' before I could begin. I've finished the remodel of the apartment, bought a (used) van, and most recently completed my first road trip back to Texas where my stuff is stored and retrieved half of it. 

Index to Eastwind's blog entries:

• Track Saw Acquired

• Track Saw Acquired

• Second Road Trip Completed

• Carpentry Question

• First Road Trip Completed

I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with a good name for my railroad. Since it's freelance, I'm not really constrained. I've been thinking about ways to incorporate my location into the name, with nothing catchy coming to mind.

Inspired today, by a post by Michael Maurer, I've decided to call it the TBNL or TB&L railroad. I'm not quite sure which way I want to go on the N. TB&L looks more like so many other names, but really the acronym needs an N not an And. 

It will stand for the To Be Named Later Railroad. 

I've never built a multi-deck layout, so I've only read discussions about whether to build top-down or bottom up. In reading these, the problem of bumping one's head on the deck above seems to stand out to me as a bigger objection than some of the others. The problem in building bottom up that resonates the most with me is dropping stuff on the laid track or scenery. 

So my questions are, A) are these really the two most significant issues, and B) how much of a problem are they? Assuming you know dropping stuff is a problem, how well can you mitigate it? 

Delta is scheduled to make landfall sometime early tomorrow (wednesday) morning, between 2-4 am. As of yesterday it looked like no big deal, just a cat 1, but this morning it was 2, then 3, then 4, all within a couple of hours, and the last I heard was max sustained winds are 145 mph, which I think is at the high end of cat 4, nearly cat 5.

Before I can get going building a layout, I needed to complete the renovation I had planned for the apartment. Although I closed in early May, I couldn't start because the government had a prohibition on construction work due to the pandemic. That was lifted in June, but the building has a restriction against renovations during the peak vacation season of July and August, and June wasn't enough time to get done, so I elected to postpone everything until September.