Wednesday I spent very much as though I were at work, buried to my elbows in a computer. L’s mother had asked for advice in upgrading her system, an Empirical Dementor 4400 that’s five years old and sorta showing its age. I’d ordered her a new CityBest 320, an entry-level system that’s got all the horsepower she’s likely to need for several years, and a flat panel monitor that just blows away the CRT she was using. I got her the CityBest instead of another Dementor because (1) I don’t like the Dementor product line and never have, and (2) she wanted to stay with Windows XP instead of changing up to Vista. Until a few days ago, the Empire refused to sell any Dementor machine with XP rather than Vista on it; they caved in after a huge customer outcry from people who weren’t ready to go to Vista, wanted to wait until the first service pack comes out to get rid of some of the inevitable bugs, didn’t want to buy as much hardware as Vista insists on having, or just plain didn’t like Vista.
Wednesday morning I started opening the boxes, which had arrived the Wednesday before, had everything unpacked in a few minutes and began assembling bits. I’d also convinced my MIL to try switching from dialup to cable modem for Net access, and the installer came in and hooked up the connection a few days ago. (I’m less than impressed with the cable company; they managed to louse up her DirecTV connection, trying to share the wire with their Internet signal. We haven’t got that straightened out till yet.)
The setup, configuration, and data migration were insanely clean, and within a few hours I had a working system with everything talking, registered, installed, and activated. I even did a debug/format/reinstall on the Demented, and once I got back to the as-shipped factory config with nothing but the OS and drivers on, it was remarkable how much the old girl’s performance improved.
L and I agreed that Thursday was good for taking M to ride on a train, something she’d particularly asked to do. We drove into southern Pennsylvania to the Strasburg Railroad, a nineteenth-century short line that operates as a working-museum-cum-daisy-picker these days. (“Daisy-picker: a railroad operating short tourist excursion runs.”) It was a nice day, so we got tickets for the open-air cars rather than the closed “parlor” cars. In nineteenth-century terms, this meant we were riding third-class rather than first-class, but M was pleased by it. Because the railroad lacks a turntable at the far end of the route, the engine hooked up to the rearmost car, where we sat, and backed all the way from Strasburg to Paradise, about a four-mile run. Sitting next to the engine as we did, we got a fine, smoky, noisy ride of it for the trip out, although the engineer made the locomotive (a Baldwin 2-10-0 Decapod, built in 1924 for the Great Western Railway) run as smoothly and quietly as ever I’ve seen a steam engine go.
When we got to Paradise, at the end of the line (you didn’t know it was so easy to get to Paradise, did you?), the engineer pulled the cars onto a side track, unhooked from the rear car, went around on the main line and rehooked to the first parlor car, and ran forward back to Strasburg. The round trip took about 45 minutes, about right for a family outing; the little kids don’t have time to get bored and the bigger kids adults get to feel as though they’re having a proper ride for their money.
The fireman watches as #90 backs out of the Strasburg station
A view across the valley
On the cars
#90 cuts loose and backs away at Paradise
Passing us by, on the way to the head of the train
Rounding a curve on the way home
There and back again: pulling into Strasburg station
We had lunch at the station cafe once we were back, then went (literally) across the road to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, home to an excellent collection of rolling stock and railroad equipment. M, as is her habit, complained of having to walk so much—at least by her lights—but was still interested by the exhibits when I stopped to explain things about them: how they were used, how they worked, and so on. (L says museum visits are generally better when Daddy’s along to explain things, ’cos he generally knows what things are on sight.)
We left the Pennsylvania Station Museum at just before a quarter to four and with enough time to read a magazine, we went back to Baltimore Fallston.
Next: Industry, and I provide Local Color at a cocktail party.
Refurbish the icy snowplow. Fnord.
2 Responses to What I Did on My Holidays, Part the Twoth