pcornelius

I prefer to travel by rail, when I can.  So why not make a list of the trips I've taken?  Most of these, especially the long-distance ones, are since 2000.  I'm sure it's not complete, & I haven't included airport trams or that sort of thing.

Amtrak intercity routes (East/North-bound and West/South-bound trips)
California Zephyr (Emeryville/Chicago)
Reno—Chicago
none
Capitol Limited (Chicago/Washington)
completed both ways
Lake Shore Limited (Chicago/New York/Boston)
Chicago—New York
Buffalo—Chicago
Maple Leaf
Niagara Falls—Toronto (yes, I have made an Amtrak trip which originated & terminated entirely within Canada)
(none)
Northeast Corridor Services (Washington/Boston)
Philadelphia—Boston, over multiple trips
BWI-Washington Union
Southwest Chief (Chicago/Los Angeles)
Flagstaff—Galesburg
none
Sunset Limited (New Orleans/Los Angeles)
Maricopa—San Antonio
San Antonio—Los Angeles
Texas Eagle (Chicago/San Antonio)
completed both ways, over multiple trips

Commuter and Short-Haul services

DART rail (Dallas)
numerous trips
Government of Ontario Railways
Toronto—Niagara Falls
MTA Metro-North (New York area)
NYC Grand Central—Rye Brook (New Haven line)
MTA subways & elevateds
various trips, including to Coney Island & Battery Park
MTA Staten Island Railway
complete route, round trip
RTD (Denver)
various trips
Santorini (Thera), Greece cable car service
downward only (makes no intermediate stops)
SEPTA (Philadelphia)
Drexel Hill—30th Street
Tandy Center (Fort Worth, free private surface/subway, now discontinued)
complete route, both directions, probably getting on & off at all stations over the years
Tarantula (Fort Worth & Western RR steam tourist excursion, now moved out of the city)
at least one trip within Fort Worth
Texas State Railroad (Palestine/Rusk, steam tourist excursion)
round trip (I think, I was about 4 years old)
Toronto subways & street rail
various trips
Trinity Railway Express (Fort Worth/Dallas)
complete route
Metro (Washington, DC)
various trips
Wellington, New Zealand cable car service
complete route, upward only
VTA (San Jose) light rail
two trips

I've long had a desire to see a Space Shuttle launch in person.  STS-135 was my last chance, & I made it, by the skin of my teeth, & at the cost of a perfectly good car.
( "Image Intensive" doesn't begin to cover it )

 Now, I admit it was, to no small extent, just the luck of the draw :  the questions I was presented with happened to be ones I was less than totally unprepared to answer.  The examiners kept bringing me the tests, & I kept taking them, which is nothing new in my life, & the last one I passed with no points to spare.
Still & all, though, there wasn't another one to be taken after that, & one of the examiners said it was only the third time he had ever seen a new license candidate pass the Technician, General, & Extra classes all in one sitting.

So, the paperwork has to go to Newington (Connecticut), thence to Washington (DC), but within probably 10 days I will be a fully-licensed Amateur Radio operator, with the legal right to do all manner of crazy things, such as carry on conversations with people on the other side of the Earth by bouncing radio signals off the Moon.

EDIT :  Just call me AE5VI

 I see that, in response to a series of publicized suicides of teenagers with homosexual tendencies, a campaign has started to assure queer kids that "it gets better", that, even if they think death would be better than what they are living through now, they can expect their lives to improve.



Maybe that's true.  I rather hope it is.  For people like me, though, there's very little such hope.



The plain fact seems to be that if you haven't developed the skills necessary for making & keeping friends by the time you leave high school, you're not likely to get another opportunity.  Some manage it in university, but it's difficult, especially given the kind of schedule pressure that exists in most programmes.



Out in the 'real world', if anything, matters are worse.  Business managers these days expect emotional commitment as well as competent work, and people rarely stay in the same job for ten years anymore.  Extended-family support structures are fragile or nonexistent for most people, as are the long-term stable social affiliations which went with them.  The days of arranged marriages, likewise, are long gone.

Even if some of these changes are, on balance, for the better, the effect is to frustrate the kind of person who needs many years of constant contact to get comfortable with people, while simultaneously depriving him of the safe niches he could have occupied even fifty years ago.



Few of us actually want to be alone, but even if we did prefer solitude to loneliness in a crowd of strangers, we hardly have the option.  There are no lighthouse keepers anymore.

Two, actually.  Both, of course, are for activities related to the Luna Project which neither I nor the Publications Fund in its current deplorable state (depleted by expenses & lack of revenue) can pay for.
One is to send me to Australia & New Zealand, to the World Science Fiction Convention & the New Zealand natcon, with a $1000 goa (& basically a one-week time limit).  The other is to print colour promotional posters, with a $500 goal, & no real time limit.  We'll see how it goes ;  at some point, we really have to get cracking on doing things, or the Project is going to continue being just a nice idea.

This Raleigh  NASFiC has been rather quiet.  It wasn't unenjoyable, but it seemed poorly attended ;  we were like a handful of dried pease rattling around in a bin.
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One thing I didn't get a photograph of was an unmarked, pearl-grey blimp which I saw while sitting outside Monday about noon.  Unfortunately, by the time I noticed it & got my digital camera started up, it had passed behind some buildings, & it didn't come around again.  It was bigger than a Lightship, I'd say 200 to 300 thousand cubic feet, but I was so busy messing with the camera that I didn't catch identifying details.  I am pretty sure it had a conventional tail, rather than X or Y configuration.

…but it's probably inevitable.

That's the Maison Ikkoku TV Memorial Box, disemboweled & spread out on my living-room floor. 96 episodes of something like realism from Takahashi, with an end no less. And the biggest single object in my library of anime LaserDiscs — Memorial Box is a good term, the thing is a monument to the animator's art.
Someday, I'll get through it all.  Some people would slam it down in one go, but I'm not in a hurry.  Big as it is, it's one item out of five hundred, all with their own stories to tell.