Happy New Year

How did I spend New Year's Eve 2007? Doing nine weeks of Laundry, baby! Walked the first half dozen loads down in a hamper held about me knees but piled up to my chin downstairs to the laundry area and had full run of the machines for the next six hours or so. Pop in the light loads first, dry the towels last. What a day. Went ten for sixteen on my NFL picks the weekend before, and with the regular season over, there was not much to do, that I wanted to do. Sure, I could have made something up like re-mopping the kitchen, but that can wait until the next weekend, while listening to NFL playoff games coming from the next room or something. So fired up the dual-core system played some user made railroad maps. Wow, there are some creative folk out there to take a simple game and turn it into a journey down the river Styx past the seven deadly sins. Basin and Range custom map has double decked train cars for merchandise hauling and a port to haul them to. The Mexico map was re-worked and doesn't look as good, it needs help, maybe I'll touch it up for the community one day. The USA transcontinental custom map was pretty sharp, when all the commodities were available for all the industries. Needs more planning there. The updated Holiday Scenario making toys, cookies, and egg-nog for the north pole station was a lot of work, and a lot of fun. And the special santa trains played random carols as they left their stations. After finishing all that, I got the bright idea to read up on how to make a custom map for this game. These guys are taking USGS satellite data and using it to build height maps for the mountains and rivers. OMG. This would be a second job in itself, then adding tint layers, blending layers etc for eight layers of fun all to move trains to stations with familiar names. It's one way to learn a little about geography, but I'm not sure I have the time to put off mopping another weekend. Look how long it takes me to do laundry! Happy New Year.