Sunday – 30 September 2012
It’s been “a while” since I posted. Huh. And with that out of the way, on with the show.

The girls of TeamDiVa are doing well.

Vanessa (l) and Diana

They are walking – with gusto – everywhere. At least, everywhere that we let them go. And, their stair-climbing prowess has increased, as well. We also introduced them to Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back last night. It was a brief introduction, about 5 minutes. Granted, it was the first five minutes of the movie – meaning, it was also possibly the slowest five minutes – but they did okay.  I’m not entirely sure that it was enough to engage them fully at this age. We might try again in six or so months.

I’ve also learned that both the #TeamDiva tag and @TeamDiva on Twitter refer to people that aren’t TeamDiVa… especially as Twitter doesn’t differentiate between capital and lower-case letters. With that in mind, Twitter posts referring to the twins will be designated #TeamDiVa2011.

A couple of weeks ago, I Sara!, the girls and I visited the Urban Flea Market:

It was much smaller than most flea markets I’ve been to, fitting into less than half of a business parking lot. At the first stall – The. Very. First. One. – that we passed, I found a few things that I could not leave the market without:  A Bachmann Norfolk & Western Class J 4-8-2 engine and tender, a Tyco B&O 4-6-2 Pacific engine and tender, a pair of B&O diesel engines I can’t completely identify (possibly SD-60s, but I’m not sure) and five B&O passenger cars. The only “problem” was that they are all HO Scale, which is “Half-O,” which makes them half the size that I usually collect.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from bringing them home.

Seriously. Would I have these pictures if I didn’t?

BAM.

I’m still giving serious thought to making a two-sided door layout, with these trains on one side and Marklin European trains on the other.

And that reminds me: The train room is days away from completion. The last coat of topping compound was applied on Friday. It’s getting sanded tomorrow. After that, it’s down to sweeping and paint.  (And deciding what I want to do for flooring.) But everything else is ready. I’ll post pictures soon. It looks amazing. And I’m pretty excited about being able to set up and run my trains again.

And with that, I’m out.

Namaste.