Tom Geiger

Congrats! We went with my daughter to see a house on Sunday morning. It had just been listed on Saturday and had an open house on Sunday. We thought there wouldn't be a lot of people because it was Father's Day, but we were wrong. All kinds of people looking! It was just an older ranch with small bedrooms and a bad family room addition. They put in a bid $2000 OVER list price. Today they find that there are SIX contracts for the house. And it wasn't even a great house!

my workbench is an old hollow core door. Being an old draftsman, I have wrapped it with brown craft paper. I used to change it once a year or so. Now I cannot remember the last time!

Here in the Philly burbs, Amazon employs private package delivery service. Lots of complaints on our local town email chain. Seems these guys slow down and toss the packages on the lawns. We have curbside mail boxes. USPS will bring a large package up to the front door. UPS puts it in front of my garage door. A funny story about Sunday or holiday deliveries. Many years ago USPS announced that Priority Mail would be delivered on Christmas Day. This was back when my kids were kids, and we're opening presents and the door bell rings. Who could that be on Christmas morning? I open the door and there's a mail man with a big smile like he's delivering the holy grail to us that will make our holiday. I wish him a Merry Christmas and send him on his way. I didn't want to ruin his spirit by telling him the package was just some eBay model parts car purchase!

Okay guys... New Jersey Pork Roll and American cheese on a hard roll. Pure heaven if done right!

Back when I lived in New Jersey I had three hobby shops within a reasonable drive. Avenel Hobbies was a 30 year shop, that went out of business a few years ago, right after the Hobby Lobby went in on the highway. Avenel was a kit shop, he had no RC, drones etc. He said that he couldn't compete and his sales went down dramatically. He said that people constantly came in with HLs 40% off coupon, expecting him to honor it. Both the Hobby Shop in Aberdeen (yea, that's their imaginative name) and Hobbymasters in Red Bank are still there. If I wanted to drive 45 minutes, there was Jackson Hobbies. With the other shops closer, it wasn't worth the drive. I have friends in Jackson and we pick up great wings at a shop in the same shopping center so I will go in there to browse. The owner wants to retire and he's made it public knowledge that the shop is for sale. No takers so far, so he's saying he'll close up by year's end. This is the quandary of a lot of shops.... aging owners needing out and nobody to buy the business! Once I moved to Pennsylvania, there is a Hobby Town about 30 minutes away in West Chester. If I need something, I can stop at Mainline Hobbies in Plymouth, on my way home from work. That involves getting off the PA Turnpike and back on again, so it about doubles my toll! There are both a Michael's and a Hobby Lobby in the same shopping area right here in Exton. I could literally walk there! I stopped even going into Michael's to look since HL opened. Michael's selection shrunk to nothing in the 7 years I've been here. For the most part I just buy supplies and paint at shops. There are shows and discount dealers in my circle of friends, where I buy my kits. Still, if I want something new I can get it at HL for a small premium over my usual sources using the 40% off coupon.

I got these five kits as a freebie from a stamp collector friend of mine. He heard I built models and had purchased these, then decided to collect stamps instead! So I will be sending him a nice big stamp care package this weekend!

Congrats to them! My daughter and her husband have been trying to buy a house for close to a year now. It's a hot market in New Jersey in their price range. They've been under contract for at least five houses, and every one has fallen through because unscrupulous sellers continue to accept bids during the attorney review period. In the meantime, my younger daughter has managed to go under contract for a condo on her own. She only lost two before this deal stuck!

in your bathtub

Jim, thanks for digging up this thread. I've been thinking about it lately but hadn't the gumption to look it up. It's interesting to read back to the kit announcements. The attitudes of the peanut gallery on this board were there, just as I remembered. At NNL East we have one category that we announce in January right before the show. (The show is in April). We call it the "Web Theme", in that it hadn't appeared in the flyers etc created a year before the show, it only gets announced on our website by January 15 of each year. It gives us a chance to include what's hot that year. This year it was overwhelmingly the Foose kits. We noticed that they were getting a lot of board space, on all the boards we follow, and people were building them in their own style. So it became this year's Web Theme. We weren't disappointed on what showed up on the tables either!

https://public.fotki.com/ModelCitizen/model_cars/1963-ford-pickup-kit/ For those of you that wanted to see the contents of a '63 Ford Pickup Kit. An Aussie friend of mine went on a buying spree back when their dollar was doing well. He'd have the kits shipped to me and I'd take photos and send them to him for verification. Every 6 kits, I'd fill one of those AMT 6 kit cases and ship it to him.

As we’ve said, buy the regular BMF and follow the advise in this thread, and you should be good. We have a new member in our club this month who had BMF questions. We promised to do a demonstration at our next meeting. Anyone who can be in Perth Amboy NJ on Saturday August 11 is welcome to attend.

A while back my wife and I were at a pub for dinner and there was an ancient photo framed on the wall I was facing.. it was a class photo from 1914. I couldn’t stop looking at it. Knowing they were all dead now, but there they were all young, smiling and ready to take on the world. You have to wonder how they all made out

My cell phone voice mail shows a written transcript. My favorite: You are hiding from the federal government. This needs to be rectified immediately so do return this call as soon as you receive the message. Stern male voice with no foreign accent

Back in last dark days of the hobby, the crayon factory had Revell / Monogram on the market and Racing Champs wanted out of AMT etal. Everyone was worried that it was the end of the hobby and all the tooling would be scrapped for metal value. I wrote an article.. wish I could find it now, that all this hobby needed was a smaller, leaner entity that could work to the reality of the size of the potential market. A company that understood the value in the vast vault of old kit tooling and knew how to pull the value out of it. Bam! Out of nowhere came Round 2, who was exactly that. RM got bought by Hobbyco, and there was a lot of worry that they'd limit distribution, and other hand wringing that never took place. They understood the market and invested in new tooling. New players emerged. Who would've thunk that a Moebius would pop up and produce a line of 1950s Hudsons. And there's more that has hit the market since. So I will go back to my point on that original article some 20 years ago. As long as there is a viable market of consumers, there will always be a company that will know how, and will want to fill that need. It's worked so far. No need to think it won't in the future.

I've had my pool cover open for two weeks and so far I've found drowned four squirrels and chipmunks floating. So I surmise that they do not swim well.