This is Boring!

Ian played baseball this year. The coach was the dad of one of the kids in Ian's class. He was a great coach and really tried to teach the boys baseball. He was very encouraging to them and never yelled, unlike some of the coaches of the other teams.

His team did really well and almost won the championship. Ian was a very good batter and almost always had a hit whenever he was at bat. He even caught an inning or two and while he wasn't great at it we were very proud of him that he stuck to it even though he was hit in the head by a pitch.

We were also happy that he said he wanted to play again next year.

Illinois Railway Museum

Many years ago, back in the '50s and '60s, my father used to ride the Railway Post Office trains as his job when he first started to work for the Postal Service. Every year he attends a reunion of guys who also rode the trains, but this year they organized a special meeting at the Illinois Railway Museum.


The IRM has one of the original cars so they hitched it up to an engine and they ran it around the museum so people could see how they worked. Not only that the local Post Master came up with a commemorative cancelling stamp and they were running real mail through the cars. People could buy post cards at the gift shop, the car would pick it up and the letter would be cancelled on the car, and then put into a bag and dropped off again.


Here is a video of the mail car grabbing the mail bag off of the hook. The person grabbing the bag from the train is my dad.

Later in the day we got to ride inside the car and watched how everything worked. Here is a short video of that.