Sudbury

Friday was a maintenance day, and I started cleaning up/sorting the boxcar tools. There is a huge tool chest for us to use, but the problem is that they aren’t organized properly. So if someone needs a specific tool, they look for it for a bit, can’t find it, so they go out and buy a whole set, put the rest in the chest and use just the one they want. And they don’t put it back, so the next person goes out and buys a whole set again. So we end up having tons of extra stuff, but not many of the things we actually need. Finally someone did something about it, where they gathered all the tools from both testing trains and put them all in a big pile. They thought it would be better to just have the tools in the drawers in the chest, so they threw away all the individual set cases and put them all loose. They ran out of time, so they dumped all the individual tools back into the tool chest, resulting in a huge mess.

This was especially obvious when going through all the socket sets, which were all loose. After spending about 6 hours sorting them all into the same sizes (during which I discovered we had 13 7/16^th sockets), I finally put together some complete sets. We now have 29 full socket sets for drives ranging from ¼ to 1 inch, plus a whole bunch of extras. It was kindof fun though, seeing it go from a complete mess to nice and orderly.

Saturday afternoon I took off for a walk, hoping to see some new areas as I had already explored Sudbury once. I found a nice walkway by a stream, and followed that for a while, until I came to a street and could see a cool looking rocky hill. As I was no longer travelling by train, and could now stop and spend time wherever I wanted, I took off to see if I could climb it. I found another path that headed in the right direction, and then stopped at a pile of rocks,  so thinking I had found out how to get to them I ran on the rocks only to find that a large marsh area separated me from it. (I would have had some pretty sweet pictures about this place, but I cleaned out my memory card thinking I had transferred everything over, when I hadn’t. shoot). So I went further down the road till I found a small access road that lead to a path from which I could get to the rocks. I ran around on them for a couple hours, found some pretty sweet spots for some decently legit rock climbing (don’t worry mom, I was completely safe!). I also found some ponds of water that had frozen over that would have made some sweet spots to slide around on, but it couldn’t quite hold my weight. Angered by the denial of the fun that it would have been, I found a bunch of large rocks and threw them into the pond and made a bunch of holes in the ice. Hehe J. It was getting dark (it gets dark so early now! So much lost exploring time), so I headed back to the train. I stopped at a Japanese place for supper, and ordered some noodles which turned out to be very slippery. It was only after I had ordered that I noticed the folly of my decision, as there was no cutlery on the table, only chopsticks. Of course I wasn’t going to ask for cutlery, so I ate it all with chopsticks. I was quite proud of that. Went to see Wreck it Ralph that evening.

Sunday I had lunch with my aunt and uncle, and then did chores and laundry and shopping for the rest of the day. The plan for next week is to continue westwards through the rest of northern ontario to Brandon, Manitoba. The systems seem to work alright, hopefully it continues that way!