January 2

I was on a lovely vacation with my family for the past two weeks, so there hadn't been much progress to report.

The ranch house is finally finished. I had never made a wood model before, and working with the material was frustrating. It is much less forgiving than cardboard, harder to glue, and I sliced up my finger in the process. I was working from a scale floor plan of the house from a history of the house published by the Arizona Historical Society, and a few photos of the house that I got off the web, since I couldn't get permission to photograph the real thing. The roof was very tricky, with all the strange angles in the roof and the dormers. I made several versions in paper and cardboard first, and then made it out of wood.

My photo of the house:

The floor plan:

After I finished the house, I turned it upside down and glued pins in the base. I want to make sure that everything in the landscape will remain in place if the pony is tipped or shaken. Since I am planning on putting down the grass before I place everything else, I won't be able to glue things to a good base.

AZ Trains is a great shop where I've been spending a lot of time lately. The scale of the house turns out to be approximately eqivalent to model train HO scale, which is (I think) 1:83) I could only get black and white cows, though, so I've been painting the splotches brown. I'm epoxying straight pins to the cows' legs; two pins per cow. I can insert the pins into the styrofoam base, which should hold better than glue on the cows' feet.