The Naughty Tortie!!!!!!

Any avid readers of the Salmon Pastures Blog will recognise Brillo as she is one of my devoted assistants!!!!

At the moment she is not my favourite feline,,,, as I may have mentioned on several occasions lately we are doing the Barrow Hill live bash in September,,, 160 years anniversary of Doncaster and all that,,,

Now I have gone public with the fact that I want to get Valour,,, finished for this show:

Enough is enough I started the bloomin thing in 1982 and it still isn't finished,, it's older than my youngest son and he is now gainfully employed and rapidly reaching his 30th birthday,,, anyway I digress,,, I have been making steady progress,,, it could have been finished years ago but it met with an accident which resulted in it needing a new boiler and when all that happened it hit the "things to do but until then lets gather dust shelf" and it has sat there an extraordinarily long time,,,, anyway having fitted the new boiler I then had to start going through the running tests to make sure everything was tickety boo before I start replacing all the hand rails and chimney and domes and all that clever stuff.

So I placed the loco on the track and started a serious set of running in operations,,, as it's wheels actually hit the rails again for the first time in quite a few years I thought I had better remove the chimney and dome which were only blue tacked on as they would almost certainly fall off during the forthcoming tests,,, I removed them and put them somewhere safe!!!!!

On top of the fridge freezer to be precise as what harm could they come to up there!!!!
The running tests got prolonged and then I got lured into having a bash at further work on the D9 and various other things I want to get finished for September and the Barrow Hill Bash.

Good progress was made on several front in the intervening 5 months and last weekend I was all geared up and rearing to go to finish Valour,,,, right then here we go,,, a bag full of handrail knobs,,,, an ash pipe,, the nameplates and valancing plus fitting the chimney and dome and all will be well!!!!

I could find everything in the Valour project box except the chimney and dome,,, where the hell did I put them,,, the search started about 4.30pm last Sunday afternoon,,, since then and over the last 5 nights I have blitzed the modelling shed,, the garage,, the workshop area of the garage, the van,,, been to a mates to see if I left them there,,,, NOTHING.

Resigned to the fact I would have to dust off the unimat and start again I thought to myself before I do that I will just finish off tidying the operating area round the back of the layout,,,, it is pretty dim and dingy round the back there and so I pointed a portable spot light in the general area to make the sweeping up easier to do and see,,,, SUDDENLY through the black plastic duckboard sort of thing that the fridge freezer sits on I spotted something glistening like recently worked brass,,,, what's that I thought,,, I donned the eyesight and bent down to investigate and lo and behold look what is sitting there in the gaps in the plastic duckboarding but 1 chimney, 2 dome's, 1 oil feed pipe, and 1 signal arm,,, all doubtless knocked off the top of the fridge freezer into nearly impossible to find oblivion by my very own trusty assistant Brillo the naughty tortie,,,

God I love that cat,,, in fact I love all cats,,, the only animal I know with a sense of humour,,, she has had me running round getting decidedly grumpy for very nearly a week,, and all I have achieved in this time is the garage is a darn sight tidier  and the shed compared with this time last week is a modellers palace!!!!