July 11John Purbrick has built a mechanical kludge which he humbly states is “rather complicated” even by his standards. He installed it in the clubroom and then left for England without telling anyone what it does or where it is! He did say there’s one small clue. If people don’t see it, they’ll have to do without. July 28Andy Miller worked on some painting. Tom and John McNamara stocked up on soda at Star Market, and fixed a problem with the portable layout which is brought to the Activities Midway each fall. It appears that a rail joiner was left out in one place, leading to poor continuity across the resulting gap (which was so small as to be almost invisible.) There was evidence of an attempted repair involving what looked like a piece of aluminum cut from a soda can; the work was shoddy, even by TMRC standards (which is to say, it didn’t work.) A wire was soldered along the side of the rails to fix the problem, and the layout now appears to work properly. A rather selective power outage, possibly caused by severe thunderstorms this afternoon, resulted in a change in the usual dinner plans. The blackout affected the building housing Royal East, and the building housing Chicago Pizza, which are two blocks apart on opposite sides of N52. No other buildings appeared to be affected.