Gasoline locally is down to $3.899 for the first time in a month. Good news, that. Now I can afford to fill the tank, get a car wash and an oil change!Yesterday Tom wound up acting as conductor for the railway when the assigned conductor failed to show. So I bought him a conductor's pin for his cap to go alongside his engineer pin. The guys who normally work as conductors dress the part. Dave, in fact, brings his 10-year-old son dressed in full uniform to act as assistant conductor. I don't know if Tom will bother to get a uniform -- only if they have one for sale for three bucks at Goodwill, I'm guessing -- but we should at least get him a hat.
Meanwhile, I am tempted to dress as Sir Toppham Hat, the fussily dressed fellow in charge of the railroads in Sodor, the island where Thomas and Friends shunt cars and haul freight. I think that is closer to my style, even if I am a bit less portly. If only Ted hadn't lost my gray top hat way back when ...Actually, although the store is a licensed distributor of Thomas toys and stuff (and there is lots of stuff -- slippers, dishes, kaleidoscopes and so on -- ) we do not have the right to advertise ourselves as a Thomas train. Which we are not. As I point out to visitors, the R&GN was not created to be a tourist attraction in the Dells. It was a working factory where our trains were manufactured. The rides for the public came along on the side, mainly for local kids.
There is a licensed Thomas train in Green Bay, though, if your kids insist. Younger kids often mistake our 98 train for Thomas because it is blue, and there is a square one in the roundhouse that they insist on calling Toby. If you don't know what I am talking about, feel free to find out more about the Rev. W. V. Awdry's creations by clicking on this link to Wikipedia's article.
At any rate, I think I could get a yellow vest at Goodwill and find a top hat somewhere. We sell a Thomas pocket watch and the chain would look perfect draped across my belly.
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